Fred Gitelman on BBO, bridge, and life now

With his election to the ACBL Hall of Fame, this felt like the right moment to sit down with Fred Gitelman and look back not only at what he achieved at the table, but at the ideas and decisions that helped shape online bridge for so many players. For millions of people, BBO became part of everyday bridge life: a place to play, learn, watch, practise, and stay connected to the game. In the answers below, Fred reflects on how BBO began, what bridge needed then, what life looks like for him now, and what still makes him optimistic about the future of the game.

First of all, congratulations on your election to the ACBL Hall of Fame. How did it feel when you heard the news, and what did that recognition mean to you personally?

In all honesty, hearing the news did not have a major impact on me. It is a great honor and I was happy of course, but I had suspected for several years that in early 2026 I would either be elected to the Hall of Fame or I would fail to be elected. I had plenty of time to reflect on the implications and prepare myself mentally for either outcome.

My record as a player is below average for a typical Hall of Fame inductee (my excuse is that I played "seriously" for less than 20 years). Presumably this means that a significant percentage of the electorate was impressed by either their perception of my skill as a player and/or my achievements away from the table. In any case, it feels good to be appreciated, especially considering that the electors are all highly-accomplished players (including several who are near the top of my most-admired list).

Canadians have historically had trouble (to put it mildly) in terms of getting elected to the ACBL Hall of Fame. I was born in Canada and lived in Toronto until I was 37. A significant amount of my bridge success occurred while playing under the Canadian flag. So, even though I have lived in the USA since 2002, I like to think that my election is a positive for Canadian bridge.

Although I already knew I had been elected, I did have a strange emotional reaction when I read the ACBL's press release. The second sentence started with "Gitelman, 61" which I found rather shocking! Of course I know my age, but seeing it appear in print was rather eerie 🙂

A lot of people know the story that BBO began almost by accident. Looking back now, when did it stop feeling like an accident and start feeling like a real answer to something bridge needed?

For much of the first year of BBO's life, 2001, seeing more than a dozen or so people online at once was a rarity. Then, all of sudden, we started to experience exponential growth - 100 people online, then 1000, and before too long we hit 10000 (many of them watching vugraph of the World Championship Finals).

My take on the reasons this occurred:

1. BBO was free and novel at the time,
2. Uday's rewrite of the deeply-flawed code that I had written greatly improved stability, and
3. The tremendous and worldwide support we received from high-level players, teachers, authors, some notable administrators, and many amazing volunteers.

I don't know if "going viral" was an expression during that time, but that's what BBO was doing. It was exhilarating, we were just getting started - we had all kinds of ideas for improving BBO. Of course we knew that the growth would eventually flatten out, but we had no idea when that was going to happen. Regardless, it was clear to me that we were on to something good.

When you looked at the bridge world in the early days of BBO, what problem were you most trying to solve? Was it access, learning, community, visibility, something else, or all of those at once?

The original experiment that quickly evolved into BBO was all about learning. Sheri and I had already been in the educational software business for about 10 years - we sold programs like Bridge Master and distributed them on CD-ROM.

We could see that the world was changing and that it would soon be necessary to sell our content through the Internet. We had some ideas for how that might look, but we lacked the technical knowledge to achieve our goals. I tried to figure out how to do it ("client/server programming").

Once I learned the bare minimum that was required, a lightbulb came on: it was suddenly obvious that we already had almost all of the pieces we needed to build an online bridge site.

Several online bridge sites already existed, but they were all either pay sites or not very good. We thought it was important for the future of bridge that there exist a high-quality free online bridge site that would include educational and training facilities suitable for players of all levels of ability. That is how BBO was born.

Access and especially visibility suddenly trumped learning. My thinking was that, in order for bridge to have a healthy long term future, it would be necessary to somehow get millions of new players to try the game in a fun and friendly learning environment. Bridge, being a great game, would largely sell itself - a decent percentage of those millions would be hooked. Bridge mostly needed a way to get them in the front door.

The problem was that traditional methods of getting the word out to millions (television and mass-marketing) were expensive and complicated. The widespread adoption of the Internet in the late 1990s seemed to be a godsend for us and for bridge. All of a sudden it was realistically possible to spread the message "play bridge!" far and wide without having to spend a fortune on marketing.

Sheri, Uday, and I are all natural introverts so community-related goals did not really motivate us at the beginning. I believe this also explains why, years later, we did not latch onto the importance and potential of social media. Had we properly grasped the possibilities, I suspect we could and would have tried to utilize sites like Facebook to increase the visibility of both BBO and bridge in general.

Over the years, you have spoken very clearly about bridge having an image problem and needing to reach beyond its traditional audience. More than 20 years later, what do you think you got right about that, and what do you think you may have underestimated?

I think my early assessment was (and still is) largely on the mark: we are not going to attract large numbers of new bridge players unless much larger numbers of people have a positive image of the game.

When we were running BBO we could have done better in this area. I certainly underestimated the importance of things like hiring professionals to help in areas like marketing, management, and design. Uday did appreciate such things, but my stubbornness and the early success we had doing everything organically really got in the way.

Perhaps naively, I also underestimated the extent to which life on Planet Earth would change after the turn of the century. Many of these changes have further complicated the problem of attracting new players to bridge.

Many readers still think of you mainly through bridge and BBO. What does life look like for you now?

Sheri and I live in a beautiful part of Las Vegas that is far from The Strip (and in the mountains, where it doesn't get quite as hot in the summer). Waking up to blue sky just about every day is a massive plus for me.

We still travel to several major tournaments each year (typically a few days at each of the ACBL Nationals and sometimes the European or World Championships, especially if we find the location attractive). We only play on teams with good friends (Uday is a regular) and care much more about enjoying the bridge and the experience than we care about our results. Sheri and I frequently practice against robots on BBO. We play a fancy Precision-like bidding system.

My other main partner is Mark Caplan (@mcaplan on BBO), a lifelong friend who currently lives in Dublin. It was Mark and his brother, David, who introduced me to bridge when we were teenagers. We also like to use BBO to practice against robots and to just hang out and chat. We play 2/1 with very few conventions.

Mark and I, as teammates playing for Canada, almost won the World Junior Teams Championships in 1991. More than 30 years later we played as partners on Canada's Open Teams in the 2023 and 2024 World Championships. Similar to playing with Sheri, playing with Mark is mostly about enjoying the game itself, each other's company, and that of our teammates. We do tend to score well as partners which is a nice bonus.

I still spend a reasonable amount of time thinking about bridge, especially suit combination problems. Here is a pretty one with a counter-intuitive solution that I recently "discovered":

You need two tricks. Share how you'd play it in the comments below.

The vast majority of my time is spent at home. More on what I do there below...

Pool has become a serious part of your life. What drew you to it, and does it scratch the same mental itch that bridge always did?

Yes I really love pool and have a table at home (see photo of Fred's pool table along with Lego Starship Enterprise, and Sheri's puzzle wall). Even though I practice and study obsessively, play in a weekly league and occasionally in tournaments, hire pros to teach me, etc., I am afraid I will never be anything more at pool than the equivalent of a good Flight B bridge player. Pool is like bridge (and no doubt many other things) in that, unless you take it at least somewhat seriously when you are young, your chances of becoming an elite player are approximately zero.

Pool has many other similarities to bridge. The shuffle in bridge is like the break in pool in that both guarantee an effectively infinite variety of possible challenges. In both games, regardless of how much experience you have, you see something new and interesting just about every time you play. The scope for learning and improvement in both games is virtually unlimited.

I suspect that the strategic aspects of pool are widely underappreciated. To be effective at both bridge and pool, you need to be able to look, sometimes deeply, into various possible futures and use what you see to come up with a plan. My experience as a bridge player has made learning this aspect of pool easier for me than it is for most players at my level - I can sometimes outthink (and beat) players who are better at the physical aspect of the game than I am.

Both games also have this attractive feature: there is just enough luck that a semi-competent amateur has a chance to defeat a superstar (in a sufficiently short match at least), but the highly-skilled player will almost always prevail in the long run. This helps to make players of all levels more inclined to keep coming back for more.

Other similarities include: the importance of mental focus and emotional control when things go badly, a delicate balance between offense and defense, substantial aesthetical beauty (to me at least), and the importance of assessing your opponent's skill level and state of mind.

You and Sheri have shared so much of this journey, in bridge and beyond. What has it meant to have that kind of partnership through so many different chapters of life?

Words can't express how important Sheri has been to me, my life, and all of my accomplishments. We are best friends and have been partners in every sense of the word.

Sometimes it almost doesn't seem real. Have we been living in a fairytale for the past 35+ years? It is something I think about and appreciate every single day.

The photo here is of Sheri sitting opposite her partner, the ACBL's Bronia Jenkins.

When you stepped away from BBO, what changed most in your day-to-day life, and what did you discover that you liked about that change?

For almost 30 years I spent most of my waking hours sitting in front of a computer and working on bridge software. Every day was an exercise in crossing off things-to-do from a never-ending list (that really existed only in my head).

When I retired there were no more things-to-do!

Such a dramatic change was an unexpectedly difficult adjustment for me. It took at least a year before I came to realize that having nothing to do meant that I could do anything I wanted. I now feel confident that I made the right decision, but I really struggled to get to that point.

Outside bridge and pool, are there other interests or habits that have become a real part of your life now?

The pandemic caused me to seriously reflect on my health for the first time. As a result I decided to give up smoking, start running, and start paying (moderate) attention to my diet.

I have continued to take exercise seriously; I am now pretty good at running for an old guy, I like to go on long walks with Sheri every day, ride my bike, and occasionally go downhill skiing. I take Pilates classes twice each week. Much to my surprise, I have come to enjoy exercise - it makes me feel good both physically and mentally. However, I am not a fanatic about it.

I have tried to learn more about some subjects that I found interesting when I was young (though not sufficiently interesting, compared to bridge, to justify actually paying attention to these subjects in college!). In particular, I am fascinated by physics, math, and computer science. Unfortunately, at least in my case, one's skills in such areas tend to atrophy if they are left unused for several decades, so it is not as if I ever expect to have any more than a layman's understanding of these highly-complex subjects.

I also enjoy Lego and juggling.

After everything you have seen in bridge, as a player, builder, and observer, what still makes you optimistic about the game?

Young players and their incredible skills.

Me and my contemporaries, including soon-to-be Hall of Famers Geoff Hampson and Brad Moss, were considered among the best young players in North America around 1990. I was aware of only one female from our generation, Debbie Rosenberg, who I saw as being on par with the best young male players of that era.

Today I believe there are many young players, both male and female, who are much stronger players than we were way back then.

This is actually one of my greatest sources of pride as I believe that the existence of BBO is one of the primary reasons that today's young people play so well. When I was young it took a long time to get the equivalent of "10,000 hours" of bridge under one's belt and exposure to world class players was hard to come by. BBO completely changed that.

Aside from their amazing bridge skills, I have been impressed by the maturity, sportsmanship, and charisma of many of today's young players. Maybe one of them will find a way to help sell bridge to other people of their generation...