I learned to play in college in the sixties but did not begin learning the game until the early 1990s when Bruce Dunlap introduced me to duplicate bridge at the Albany Duplicate Bridge Club. My game steadily improved by playing with regular partners Hon Ko, Irva Neyhart, Dr. Terry Hill, Sandy Allen, Dick Jarvinen. Frequent partner Eileen Boal put me over the top to Emerald status at the Instant Matchpoint game in October.

My drive to five thousand points began very slowly. After nearly ten years of playing duplicate bridge I had earned fewer than twenty masterpoints. In January 2000, Jan Boger invited me to play with her in a sectional tournament in Salem, where she helped me earn my first pigmented award: 0.70 silver. Having developed a taste, I began partnering with bridge-playing work friends Airell Clark and Brian Breckenridge, who introduced me to bigger-than-life Ray Johnston. We traveled to a widening circle of tournaments, including regionals and nationals. I expanded my tournament partnerships with Jim Smith, Jon Niemand, Greg Smith, Molly Harris,
Eileen Boal and the late Allan Selberg, and the late Fred Dorr. I am grateful to all of these patient people who put up with my many quirks and helped me improve my game.

Away from the table, I recognized significant differences between our club games and tournament games. While tournaments provided pre-dealt hands, which allowed players to study the hand record at the end of the game, our unit used shuffle-deal-and-play. Since I was convinced that hand records were crucial for improving bidding and play, I advocated for acquistion of a dealing machine to provide pre-dealt hands for our unit. Although this was a substantial investment for our small club, unit president Joyce Willcox supported the idea and proposed that the unit foot the bill. I worked with Randy Boyd to enhance our club’s web results from a list of winners to a detailed summary similar to tournament results. We found software to integrate the hand, the contract and opening lead for each hand and to automate uploading results to the club website. This was heady stuff for 2009. Later I teamed with Dick Jarvinen to further enhance and expand our website and game summaries.

The photos demonstrate that I favor a lighter mood at the table with apparel and hats suitable for hiding an extra ace in the hat band. I believe that bridge is a game that stimulates critical thinking, that exercises memory, that provides opportunities for volunteering and for
expanding our circle of friends, and most importantly it should be fun.