I took up the game while in my 30’s, am self taught and have played almost exclusively in club games for the past 50 years. I have been the Ace of Clubs many times, but have fewer than 45 gold points and have been fortunate in that rankings above Life Master have been “grandfathered.” About 3100 of my 3500 points are black points, and most of the remaining 400 points were also won at club games.

I mentioned that I am self taught and I’ll share with you a story that I still enjoy telling. I learned to play from a book by Charles Goren. The book was structured so that you were given a lesson and at the bottom of the page was a question with multiple choice answers. Each answer required you to go to a different page in the book. If you selected the right answer, the new page gave you the next lesson. If you selected a wrong answer, you were told to go back and retake the lesson. The lesson on page one was, “A bridge deck is 52 cards, 13 cards in each of 4 suits.” The question was, “What is a bridge deck?” and the there were 2 choices for answers, one of them being, “A bridge deck is 52 cards plus 2 Jokers.”  This is nonsense, I thought and turned to page 2. There in huge letters was, “YOU DID NOT FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. GO BACK TO PAGE ONE AND RETAKE THE LESSON.” From this, I learned that in bridge, expect to be criticized on occasion, but learn from your mistakes.