My advice to bridge players is to start working on pigmented points, especially Gold, as early in your bridge career as possible.  It took me forever to reach 50 Gold points.  When I first started playing bridge I never thought I would get 100 points let alone 500.  Then COVID happened and I was playing bridge constantly online.  I didn’t take as much advantage of the tournaments and other opportunities for getting pigmented points when I was at a lower stratification.

I enjoy both online and face to face bridge, and now that I finally made Life Master and don’t have to worry about having to play in a  higher stratification, I may play in person more often.

District 4 has been great and I don’t have any suggestions for improvement.  I enjoy reading the 4 Spot , club newsletters, and ACBL magazines.

Thanks for your letter, I forwarded it to my several regular partners and to the directors of the three duplicate Bridge clubs who host the games for about 30 to 50 players here in Atlantic and Cape May counties. They brought me into the ACBL in March 2017 after years of playing Bridge during childhood (in my family, then as a college student, all pre-duplicate games) and as a Spades addict in the Army in Vietnam in my twenties. It was a whole new experience both for the challenge of learning to play better and for the pleasure of making friends with so many people with their breadth of life experiences.

I was working up through COVID (Martin de Bruin kept us busy online) and until I retired at the end of’23. I had squeezed in several tournaments and slowly helped my regular partner Larry Gash get his Life and Bronze Life Master on the same day with the few gold points that we finally won at Rehoboth in’24.

Dozens of people partnered with me (Vinny Freaney mainly in the summer when he came north). My opponents in the games as well as my partners were all helping each to up our game. All our clubs have a positive culture as led by the directors: Martin, Karen Sylvester, and Mike Bruno and by our expert players.

Since retirement I’ve been free to play face-to-face from 3 to 5 times a week. Attaining this new rank is a reflection on the pleasure these games with these players have given me.

I would never have reached the goal of Sectional Master w/o your patience.  Thank you for your guidance.    Without bridge I would be like a boat without a rudder.  In my journey though life I’ve finally reached the challenge of the ‘golden years’.  Age and  physical maladies have caught up with me and removed my ability to be independent and physically active.  Bridge has been my rock, providing me with something ‘competitive’ to keep my mind functioning.