Word: players
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When not busy making money, Charlie Goren, nagged by an inner streak of loneliness, likes to go where people are. He is an inveterate Broadway theatergoer, a football and baseball addict. His active sport is golf, at which he is a good bridge player, shooting about 100. Now and then he sallies out of his modest Manhattan apartment to play some nonbusiness but highly serious bridge with the experts who hang out at Manhattan's Cavendish and Regency clubs. When he plays bridge with nonexpert celebrities, as he often does, Goren is perhaps the world's most tolerant...
...same time accurate enough for the experts. Goren's system made it easier for partners to communicate, even when playing together for the first time. Says a Philadelphia bridge teacher: "Charlie Goren has given bridge what it needs most: an outstanding authority, so that a bridge player from Pennsylvania can sit into a game in California and be right at home...
...enduring and growing popularity, urbane Novelist William Somerset Maugham has a simple explanation: "Bridge is the most entertaining and intelligent card game the wit of man has so far devised." Of all partnership card games, bridge is the most challenging to the mind. Nobody can become a good bridge player through experience and rule learning alone; the game requires thought. There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands, and the value of every one can be modified, sometimes drastically, by the distribution of unseen cards in other hands. Even an incurably cautious bidder, for example, might well leap...
...System as Servant. Because the actual trick-taking value of a hand depends on how the other cards lie, the bridge player must strive to 1) infer the contents of the unseen hands, and 2) convey the picture of his own hand to his partner. In these tasks, a bidding system is an indispensable tool-but so are attention, memory, psychological perceptivity and clear thinking, plus that obscure talent called "card sense." In addition, a really good bridge player has a talent that Charles Goren defines as "the ability to make sound decisions under pressure." Rules, he warns, are made...
...already known as a highly successful tournament player, Goren published his first book, Winning Bridge Made Easy. In it he prophetically deviated from the Culbertson system. For suit bids, Goren stuck pretty much to Culbertson's elaborate "honor trick" count, but for no-trump bidding he adopted Milton Work's method of evaluating a hand with a point count: four points for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen, one for a jack. Entranced by the point count's simplicity, Goren devoted numberless hours to expanding the idea into a general bidding method...