Bridge
I started playing duplicate bridge in Fremont, at Jack Cassell's novice duplicate bridge club in ACBL's District 21, Unit 500 (Southern Alameda County) in 1972. As I got more experienced and in between jobs, I found directing ACBL duplicate games was interesting and provided some income. I directed games in Hayward and San Leandro in the middle 70s and early 80s. After starting with Kaiser Permanente in 1978, I had enough money to afford the new Radio Shack Microcomputer. I taught myself how to write computer programs and wrote one to compute and printout duplicate bridge results. I would haul around an entire computer system with a printer to each game and provide results after each game I directed. This experience eventually caused my transition at Kaiser Permanente to the computer department and and 26 years of doing something I loved. I continued playing ACBL duplicate, making life master in 1979 after winning a Sacramento Regional tournament. I continued playing duplicate as a hobby in tournaments all over the Bay Area. I had my biggest year in 2007, winning just under 400 master points. I continued playing in tournaments until 2020, when the pandemic hit. I took a break, and haven't played tournament bridge since. I won 2,174 master points which earn 'cred in some circles and am at the Ruby Life Master (1,500 - 2,499mp) level.
I've served on local ACBL Board of Directors in South County and Diablo Valley Units. I also authored several web sites to help bridge clubs get their results on-line in the early 2000's. Current URLs of the three units are (also, see what they looked like in years gone by courtesy of the Wayback Machine):
- Unit 499 - Diablo Valley Wayback Machine
- Unit 500 - Southern Alameda County Wayback Machine
- Unit 501 - Livermore Bridge Club Wayback Machine
Other interesting Bridge Links
- BridgeBase.com (see below).
- Bridgewinners.com - Put together by Gavin Wolpert. Excellent source of high-level bridge articles.
- Bridgehands.com - Friend of mine's web site, very extensive on all kinds of bridge lessons.
- BridgeGuys.com is one of the most extensive coverage of bridge bidding conventions.
Have you tried BridgeBase? It's an on-line bridge website that allows playing in many types of bridge matches including ACBL masterpoint tournaments. They use a General Convention Card. Most enjoyable are their Vugraph, real-world real-time bridge matches, especially the NABC Spring/Summer Vanderbilt/Spingold KO finals.