![\"Bridge](\"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Bridge-hand.jpg\")
<\/a>Suddenly I find myself playing somewhat competitive bridge on a weekly basis, taking me back to my college days when I first learned.\u00a0 Charlie was a bridge player, and I remember watching him and realizing that bridge could offer me a way in.\u00a0 There I was, a timid freshman, a mid-Westerner arriving in California from an all-girls school, desperately wondering how I was going to fit in.\u00a0 I knew that I was never going to become a member of the hard-partying elite.\u00a0 I tried hard, but absolutely loathed the taste of beer, and I don\u2019t know why, but I just had no interest in smoking weed.\u00a0 But at the same time, I didn\u2019t think of myself as a social outcast \u2013 I hoped that I had something to offer, but I wasn\u2019t sure what.<\/p>\nDuring the week, the custom was to sit in the large common room after dinner and watch television for a bit until people dispersed, supposedly to their studies.\u00a0 I am not sure who had control of the channel (the TV might not even have had a clicker), but every night, the TV was resolutely set to reruns of the Wild, Wild West and Star Trek.\u00a0 I would have been happy to join the group to watch TV (reruns of the Dick Van Dyke Show would have been most welcome) but I had no interest in fantasy shows, and to this day I have never seen an episode of Star Trek.\u00a0 So what to do?\u00a0 And then I discovered a splinter group that played bridge, which seemed to carry some cachet that crossed the boundaries of the typical cliques.\u00a0 And Charlie was an enthusiastic and much sought after partner.\u00a0 By all outward appearances here was a goofy guy, someone who probably would never be considered a member of the social elite, but the singular thing I remember about Charlie was that he simply didn\u2019t care. \u00a0I could be completely wrong, maybe he was a tortured soul, but from my vantage point of outside looking in, he appeared to be a person who was entirely comfortable with who he was, thick rimmed black glasses, pocket protector and all. \u00a0He just had a joyful presence that I really admired.\u00a0 And bridge was the great equalizer and common bond.<\/p>\n
I began to hang around the fringes of the bridge table to capitalize on the limited strategies my mother had taught me \u2013 the point counting system to assess your hand, and the essential strategy of the finesse, i.e. how to neutralize your opponent\u2019s king and capture it with the ace, and the importance of getting the trump out, i.e. \u201cgetting the bad boys off the street.\u201d\u00a0 Bridge really isn\u2019t that hard if you have some basic card sense, but it has an intimidating reputation, and I remember my quavering nerves when I first took my seat at the bridge table. \u00a0I would secretly hope to be on defense, which would allow me to keep my hand to myself, thus concealing any egregious blunders.\u00a0 However, if I was the dummy, I would have to lay down my hand for everyone to see.\u00a0 It was judgment time.\u00a0 Immediately I would sense my partner adding up my points, nervous that he would purse his lips or sigh in disappointment if we had either overbid or more likely underbid, since I had a hair trigger for passing.\u00a0 But playing defense had its own terrors, mainly leading.\u00a0 While it might be tempting to lead an ace, it would only delay the problem, since I would just have to lead again.\u00a0 Furthermore, perhaps it would be better to lay in wait, and use my ace to capture the opponent\u2019s king.\u00a0 If I led the ace, it would \u201cput pants on the king,\u201d as my mother used to say.\u00a0 But on the other hand, I might not ever get another chance to play it, and you certainly didn\u2019t want to go to bed with a winning ace in your hand.\u00a0 And then there is the moment, midway through the hand, where you have to make another lead, hopefully to a winning card in your partner\u2019s hand.\u00a0 I remember playing with some particularly pissy opponents, who could totally undermine my confidence by saying, \u201cOh, thanks for that lead, I couldn\u2019t have won without your help.\u201d<\/p>\n
If I ever actually won the bid and was in charge of playing the hand, my partner, now the dummy, would usually come behind me and direct traffic.\u00a0 This was not necessarily a learning experience, since he would just point at my cards to lead or to play.\u00a0 I remember people asking me about my medical residency and why newly-minted interns are forced to work punitive hours making critical decisions.\u00a0 Well, on a much more forgiving level, it is the same with bridge. You simply can\u2019t learn unless you are at risk yourself and willing to deal with the consequences.\u00a0 So I stuck with it and eventually soloed with some limited success and developed a circle of diverse friends.<\/p>\n
I never did play with Charlie.\u00a0 Bridge-wise he was out of my league.\u00a0 And here is another interesting thing about bridge.\u00a0 It seems to be a surrogate for intelligence.\u00a0 I remember people saying, \u201cOh that\u2019s Charlie Grinstead, he\u2019s really good at bridge.\u201d\u00a0 Nobody would ever be so tacky to discuss SAT scores, the Dean\u2019s list or other trappings of intelligence.\u00a0 All you had to do is say that someone was good at bridge and that said it all.\u00a0 It is common I am currently playing in a bridge league of sorts, where my assigned partner and I play a series of six different opponents, all of whom are much more experienced and many have even taken lessons.\u00a0 This is a startling fact, since I perceive Bridge as a game, and one of the distinctions between a game and a sport, for example, is that all games should be self taught.\u00a0 You wouldn\u2019t pay someone to instruct you in Monopoly or even chess (unless you want to play at freakishly elite levels).\u00a0 But the lessons have paid off, and my new peer group has a firm grasp on different bidding conventions that slyly communicate the exact strength of a hand and the number of cards in each suit.\u00a0 This is a far cry from the simple conventions of my college-era Bridge, and I find myself feeling the same anxieties of 40 years ago \u2013 a little too eager to pass, blundering the lead, fumbling the bidding convention \u2013 Stayman, Blackwood, Gerber, and now there are many more.\u00a0 The best that might be said of me is that on a good day perhaps I have decent card sense.\u00a0 We have yet to play an opponent named Jill, but every time her name comes up, someone inevitably says, \u201cOh she is a good bridge player,\u201d and that is what made me think of Charlie Grinstead.<\/p>\n Yesterday I went on the internet to see if I could discover what had happened to Charlie.\u00a0 The only slight gap in my memory was that I was spelling his name with an \u201cm\u201d instead of an \u201cn,\u201d but once I straightened that out, I discovered that he has a PhD in math and is a college professor.\u00a0 Additionally, he has published an introductory textbook on probability theory.\u00a0 How perfect, since the successful bridge finesse is all about probability.<\/p>\n I started out as a timid freshman, a nervous and innocent coed<\/p>\n Wondering who\u2019d sit with me at dinner, I\u2019d enter the dining hall with *****<\/p>\n It was at this – – – – – in life I discovered that bridge could give me a start<\/p>\n If I could overcame my worry that the game was reserved for the super smart.<\/p>\n But you don\u2019t have to make it complicated, don\u2019t succumb to the mystique.<\/p>\n Just know a few conventions and maybe ***** your points before you speak.<\/p>\n I never ***** to dream that I could be more than a journeyman or tough to beat.<\/p>\n But if you do – – –\u00a0 \u00a0– – good as Bill – – – – – , then you\u2019re certainly among the elite.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dread, stage, readd, dared, get as, Gates<\/p>\n <\/p>\nFollow Liza Blue on: How odd that the image of Charlie Grinstead should come to mind in such perfect detail after a 40 year hiatus.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that I ever spoke a word to him during the two years our lives overlapped at … Continue reading <\/a>knowledge that both Bill Gates and Warren Buffet like to spend their idle hours playing high level bridge on the internet.\u00a0 This probably implies as much about their intelligence as the success of MicroSoft or Berkshire Hathaway.<\/p>\nThe missing words in the following poem are two sets anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks or dashes indicates the number of letters.\u00a0 Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.\u00a0 Scroll down for answers.<\/em><\/h6>\n
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