First Youth NABC to be held in Atlanta GA
The inaugural Youth North American Bridge Championships will be held in July 3 - 6, 2008. This event is open to all youth Bridge players 19 and younger with 5000 master points or less. This will offer plenty of playing and social opportunities for bridge playing students and their families at every level. Meet and play with students from around the country! For more information, visit the website at www.youthnabc.org
EFFINGHAM COUNTY SCHOOL BRIDGE LEAGUE By Mary Beth and Chris Shaw
This effort has become a model of how to start a student
bridge league in a rural community. The
program got started when Sharon Osberg approved a mini-bridge grant for the
2006-2007 school year that paid for teaching seven teachers in five schools how
to play mini-bridge. They then taught
their students how to play. It finished with a mini-bridge tournament between the
five schools in March 2007.
The student response to learning mini-bridge was so positive
that the school administrators wanted to continue the program in the fall of
2007, but they could not find an experienced bridge teacher to “teach the
teachers” how to bid.
In September 2007, we contacted the Assistant Superintendent
of the Effingham School District, Debra Owen, and offered to give the “teach
the teachers” seminar at no cost so that the program could continue. She made
the arrangements to pull the teachers out of the classroom on Tuesday, October
2, 2007 to attend our one-day seminar on bidding and provided the Effingham
School Board meeting room for the seminar.
Seven teachers attended the seven-hour bidding seminar that
we presented that day. The last hour of the session was spent on planning a
school bridge league. Each of the five schools agreed to host one of the
monthly tournaments that started in January 2008. They started after- school Bridge Clubs in
October and a total of 75 students in the five schools participated. We met with
the teachers on a school night in both November and December to keep them ahead
of their students.
The five school districts in this program have treated
Bridge as a school-sponsored activity.
This approach required that a coach’s stipend be paid for the after
school activity. The amount is stated in each schools’ Collective Bargaining
Agreement. Three American Contract
Bridge League funding sources; the School Bridge Lesson Series, and the ACBL
Educational Foundation grants, and ACBL Unit 223 were discussed.
All five schools registered their after-school classes with
ACBL’s
School Bridge Lesson
Series. The teachers received the
$350 stipend after teaching 16 hours of lessons to at least eight
students. They also received the Club
series text, T-shirts and trophies for their students.
Two schools submitted grants to the ACBL Educational
Foundation. These grants requested the
additional funds needed beyond the $350 from the SBLS to cover the cost of the
after-school activity stipend for the teachers.
The Board of Trustees approved them with payment to made after
completion of the School Bridge Lesson Series classes.
Unit 223 provided the $500.00 needed to buy the boards and
bidding boxes needed to play duplicate bridge.
Unit 223 also voted to pay up to $1,000.00 of the travel expenses of the
top pair to the first Youth North American Bridge Championships to be held in
Atlanta, GA in early July 2008. District
8 voted to match the Unit 223 reimbursement to allow the runner-up pair to
travel to Atlanta.
We worked with Debra Owen to submit a grant application for
the November ACBL Educational Foundation Board of Trustee’s meeting to provide
funding for the resources needed to support transportation to an ACBL Sectional
event. Another grant application was submitted by Teutopolis. Effingham requested $2750 and Teutoplis
requested $350.
Both grants were approved at the Fall NABC meeting by the
Board of Trustees for the ACBL Educational Foundation.
On January 15, 2008 at Teutopolis Middle School in Illinois,
45 students from five schools participated in their first duplicate bridge
tournament. Three local members of the Effingham Duplicate Bridge Club helped
with the directing and scoring of the tournament. Two of them played in the tournament to fill
out the 12th table.
The second tournament was held at Dietrich on February 19,
2008 with 41 students participating. We
were able to announce that Unit 223 had agreed to pay up to $1000.00 in travel
expenses to the Youth NABC to be held in Atlanta, GA for the overall winners of
the five tournaments.
The boards for this tournament were sent by the School
Bridge LEAGUE and were scored as part of its Valentine Day Tournament. Two students from St. Anthony’s School placed
5th in the beginner category and 11th overall.
There were 100 beginner pairs and 76 intermediate pairs competing in the
School Bridge LEAGUE’s Valentine Tournament.
The third tournament was held at St. Anthony’s School in
Effingham on March 18, 2008. This time 48 students participated in the pairs
event.
The fourth tournament was held at Beecher City on April 8,
2008. A Swiss Team competition was held
for the 48 students. Four three-way
matches were held so that each team competed against two other school teams. St, Anthony’s teams placed first, second and
sixth. Beecher City took third, fifth,
and ninth. Teutopolis took fourth place. It is extremely important that the
students record the board number of the hands that they play and the team they
played for each board.
Twenty students from the Effingham Country School Bridge
League participated in their first ACBL Sectional Tournament in Effingham on
April 26th. A total of six tables were
played because four students from Carlinville participated.
The fifth tournament was held in Effingham on May 7th. There were 40 students playing the six boards
provided by the School Bridge LEAGUE’s End of Year Tournament. Over 450 middle and high school students in
35 schools in the United States and Canada competed in this event. The top pair from this league, Michael
Goldstein and James Ritz from St. Anthony’s, will be participating in the Youth
North American Bridge Championship in Atlanta with the travel expenses for them
and their chaperone paid by ACBL Unit 223, Southern Illinois and Paducah, KY.
The last activity for the 2007-2008 school year took place
on May 17th when 24 students from three of the five schools in the Effingham
County School Bridge League rode a school bus for two hours to travel to the
St.Charles, MO Sectional. Rick Beye, the
Chief Tournament Director of ACBL, directed the eight -table event and used the
new remote scoring system being tested by ACBL.
These middle school students caught on very quickly to using this
technique.
The students are looking forward to continuing playing
duplicate bridge in their Effingham County School Bridge League next year. Their coaches are planning to be there for
them next year as well.
Bring Bridge Back to the Table
November 27, 2005 Op-Ed Contributor
By Sharon Osberg
San Fransicso
Poker is all the rage. Online poker games and television poker championships have exploded in popularity. Games like Texas hold'em and five-card stud are spreading like wildfire among high school and college students. By some counts, as many as 80 million people in the United States play poker. And according to PokerPulse.com an independent research site, about two million people play poker online every month.
You would think that with those kinds of numbers, the card game called bridge would also be getting a lift. But think again.
According to the American Contract Bridge League, 25 million Americans over the age of 18 know how to play bridge. These people are well educated (79 percent have a college degree), affluent (the average income is $62,000 per year), primarily white (71 percent) and older (the average age is 51). Of these 25 million adult bridge players, only 3 million play the game at least once a week. This is a huge decrease from the 1940's when 44 percent of American households had at least one active bridge player.
Bridge should be popular. It's an elegant game, full of strategy and tactics. It's part science, part math, part logic, part reason. But a huge component of bridge is also very human. This melding of the former with the latter is what sets bridge apart, not only from other card games, but also from board games like chess. While computers can now routinely beat all but a handful of chess grandmasters, they can't come close to outplaying the world's finest bridge players. Why is this? Because computers can understand math, but they can't understand people - at least not yet.
Bridge is a partnership game. Above all else, a successful bridge player must be a great partner. Trust, communication and patience are the essential attributes of winning at bridge. Once a strong partnership is formed, it provides a platform for individual creativity, allowing players to inject their own personalities into the game. Take my bridge partner, for example. I play with Warren Buffett, the investor and founder of Berkshire Hathaway. No one would describe Warren as timid. Yet, when we first played bridge, we got trampled by our opponents because Warren deferred to me, and I was afraid to make mistakes. As we got to know each other, and as our partnership solidified, things changed.
The Warren Buffett you know from business is now the same Warren Buffett I know at the bridge table. And as Warren would tell you, playing bridge is like running a business. It's about hunting, chasing, nuance, deception, reward, danger, cooperation and, on a good day, victory.
Bridge used to be very popular. In 1938, three bridge books - "Complete Contract Bridge," "Culbertson's Own New Contract Bridge" and "Five Suit Bridge" - made this newspaper's best-seller list. In 1957, "Goren's New Complete Contract Bridge" also made the list - for four weeks. Films like "Shadow of the Thin Man," "It's a Wonderful World" and "Sunset Boulevard" featured characters playing bridge. Matches were covered in newspapers, magazines and on the radio.
One famous game in the 1920's captivated the public's attention for months. On Sept. 29, 1929, John and Myrtle Bennett of Kansas City, Mo., invited their friends Charles and Myrna Hofman over for a game of bridge. Things were going well until several hours into the match when Mr. Bennett overbid. A domestic brawl ensued, and suddenly Mrs. Bennett walked into a bedroom, returned with a gun and shot her husband several times. Mrs. Bennett was charged with first-degree murder, but she was acquitted on the ground that the shooting was accidental. Of course, a jury of bridge players might have ruled that it was justifiable homicide.
So, why has bridge's popularity steadily declined over the last 50 years? It's probably too easy to correlate this decline with the advent of television, but it's no coincidence. Television served as a social replacement for bridge night. To compensate for increasing competition from technology, some sort of marketing by the various bridge organizations might have kept bridge visible, but until very recently, no marketing was done. As a result, bridge is rightly perceived as a game "my grandparents" play.
Bridge will never have the spectator appeal of games like poker. It's just too cerebral. Moreover, the learning curve is steep. But it's worth trying to bring back some of the glory of bridge by getting young people engaged in the game.
Progress has been made on that front. The American Contract Bridge League has recently developed a youth marketing plan focused on affiliate clubs and has launched a Web site, bridgeiscool.com, where young people can learn, play and obtain information about tournaments, clubs and special events. Warren Buffett and Microsoft's Bill Gates, another bridge enthusiast, have recently asked me to organize a bridge program for public schools. They know that the key to reviving bridge is getting children to play, and they are prepared to provide $1 million of initial financing for the effort.
Public schools should be thrilled with this proposition. Bridge embodies cooperation, logic, problem-solving and has even been linked to higher test scores among children. Who knows, the next Warren Buffett or Bill Gates might be sitting in a classroom somewhere waiting for someone to teach them the meaning of a grand slam.
Sharon Osberg is a two-time World Champion bridge player.