Charles Henry Goren was an American bridge player and writer who significantly developed and popularized the game. He was the leading American bridge personality in the 1950s and 1960s – or 1940s and 1950s, as "Mr. Bridge" – as Ely Culbertson had been in the 1930s. Culbertson, Goren, and Harold Vanderbilt were the three people named when The Bridge World inaugurated a bridge "hall of fame" in 1964 and they were made founding members of the ACBL Hall of Fame in 1995.
In the card game contract bridge, the Losing-Trick Count (LTC) is a method of hand evaluation that is generally only considered suitable to be used in situations where a trump suit has been established and when shape and fit are more significant than high card points (HCP) in determining the optimum level of the contract. The method is generally not considered suitable for no trump or misfit hands; also, the trump suit is generally considered to require at least eight cards in length with no partner holding fewer than three.
Standard American is a bidding system for the game of bridge widely used in North America and elsewhere. Owing to the popularization of the game by Charles Goren in the 1940s and 1950s, its early versions were sometimes referred to simply as 'Goren'. With the addition and evolution of various treatments and conventions, it is now more generally referred to as Standard American. It is a bidding system based on five-card majors and a strong notrump; players may add conventions and refine the meanings of bids through partnership agreements summarized in their convention card. One standardised version, SAYC, is widely used by casual partnerships and in online bridge.
In the card game of bridge, the unusual notrump is a conventional overcall showing a two-suited hand. It was originally devised by Al Roth in 1948 with Tobias Stone, to show the minor suits after the opponents opened in a major.
Easley Rutland Blackwood was an American contract bridge player and writer, best known for the Blackwood convention used in bridge bidding.
The Official Encyclopedia of Bridge (OEB) presents comprehensive information on the card game contract bridge with limited information on related games and on playing cards. It is "official" in reference to the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) which authorized its production and whose staff prepared and/or supervised its various editions.
In contract bridge, various bidding systems have been devised to enable partners to describe their hands to each other so that they may reach the optimum contract. Key to this process is that players evaluate and re-evaluate the trick-taking potential of their hands as the auction proceeds and additional information about partner's hand and the opponent's hands becomes available.
In the card game contract bridge, a suit combination is a specific subset of the cards of one suit held respectively in declarer's and dummy's hands at the onset of play. While the ranks of the remaining cards held by the defenders can be deduced precisely, their location is unknown. Optimum suit combination play allows for all possible lies of the cards held by the defenders.
Philip Hal Sims was an American bridge player. In 1932 he was ranked by Shepard Barclay, bridge commentator of the New York Herald Tribune, the second best player in the US during the preceding year.
Hubert Phillips was a British economist, journalist, broadcaster, bridge player and organiser, composer of puzzles and quizzes, and the author of some 70 books.
Tim Bourke is an Australian bridge player and writer. He is internationally renowned as a collector and composer of bridge hands, or deals, having composed most of those in David Bird's "Abbot" series since 1996.
Bridge Squeezes Complete is a book on contract bridge written by Ann Arbor, Michigan-based mathematics professor Clyde E. Love, originally published in 1959. Written in a "dry, mathematical way", it is still considered one of the most important bridge books ever written and the squeeze vocabulary Love invented remains the basis for all discussions of squeezes.
John Terence Reese was a British bridge player and writer. Regarded as one of the finest players, he was also one of the most influential and acerbic of bridge writers, with a large output, including several books which remain in print as classics of bridge play. He was also the long-time bridge correspondent of The Lady, The Observer, the London Evening News and the Evening Standard.
George Robert Nail was an American bridge player and a club owner and teacher in Houston, Texas.
Dorothy Rice Sims was an American sportswoman, aviator, bridge player, artist, and journalist.
Design for Bidding is a book by the Russian-born English bridge player S. J. "Skid" Simon, published posthumously in 1949. It is about the theory of bidding in contract bridge, particularly in the context of the Acol system of which Simon was one of the co-developers. It was the first, and as of 2015, remains one of the few, studies of the thought processes involved in designing a bidding system, rather than simply setting out the author's conclusions.
Wilbur Cherrier Whitehead (1866-1931) was an American auction bridge and contract bridge player and writer.
Bridge Headquarters was a group of contract bridge experts organized in the early 1930s.
Right Through the Pack: A Bridge Fantasy is a 1947 book about the game of contract bridge by Robert Darvas and Norman de Villiers Hart. It includes 52 deals in which each of the 52 cards of the pack plays a significant role, described by and interspersed with comments from the playing cards themselves, the anthropomorphic "People of the Pack".
