The Bridge World

*The Bridge World*
Editor	Jeff Rubens
Categories	Games
Frequency	Monthly
Publisher	Jeff Rubens
Founder	Ely Culbertson
Founded	1929
Company	Bridge World Magazine, Inc.
Country	United States
Language	English
Website	www.bridgeworld.com
ISSN	0006-9876

Last updated January 03, 2023

The Bridge World (TBW), the oldest continuously published magazine about contract bridge, was founded in 1929 by Ely Culbertson. It has since been regarded as the game's principal journal, publicizing technical advances in bidding and the play of the cards, discussions of ethical issues, bridge politics and leading personalities, and reports of major tournaments.

Culbertson edited TBW (assisted by a staff of well known writers and players such as Josephine Culbertson, Alfred Sheinwold, Samuel Fry Jr., Richard L. Frey, Albert H. Morehead, and Alphonse "Sonny" Moyse Jr.) until 1943. Morehead then became editor and continued until 1946, when Moyse took over. The McCall Corporation purchased TBW in 1963, and subsequently sold it to Edgar Kaplan. Kaplan became editor and publisher in late 1966; his first issue is dated January 1967. Jeff Rubens acted as Kaplan's co-editor until Kaplan's death in 1997, when Rubens became editor and publisher.

Largely because of its emphasis on IMP and matchpoint play, TBW is of interest primarily to tournament players.

Regular features

Several features appear in each issue. The most popular are:

Editorial

Prior to 1967, editorials had appeared infrequently in TBW. Under the Kaplan/Rubens editorship, the Editorial became a monthly feature, and occupies a privileged position, appearing directly after the table of contents.

The Editorial usually discusses issues that are both timely and of import to tournament bridge players, and from time to time provides a forum for points of view that are not shared by the editorial staff. A non-random sample of the topics that have appeared in the Editorial over the past 40 years:

Conditions of contest that reward the deliberate loss of preliminary matches
Effective disclosure of partnership agreements, particularly in international competition where Highly Unusual Methods (HUMs) are prevalent. Similarly, the ongoing tension between players who wish to use their own bidding innovations and administrators who need to protect tournaments from HUMs.
Slow play
Dealing effectively with cheating and professionalism, primarily as to American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) tournaments
Sex discrimination, evidenced by the existence of men-only, women-only, and open events
Psychic bidding
The Italian Bridge Federation's handling of the Burgay-Bianchi affair

Master Solvers Club (MSC)

The MSC is a combination of quiz and commentary. Several problem hands, along with the bidding so far on each, are presented and the reader is asked what call he would make (the number of problems per month has varied, but since at least the 1950s it has settled in at eight per issue). The answers to each question are given in the next issue, along with comments by expert panelists and by the panel's moderator.

This arrangement provides a means for the reader to improve his bidding skills, and to get a glimpse of the thought processes of the experts. Readers (or, in the context of the MSC, "solvers") are invited to submit their monthly scores to TBW. An annual competition is held for the highest 12-month total; the winner is invited to participate on the expert panel for a year.

For many years, the MSC was conducted by the same person each month: Samuel Fry Jr. from 1932 through 1945 and Albert H. Morehead from 1945 until his death in 1966. In January 1967, when Kaplan and Rubens took over TBW's editorship, a rotating group of directors was established: Moyse, Alfred Sheinwold, Howard Schenken, and Alan Truscott each directed the Club once every four months. Retirements, editorial disagreements, and health problems led to changes in the Club's directorship, and well known players such as Bobby Wolff, Jeff Rubens, Eric Kokish, Kit Woolsey, David Berkowitz, Larry Cohen, Bart Bramley, Danny Kleinman, Steve Landen, Karen McCallum, and Barry Rigal have all served as directors. In 2005, the MSC changed from a rotation of four directors to a rotation of six.

The form of the MSC has also changed markedly over the years. It was originally conceived as a means by which readers could test themselves on the Culbertson System, and for years it was held that there was only one correct answer to each problem – there being only one correct answer in the context of the Culbertson System. In the 1940s a system of partial credits was instituted, with the "correct" answer receiving 100 points and lesser awards going to other answers.

A related change occurred in 1951, when the answers provided by experts other than the director were printed, along with their comments. According to TBW's history of the MSC, this was the magazine's first explicit acknowledgment that such a panel existed. The inclusion of expert comments has continued ever since.

Although most of the monthly problems concern bidding, under the Kaplan/Rubens editorship there has been one problem each month concerning leads, nearly always opening leads.

As to the problems that concern bidding, the experts' answers and comments lost clarity as the Culbertson/Goren consensus (four-card majors, strong notrump, strong two-bids, two-over-one showing only about 10 HCP) began to fall apart during the 1950s and 1960s. The experts' answers became influenced less by judgment and more by system, some experts even abstaining on occasion because they could not use a favored treatment. When different experts preferred different systems it became difficult to reach consensus and the comments became less valuable.

Therefore, in 1967 Kaplan and Rubens instituted a poll of experts to determine their bidding preferences (e.g., four-card or five-card majors, strong or weak two-bids, doubles of overcalls negative or for penalty, limit or forcing jump raises, etc.). Solvers were also invited to participate in the poll, but their role was restricted to breaking ties among the experts. The result was Bridge World Standard 1968, now known as BWS 68. There have been three major revisions of the system, in 1984, 1994, 2001, and 2017. BWS has always been intended as a platform for answering MSC problems, but also as a system that two experienced players could use if they had never partnered one another. Another use for BWS, perhaps intended in 1967 but never touted as a rationale, is to provide a means of tracking how expert preferences have changed over the years.

TBW regards the MSC as its most successful feature; certainly it is its longest running. It has been imitated in one guise or another by most bridge periodicals.

Several sample MSC problems, answers, and commentary can be found at TBW's web site.

Challenge the Champs

Challenge the Champs (CTC) is, in the words of TBW, "… a continuing bidding battle. Each month, two leading pairs compete, bidding deals from actual play (taken from old tournament reports or submitted by readers)." CTC is a feature that debuted in The Bridge Journal, a periodical edited by Jeff Rubens which was discontinued when Rubens joined the staff of TBW. At that point TBW took over the operation and the publication of CTC.

The format is to give each pair ten hands to bid, just as though they were at the table. Awards for different contracts are pre-set, and the results are scored as though they were matchpoints awarded on a 12 top. Over ten hands (again quoting from TBW): "… in the fifties is over average, in the sixties might win, higher is phenomenal."

In its original form, a pair would continue in CTC so long as it kept winning. The prior month's winners were termed the "Champs" and would compete against a new pair, the "Challengers." More recently the contest has been altered: TBW invites a pair to participate for exactly two consecutive months (first as Newcomers, then as Incumbents); if a pair wins at least one of its two matches, it is invited to return at a later time, and possibly take part in a CTC elimination tournament.

During the period that a pair could compete indefinitely, Matt Granovetter and Ron Rubin established the record for consecutive wins at 10, from July 1975 through April 1976, using the Ultimate Club, a strong club system with many relay sequences. In May 1976 Granovetter-Rubin lost to Kerri and Mike Shuman by the record combined score of 86-85.

CTC has been involved with some odd coincidences. As reported by John Kelly Karasek in a 1978 issue,^[1] the March 1975 issue both reported on the Facchini-Zucchelli foot-tapping incident in that year's Bermuda Bowl, and featured Facchini-Zucchelli as the Challengers in CTC. The May 1977 issue reported at length on a cheating scandal in the US international team trials in Houston Texas, during which the accused, Richard Katz and Larry Cohen (not the same Larry Cohen who has written extensively on the Law of Total Tricks), resigned from the ACBL. Katz and Cohen were the CTC Challengers during that same month.

Bits and Pieces

Bits and Pieces is principally a letters-to-the-editor column. It first appeared in January 1955. The very first letter printed in the column asked the correct play in a contract of 4♥, and the answer was to take an Ann Gallagher finesse.

The letters tend not to concern questions of bidding or play – these are dealt with in other features such as Pro et Contra (discontinued after Oswald Jacoby's death in 1984). They do tend to focus on issues raised in editorials, editorial style (e.g., matters such as gender-neutral prose, and the use of hyphens), unusual occurrences, laws and proprieties, and how sponsoring organizations such as the ACBL and the EBL regulate the game. The column also contains corrections and amplifications, book and product reviews, and occasional solicitations of readers' opinions.

Other features appearing regularly

Test Your Play: Two problems consisting of declarer's hand and dummy. The bidding is often provided, but is usually immaterial. The level of play is quite high, and for many years the problems were set by Paul Lukacs, thought by many the game's premier composer of single dummy problems. A discussion of the correct play, or line of play, is provided elsewhere in the same issue.
Kantar for the Defense: Written by Edwin B. Kantar. One problem consisting of a defender's hand and dummy. The bidding is usually provided and is often important to finding the correct solution. The general difficulty level is just a little lower than in Test Your Play.
Tournament reports: These were nearly always written by Edgar Kaplan from the time that he purchased TBW until the mid-1990s. They cover the major ACBL events and world championships, although reports of events held by other sponsoring organizations occasionally appear. The approach is to discuss hands that were of particular interest, or that caused major swings in a match. Since 1997, authorship of the reports has been distributed among various reporters, part of the emphasis that Rubens has placed on broadening the magazine's perspective.
Swiss Match: Usually authored by Jeff Rubens, this feature appears three times annually. It poses seven problems in bidding or play, in the form of a Swiss match. The reader is given a raw score for each of various actions that he might take. A post mortem section describes the outcome of each problem at the "other table," and the reader can IMP the results for himself. The format extends (by means of sub-problems) that used by Hugh Kelsey in his books Test Your Match Play^[2] and The Tough Game.^[3]
Fifty Years Ago: This monthly feature first appeared in 1986. It revisits an issue that was published exactly fifty years earlier, and discusses points of interest from that issue, such as spectacular hands and bidding innovations. The column is of particular interest because the author discusses erstwhile hot topics in light of subsequent bridge history.
Bridgeworks: Articles on bidding and play that are aimed at newer players.
Classic Rewind: Outstanding articles from TBW's early years, thus from issues that are now difficult to obtain.

Features that appear irregularly

Some features that do not appear according to a fixed schedule, or that have run their course:

Appeals Committee: A series of articles that discusses how a committee should apply the Laws and Proprieties to adjudicate rulings that have been appealed by the players.
That's Ridiculous: Collections of newspaper columns, submitted by the TBW readership, that mis-analyze hands. (The column title was adapted from a television program, That's Incredible! , then-popular in the US.)
Technical innovations first appearing in TBW: a highly abbreviated list includes the Grand Slam Force, Stayman, lebensohl, PLOB, suit-preference signals, the unusual notrump, Puppet Stayman, and CRASH. (Blackwood is not included in this list: although Easley Blackwood Sr. submitted an article on his convention to TBW, it was rejected – presumably because it conflicted with the editor's eponymous Culbertson 4-5 Notrump convention.) A technical innovation in the play of the cards is now rare: many advanced coups were known to whist players during the 19th century. However, Geza Ottlik's The Quest^[4] and The Way It Is^[5] advanced readers' awareness of card play, particularly in the areas of elopement and squeeze play, well beyond levels previously discussed in the bridge literature.
Several times each year, humorous, bridge-themed fiction appears in TBW. Authors such as Frank Vine, Robert Gray, Victor Mollo, David Bird, Danny Kleinman and Nick Straguzzi, and E. S. Baer (a pseudonym of Edgar Kaplan's), among many others, have contributed satirical short stories with points concerning bidding, the play of the cards, and bridge personalities.

Bridge Hall of Fame

The concept for a Bridge Hall of Fame was originated with Lee Hazen,^[6] an early Life Master, and undertaken by The Bridge World magazine by a ballet poll of 115 leading bridge columnists in the United States; the top three names receiving at least thirty percent of the cast votes were elected in the inaugural year. The magazine continued with elections in 1965 and 1966 but then discontinued sponsorship. The elected members to the Bridge World's Hall of Fame were:

1964: Ely Culbertson, Charles Goren and Harold Vanderbilt
1965: Oswald Jacoby, Sidney Lenz and Milton Work
1966 Howard Schenken, Sidney Silodor and Waldemar von Zedtwitz

Subsequently, in 1995, the American Contract Bridge League inaugurated their own Hall of Fame and adopted the initial nine inducted in the Bridge World Hall of Fame.

Bridge World Standard

Since 1968, the magazine has periodically polled experts on various bidding treatments and conventions in order to develop a unified system of bidding known as Bridge World Standard. There have been five versions of the system with the latest revision being the 2017 edition.^[7]

Bridge World Standard has evolved with the practices of North American experts and, similar to the Standard American Yellow Card system promulgated by the American Contract Bridge League, is offered as a system "for use by impromptu or casual partnerships, and as a basis for discussion by those who wish to formulate their own system."^[8]

Related Research Articles

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.

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Elie Almon Culbertson, known as Ely Culbertson, was an American contract bridge entrepreneur and personality dominant during the 1930s. He played a major role in the popularization of the new game and was widely regarded as "the man who made contract bridge". He was a great showman who became rich, was highly extravagant, and lost and gained fortunes several times over.

Oswald "Ozzie", "Jake" Jacoby was an American contract bridge player and author, considered one of the greatest bridge players of all time and a key innovator in the game, having helped popularize widely used bidding moves such as Jacoby transfers. He also excelled at, and wrote about, other games including backgammon, gin rummy, canasta, and poker. He was from Brooklyn, New York and later lived in Dallas, Texas. He was the uncle of activist and author Susan Jacoby, as well as father of James Jacoby, an author and world-class bridge player in his own right.

These terms are used in contract bridge, using duplicate or rubber scoring. Some of them are also used in whist, bid whist, the obsolete game auction bridge, and other trick-taking games. This glossary supplements the Glossary of card game terms.

Alfred (Freddy) Sheinwold was an American bridge player, administrator, international team captain, and prolific writer. He and Edgar Kaplan developed the Kaplan–Sheinwold bidding system. Among other administrative assignments that he accepted, Sheinwold chaired the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) National Laws Commission from 1964 to 1975, and the ACBL Appeals Committee from 1966 to 1970. He was an editor of The Bridge World monthly magazine from 1934 to 1963 and was the editor of the monthly ACBL members' Bridge Bulletin from 1952 to 1958.

Edgar Kaplan was an American bridge player and one of the principal contributors to the game. His career spanned six decades and covered every aspect of bridge. He was a teacher, author, editor, administrator, champion player, theorist, expert Vugraph commentator, coach/captain and authority on the laws of the game. He was the editor and publisher of The Bridge World magazine for more than 30 years (1967–1997). With Alfred Sheinwold he developed the Kaplan–Sheinwold bidding system. He was from New York City.

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Howard Schenken was an American bridge player, writer, and long-time syndicated bridge columnist. He was from New York City. He won three Bermuda Bowl titles, and set several North American records. Most remarkably he won the Life Master Pairs five times, the Spingold twelve, and the Vanderbilt Trophy ten times; the LM Pairs and Vanderbilt records that still stand today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bidding box</span> Device used in contract bridge

A bidding box is a device used for bidding in bridge, usually in duplicate bridge competitions. Made in various configurations and sizes, it is typically a plastic box with two holding slots, each containing a set of bidding cards: one with 35 cards with symbols of bids, and the other with cards for other calls.

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Inverted minors refers to a treatment introduced by the Kaplan–Sheinwold (K–S) bidding system for the popular card game bridge. The original structure of Precision, another bidding system, also employed inverted minors over a 1♦ opening. However, the treatment is no longer restricted to users of these bidding systems. although partnerships that use a Short club system tend also to use the convention only after a 1♦ opener.

Louis Henry Watson was a highly ranked American contract bridge player and writer who rose to prominence in the 1930s. A popular personality and one of the most brilliant of the younger generation of contract bridge players, he was considered by Ely Culbertson to be his most likely successor, but died of a sudden heart attack before his 30th birthday.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael T. Gottlieb</span> American bridge player

Michael Theodore Gottlieb was an American bridge player, an original member of the Four Aces team established by David Burnstine in 1935.

Cheating in bridge refers to a deliberate violation of the rules of the game of bridge or other unethical behaviour that is intended to give an unfair advantage to a player or team. Cheating can occur in many forms and can take place before, during, or after a board or game.

The Culbertson 4-5 notrump is a slam-seeking convention in the game of contract bridge. It was devised in the early 1930s by Ely Culbertson. Most four-notrump conventions demand that bidder's partner define their hand using agreed codified responses. In contrast, the Culbertson 4-5 describes the bidder's hand, and invites partner to use their judgement in the light of that information.

References

↑ The Bridge World, October 1978, p. 6
↑ Test Your Match Play, Faber and Faber, 1977
↑ Kelsey, Hugh (1979). The Tough Game. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-11360-5.
↑ The Bridge World, December 1967
↑ The Bridge World, February through May 1974
↑ Editors, The Bridge World Magazine (February 1964). First Three Members Elected to Bridge Hall of Fame. New York, NY: The Bridge World. p. 2.{{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)
↑ "The Bridge World". www.bridgeworld.com. Archived from the original on 26 October 2017. Retrieved 7 May 2018.
↑ Editors, The Bridge World Magazine (May 2011). The Pocket Guide to Bridge World Standard (2001 ed.). New York, NY: The Bridge World Books. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-9753419-2-6.{{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)

External links

Official website

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[1] The Bridge World, October 1978, p. 6

[2] Test Your Match Play, Faber and Faber, 1977

[3] Kelsey, Hugh (1979). The Tough Game. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-11360-5.

[4] The Bridge World, December 1967

[5] The Bridge World, February through May 1974

[6] Editors, The Bridge World Magazine (February 1964). First Three Members Elected to Bridge Hall of Fame. New York, NY: The Bridge World. p. 2.{{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)

[7] "The Bridge World". www.bridgeworld.com. Archived from the original on 26 October 2017. Retrieved 7 May 2018.

[8] Editors, The Bridge World Magazine (May 2011). The Pocket Guide to Bridge World Standard (2001 ed.). New York, NY: The Bridge World Books. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-9753419-2-6.{{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)

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