December 13, 2020

I have a lot be thankful for the game of Bridge. I have played against many of the top bridge pros and for the most part enjoyed the experience. I have loved meeting and playing against thousands of local and national players.

My first duplicate game was at the Fargo Contract Bridge League in 1964. I met my now wife Sue at the Twin Cities Bridge Club in 1978. I also met people there who gave me my first Programmer/Analyst job, which became my career, in early 1980 because they wanted to have someone to play bridge with when we were on the road installing systems. I became a Life Master in 1981. In the early 90’s, I stopped playing bridge regularly because I was working alone all over the US at computer consulting jobs. After retiring, I was again able to play regularly and also attend a lot more regionals and now 22 Nationals.

There is very little that District 14 can do to improve the number of competitive games. We just don’t have the population density of the large districts.

My main complaint of the ACBL is the explosion of master points. When I first started playing, you would get 1 point at the club level if you won the one Membership game a year. The rest of the time it was fractional points you had to mail to the ACBL to get credit for them. Many years ago, the ACBL should have established a system of ranking players like chess or scrabble. It is now too late to get off this point merry-go-round.

Stephen Jackson