Mon Dec 24, 2018 1:11 pm
Rburgh - Craig Biddle - is a very active duplicate player who I believe has made the Barry Crane top 500 list of master-point winners, perhaps in 2017? When I played duplicate (1977-1986) I think it used to be called the Mckinney Trophy that the ACBL awarded to the person who garnered the most masterpoints in a given year. I still have a couple of hundred bridge books and crates of old Bridge World magazines in my garage, but when I started graduate school and moved away from Long Island, pretty much gave the game up. My forte was bidding but needed a regular partner, the guy I played relay precision with was one of my professors at college but when we became geographically separated that was it for me.
Now I just play chess, these days online. When I retire in a couple of years will probably resume playing face to face tournaments. From 1997-2003 I was the editor of Empire Chess, the journal of the New York State Chess Federation. Stylistically, I am most similar to Petrosian, thus my initial name here. Fischer and Karpov, particularly Fischer, had clear, relatively transparent, styles. I just like games: Chess, Bridge, Backgammon, Poker and SOM. The latter is more of an old addiction, SOM lacks the immersive quality of chess or bridge but is much easier to achieve a reasonable degree of mastery over.