Billionaires
bank on bridge to trump poker
By Martha T. Moore,
Poker may
be all the rage with junior high school kids, but the two richest men in the
country are betting a million dollars they have a better card game to offer
young people: bridge.
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That's contract bridge, the four-player card game whose
popularity peaked a half-century ago and is now played largely by senior citizens,
country clubbers, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett.
The two billionaires are passionate bridge players who
compete in tournaments and online under the names "Chalengr"
for Gates and "T-Bone" for Buffett. Now
they want to fund a program to teach bridge in schools.
Pastimes of the 1950s are already being revived among
kids: Poker is popular, and schools have turned to ballroom dancing to teach
teamwork.
Now Gates and Buffett have hired
Buffett's bridge partner, Sharon Osberg,
to start a program to teach contract bridge in junior high schools. They've
anted up $1 million to fund it.
"Bill Gates and I kind of cooked it up
together," says Buffett, who thinks bridge would
teach kids math skills, logical thinking and how to work with others. "We
hope we could get a school program someplace, where the kids were taught the
game and ... develop a lot of competition between schools."
In bridge, two pairs of partners take turns bidding how
many tricks, or rounds of cards, they think they will win. Partners signal to
each other what kind of cards they hold and which suit of cards they want to be
"trump," or winner over all other suits.
Gates learned bridge from his parents but took it up
seriously when he began playing with Buffett 10 years
ago. "Bridge is a game where you can keep improving and feel great about
it without ever hitting the limit of what can be done," he said in an
e-mail.
The idea to teach bridge in school is modeled on
inner-city programs teaching chess and dancing. Chess-in-the-Schools, a
The billionaires' bridge program has yet to get a bid,
says Osberg, a two-time world-champion bridge player
and bank executive who has played bridge with Buffett
for 15 years. The first school district she approached,
Buffett was surprised.
"You'd think that even if a proposal came in from Bill Gates that they
didn't want to do, they'd follow through because they'd think, 'We'll sell him
something else,' " he says.
Marley Kaplan, president of Chess-in-the-Schools, says she
has pitched the idea of bridge to
But at lunchtime, those budding Kasparovs
are dealing Texas Hold 'Em anyway, she says. "In
the cafeteria, the cards come right out."
Kids who are crazy about poker should love bridge, says Buffett, who spends nearly every evening playing online —
4,800 hands last year, he figures. "There's intellectual development
involved and working as partners with people," he says. "If a lot of
kids are exposed to bridge, a number of them are going to benefit in a very
significant way."
Most bridge players have been out of school about as long
as Buffett, 75. The average age of American Contract
Bridge League members is 67. The league is also trying to appeal to kids: Last
year, nearly 4,500 students learned the game in classes taught at schools by
league members. In September, the league launched a website, www.bridgeiscool.com.
"The problem is, all the action takes place inside
your head," Osberg says. "It doesn't
translate well to television."
And unlike poker, there's no money involved. "We play
only for glory," says Linda Granell, marketing
director for the bridge league.
What bridge has over chess and poker is that it requires
players to learn to work with someone else, Buffett
says.
"You have to learn to understand your partner, to be
tolerant, sympathetic, encouraging," he says. "Those are skills that
are not bad to have in life."
If a program gets going, Buffett
and Gates have promised to take on the winners of a school tournament.
"We'd go down and play the best team," Buffett says. "It would be fun for me and Bill to play
the champions. And it might spur them on some."