BRIAN GLUBOKBrian is a highly accomplished American bridge player hailing from New York City. Glubok, an alumnus of Amherst College, has consistently excelled in North American Bridge Championships, securing numerous titles, including wins in the Jacoby Open Swiss Teams, Reisinger, and Spingold events. In addition to his domestic success, Glubok came close to victory in the World Mixed Pairs Championship in 2010, finishing as the runner-up.. Archives
October 2024
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Diary of a Bridge Pro #176/26/2024 The Hal FilesHal Antonson was a dutiful client and computer maven. He made his money at Microsoft, worked there twenty years. The clip featured above, the closing minute of the 1968 film 2001, A Space Odyssey, could be the most important piece of film any of us will ever see. I first saw that one with my family at Radio City Music Hall the weekend it opened in November of 1968 - my sister Carolyn was home from her first semester at Ann Arbor and we made a family outing of it. Kubrick reached me that day, I may have been only 9 but I was struck by the image in that crowded, darkened theater, Hal the Computer watching and lip-reading - for even to me at 9 that was apparent, what a film-maker! Certainly the monkeys and the monolith were lost on me at the time - maybe they still are - What extraordinary parents I had! That clip is way too heavy - here’s the one I’ve been wanting to feature, I always thought this song was original to Joni Mitchell, but no - she did get some celebrities to appear on the studio version, featured here. For our crowd here at this DBP blog, I think this b/w cocktail party is an even better tribute - worth noting here that this was around the 100th song Joni ever recorded - I was a huge fan as a teenager, greatly inspired by that whole singer-songwriter tradition - the 100th song she ever recorded, and the first that she hadn’t written herself. Just sayin’. Check out this, one of the first she ever recorded - Me and my Uncle, the Dead made this a staple of many of their over two thousand shows: Now this elegant, cocktail party version of Twisted, by the woman who actually wrote the song - with Count Basie! And now Joni once more, with her hit version, from her Court and Spark album, 1974 - complete with contributions from Cheech and Chong (“This chick is crazy - flip city! Shooby-dooby!”) and a Steely Dan founder too - I couldn’t confirm this, but they say - that if you can remember the 60’s (which were at their peak when this was recorded, in January of ‘74 in LA) - then you weren’t really there. The guy I know who was most there was bridge legend Kyle Larsen - born January 2nd, 1950, he lived in San Francisco and was a daily visitor to Haigh-Ashbury in the brief period in ‘66/’67 when that two-block stretch didn’t just feature regular performances by Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane, but - it might as well have been the center of the universe, for a lot of us. Here’s Joni’s Twisted, the version most of us know best: It is not the most attractive trait of bridge pros to estimate the money of their (our) clients - but we do. In our defense, how can we recommend the most suitable services for a client if you don’t know what they can afford? Hal wasn’t rich enough to hire an entire elite team for the major events - that’s a very price undertaking. It’s at least ten weeks a year of bridge, if you’re thorough - fielding a team for the Spingold, the Team Trials, plus the other major championships (Vanderbilt and Reisinger), maybe a practice tournament before each nationals - then in May you’ll want to contest the Trials in suburban Chicago. If you win there you’ll head off a few months laters for some other country, perhaps to Bermuda itself. As USA1 (or USA2) you’ll be traveling there with your team and a small American delegation to contest the Bermuda Bowl as the US representative. In pursuing that goal you’ll be chilling with the snow leopards, those rare mammals who inhabit the highest rung of the food chain, “Masters of the Universe” as they were known in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Once you start to play in that milieu you’ll be part of “The Show” - that’s the term minor league ballplayers use when referring to the major leagues, and it’s apt for bridge as well. Duplicate at your local strip mall isn’t “The Show” - playing in the Spingold, even the very first round - that is. Competing in the major North American team championships, and then the Team Trials, then possibly the Bermuda Bowl - this is the bridge equivalent of trying to win the “America’s Cup” at yachting, or a polo trophy in Westhampton with a crew of hired Argentinians. All kinds of rich guys do it - some of ‘em second or third generation Americans like me, whose grandfathers fled the shtetl and they found themselves in the right place at the right time to make small (and sometimes large) fortunes here, in Wall Street or tech, depending on the era. “From Poland to Polo in a single generation….” If you want to sponsor a bridge team at that level, expect to spend north of a million dollars a year. Hal was not the type of sponsor to hire an entire team for the Spingold, but he was quite happy to hire me to play at nationals, and at some regionals too. Between bridge games and bridge conversations, Hal and I liked to talk about his experiences at Microsoft. Hal: …. So yes, I created and developed some bridge software for Microsoft - it was just kind of a hobby for me, a project I found interesting personally - I was mostly a hardware guy, getting inside machines with a wrench and a pliers and fixing these mammoth computers - then later I got into writing code - I found their bridge software kind of unwieldy so I wrote something better for them - they must have made 20 million off what I wrote for them…. Brian: So did they give you a fat residual check for royalties on all those sales? Hal: Royalties? No way - they gave me an “‘Attaboy!” ***** Convergent, then, that Hal would have noticed Gates at the Nationals in San Francisco in the late autumn of 2019 - just prior to lockdown, the last nationals to be held for two years - the last open nationals to be held for three - The Covid Story, which of course Gates himself had so much to do with - “There’s Bill,” Hal remarked to me in that downtown hotel ballroom that day - I make the time 12:53, for the playing room had that bubbling spirit of hope which dissipates as the matches go on and reality sets in - the reality that states: No, this isn’t going to be the tournament where my teammates and I all play well and behave well, remember out systems and bid responsibly, count the distributions and plan the play, we’ll sail unchallenged to the Winner’s Circle, we fantasize…. No, this tournament is going to be like all the others. Reality Check. Reminds me of a classic Talking Heads song, maybe you’re reminded of it too: In terms of net worth, many of my clients fall within shouting distance of 20-30 million - just an educated guess. For regular people there is little distinction between twenty million and two hundred million - even five million might seem like immense wealth to a teenager or teamster. For the very wealthy, these distinctions are not irrelevant at all, but important. The difference between having a few or even five million, and five hundred million is the difference between hiring a second-tier pro for a few days at your local regional once a year, and - flying around the country on a private jet, and fielding a team of stars at every tournament you attend. You’ll bump into the other whales, in the finals of the KO’s, at the airport in Teterboro, at the Michelin - Star restaurants you both patronize. I played one especially small regional with Hal, there in eastern Washington State along the Columbia River, we played a team game with some friends of his and a couple of pair games together. We finished second in the Saturday rendition, I was pleased with that result - he seemed to be too. What would a diary entry from that tournament look like? Let me try to write one now: Tri-city Regional, Pasco, Washington, October, 2019 ….smallest regional I’ve ever been to, I’ve played sectionals way bigger than this jamboree - this tri-city regional in eastern Wash State gets to host this regional one year in seven - for half the field this might be the only regional they play this year - some touring pros here - Passell with Nanette and also with Kranyak and JLall - Bruce Ferguson - Howard Parker - the guys on this circuit find it quite pleasant and medium lucrative - my motel is a two minute walk from the playing room, both my motel and the host venue look like your classic airport Holiday Inn - we played a team game the first day, joined up with some old PNW friends of Hal - second and third days - we played pair games - highlights include bumping into JLall one day and Kranyak the next at the Asian restaurant in the strip mall across Route 397 from the venue…. Hal and I managed a third and a second in the two pair games - got beat up pretty bad in the team game we played - would have been nice to win something with him but a third and second are credible so the trip wasn’t a failure, could almost be labeled a success - at least I can put a tick in that box (played a really small regional with one client in eastern Wash State: Check - ). On the second day Hal and I had lunch at the local fish tavern set on one of the rivers that runs through the industrial districts of this tri-city region. On the ground here, Trump is president and the locals are fine with that (unlike the New York I left from and will return to), though no one has much to say on the subject, pro or con - maybe a T-shirt of bumper sticker of MAGA Hat - we are in between the coasts here, militia country. Yes, it’s hard not to notice something of a cultural divide here in Amerika - unlike the Vietnam Era, however, few people are much concerned with it, one way or another. Haters gotta hate. ***** John K. seems to be everywhere we look, try your luck at this hand I played against Kranyak during this year’s visit to South Florida: You hold JT87x, x, void, AQJxxxx (I did): 7-5 distribution is very rare. https://www.durangobill.com/Bridge.html You might enjoy that link - that’s where I learned that the chance of holding 7-5-1 distribution (“Any of the 24 possible 7-5-1 distributions”, I should say) - is around one in 900 -
That is consistent with our experience, no? If we played three afternoons a week at the local duplicate club, we might go three or four months before we’d hold that pattern again. Definitely worth waiting for! With this 7-5-1 (5=1=0=7), it’s no one vul, and you’re in third position, after two passes - Accept the One Club opening that I chose - Kranyak, on my left, doubled - Partner, Walter, bid One Heart, and Kranyak’s student, on my right, bid 2 Diamonds. With a weak hand I couldn’t think of a good reason to introduce the spades, so I continued with a simple Three Clubs. Kranyak seized the day with a bid of 3 No Trump. Put yourself in my seat and act after this 3NT bid is passed back to you, making the sequence to date: P - (P) - 1C - (Double) - 1H - (2D) - 3C - (3NT) - P - (P) - Answer to follow in #18 -
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Diary of a Bridge Pro #166/21/2024 Happy Easter, all. Not much time to write right now - flying to Florida later today to partner up with client Walter Schenker in the Southeasterns. Walter has been my core client for some years, a Wall Street guy originally from Long Island with a background not too different from my own. He was doing his undergraduate work at Cornell when I played my first duplicate back when I was in 7th Grade, and then he was a graduate student at Columbia Business School when I won my first Reisinger Knockout and made my first Spingold final in 1980, at the ripe old age of 20. ***** I had an ambivalence about including this next section - too Jewish, maybe, I figured. But a trusted adviser asserted that I should publish this - that some people care, even care deeply, about “the history of bridge”. So let transparency rule supreme throughout the land - here goes: ***** Perhaps if I had it to do again I would have visited Kaplan more often during the 15 year stretch that we were partners and then friends. I first met him in person in the autumn of ‘82 when I went to see him at his brownstone on 94th Street and speak to him about playing in the Grand Nationals. We did, and we wound up winning the New York District. Then in August of 1997 I saw him for the last time, during the period he was in and out of Roosevelt Hospital in the West 50’s (of Manhattan) where he received treatment for the cancer to which he finally succumbed. The incident I want to describe occurred eight or ten years previous to his death. I had resolved to visit Kaplan regularly, though as a practical matter I fell far short. I wanted to supplement the encounters we’d have at the tournaments where we partnered up. Despite my intentions I didn’t get there very often - maybe once a year. New York lives don’t allow much time for activities that aren’t a high priority, so I always had something more pressing to do. Sleep, eat or make some money, those were three of my big pursuits in those years. But I knew it would help me to go visit him, partly because compared to all the rest of us, Edgar had a more modulated, less frantic life. I admired and respected that, more than envied it, I guess. I understood that my own life was unusual as well. Most of the New Yorkers I knew, the ones who were closest to my age (thirtyish) as opposed to Edgar’s (sixty-something at the time) - were preoccupied, absorbed, even, with day jobs, Crisis Management, or with logging long hours at their core business. No one had a lot of time left over for reflective contemplation - or for leisurely lunches, visiting friends, or rowing on the pond in Central Park. So the fact that I could consider engaging in activities like that (even if I could only rarely make the notion become manifest) put me in that small minority of New Yorkers leading a relatively unhurried life There were periods where I saw more of him. For a while Robin Kay, Norman’s daughter, lived in a spare room in the brownstone. I used to visit her sometimes, I remember seeing the epic Game Six of the 1986 Mets-Red Sox World Series with her there. Then there was a period where I held IMP Games at Edgar’s home - Nick Nickell used to play, and Michael Rosenberg, Sam Lev, Jimmy Rosenbloom - Zia if he was in town. Plenty of bad players, too, naturally - the game wouldn’t have made sense without them. The conversation I’m about do describe would have occurred a few years after that ‘86 World Series - it must have been late Autumn, for I remember the Manhattan sky being overcast and gray - wintertime - and in that period, I spent my winters in Australia, so most likely it was November, I’m thinking. Of the several dozen times I visited him in that fifteen year period, I remember our conversation on one occasion in the late eighties or early nineties particularly well. It was autumn, I was a month or two from leaving NY for Australia - I went to Australia every winter in that era - a marvelous way of life, I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. I held some fear that the story might reflect badly on Edgar’s memory, or on yours truly - hopefully it doesn’t. But even if it does, well, I’m here to spread light. And at the least this story may shed some. Ultimately, it’s just a couple of guys from the New York Jewish Atheist Tribe (not saying that Edgar or I were or are atheists - he probably was, though we never discussed it - certainly we are/were both Jews). Certainly Edgar and I didn’t often discuss theology, or anything in the way of Jewish mysticism, or spirituality - I would estimate the number of exchanges we had on those subjects over the years at zero - and we did not have one on this day either. Though we could have, Edgar brought a truly open mind to our conversations - as long as I didn’t suggest that we switch to a relay system of bidding, I doubt he would have been very receptive to that. As always, his spacious study, which overlooked West 94th Street, just a block from the park, was cluttered with his books and various pages to be pieced together for the upcoming issue of Bridge World. I was sitting on the one idle chair, or maybe it was a foot-stool opposite him - or maybe an ottoman - his study wasn’t furnished with great intention, it was more of a lair….we had tackled most of our business at hand, perhaps a discussion about prospective teammates for a tournament - absently, I noticed a stapled document, I guess it was or a dozen pages, with typed profiles of maybe twenty or thirty nominees for the reconstituted Bridge Hall of Fame. Some readers here may be familiar with the storied history of The Bridge Hall of Fame, others not. The history of Kaplan and The Bridge World magazine, dating all the way back to the Culbertson Era and the invention of the game by Vanderbilt, are both intertwined with that of the Hall. As best I can reconstruct things - I really should ask Jeff (Rubens) - the Hall had had two moratoriums on inductions by that point, around 1990 - there were an initial ten inductees, sometime in the late nineteen-thirties, and then may another ten, guys like Kaplan himself, along with some other giants like Roth, Schenken, or B. Jay Becker, in the early sixties. Then, nothing for 25 years. But at the time of this encounter, probably thanks to the efforts of Edgar himself, the Hall was about to be resurrected. Which explains why, sitting there on this foot-stool in his cluttered study was this monograph with brief bios of a couple of dozen new nominees, listing the administrative and at-the-table bridge achievements of these two dozen worthies, ⅓ of whom may have been deceased, and ¾ of whom were no longer active in tournament play. I recall being a bit sullen rather than animated that morning - if it was in fact morning - probably around 11:30 AM - I had a bad habit of neglecting meals and being cranky as a consequence - still haven’t shaken that one - but I guess I must have said to him, at a lull in the conversation, something like “So let me ask you something….” “Shoot….” he might have said, though that isn’t the type of idiom he would employ, unless he was intentionally being ironic - he had a deep love for language and a rich internal life - At this point, dear reader, I will beg your forbearance in allowing me to embellish the conversation I had with EK that day. While I could have spoken to Edgar about anything, and occasionally did - he was a highly educated guy, exceptionally learned even among a cohort of learned people. His broad knowledge on multiple subjects felt almost inevitable, or incidentally. Latin, Greek, calculus, trigonometry, he knew something about all of them. Academically, Edgar had had an outstanding high school experience, at the private school a block from where we were sitting, Columbia Grammar. Then for college, he attended Cornell - he wouldn’t have been much more than a freshman there when he was drafted into the US Armed Services - perhaps he enlisted - he would have been drafted if he didn’t. He turned 17 in 1942, the April after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Like everyone else at the time, he probably took that personally, the attack by the Japanese on US forces at our naval base in Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor. Also known as: “The Sucker Punch That Shook the World”. World War II was one of many subjects we never discussed, along with theology, Jewish matters and how much help it was okay to give partner during the bidding - none, I figured, but I was from a different era. As for WWII, which he had fought in as a radio man on bombing runs in the Pacific - while in some respects the war defined our era - even forty years on, we were still living in the “Post-war era”. While I knew tons of veterans (my own father, Edgar, Al Roth) - details of the war went largely undiscussed. The prevailing thinking at the time ran, “If you were there you already know, and if you weren’t there - there’s no way to describe it (the horrors of war).” Certainly WWII and the Holocaust were very far from our respective trains of thought that day - it was over forty years since he’d enlisted - I’m thinking he enlisted, I doubt he’d have waited until he was drafted, though he may have - as a practical matter, the easiest way to enlist was simply to wait for a letter from the Selective Service Department, directing you to report for a physical - “Greetings!” the letters began. “So let me ask you something,” I said to him, “All these people on this list of Hall of Fame nominees….” “Yes?” he may have echoed. “All these people….P. Hal Sims of Deal, New Jersey, Alvy Sheinwold, your husband-in-law (Kaplan had published a best-selling bridge book with Alvy and then married Sheinwold’s wife, Elizabeth - he and Edgar reconciled after a few years and from that time on Kaplan called his former partner his ‘husband-in-law’)”. “What about them?” “Ely Culbertson… “Yes?” “Ely Culbertson,” I repeated. “Jew, not Jew?” “Both.” “Both?” “He may have had a Jewish grandfather, from Russia.” “Oswald Jacoby. Jew, not Jew?” “Not Jew - though many think he is. Brooklyn-born.” “Curt Reisinger?” “Jew, but he tried to pass.” “Richard Kahn?” “New York Jew.” “Waldemar von Zedtwitz.” “The Baron? Waldy? Is that a question? Whoever heard of a Jewish Baron?” “Eric Murray.” “Eric Rutherford Murray?” he echoed again, startled. “His people came over on the Mayflower, if Canada had a Mayflower.” “Sami Kehela”. “Iranian Jew.” And so we bantered, back and forth, as I got a crash course in the bios of twenty legends of our bridge world. “Eddie Kantar. Jew, obviously, but from where?” “Minnesota.” “Ha-ha” “Rumania.” And so we went through the rest of the list, Eric Kokish and Sam Gold, Don Oakie and Lew Mathe. Executive Summary: Edgar Kaplan - it was a privilege to know him. Next Up (Blog #17): Peter Leventritt’s favorite Edgar Kaplan Story.
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Diary of a Bridge Pro #156/4/2024 WBS Signs TGB |
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