King of the Aces

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The onetime Philadelphia lawyer seemed strangely out of place among the fierce-eyed, quick-fingered, nerve-torn bridge experts competing for the Life Masters Pair Gold Cup at Miami Beach's Americana Hotel. In a game whose fascinating frustrations can bring out the worst of man's nature, he remained bland and smiling. In a game where a peek can be worth two finesses, he carelessly held his hand within easy view of roving eyes. He actually treated kibitzers as humans ("I might as well love them. I'm married to them"), and he went out of his way to describe his partner, a perky strawberry blonde named Helen Sobel, as one of the world's greatest bridge players--which she is. As the tournament neared its end, with tensions and tempers rising, he occasionally took advantage of being dummy to rest his eyes, almost as if snoozing. He was obviously out of his element in one of the most competitive of all pastimes.

Yet when the final point-standing was tabulated, Charles Henry Goren, 57, brilliantly aided and abetted by Helen Sobel, had again won one of bridge's most coveted titles. And last week, reflecting on that victory, he finally permitted himself to show the hard competitive instinct that lies close beneath his amiable surface. "I gave my rivals a good swift kick in the stomach," said Charles Goren, "and they hated it."

On the Pinnacle. That same competitive instinct took Charlie Goren, driven by poverty and a desperate desire for recognition, to the very top of the world's bridge players, and it has kept him there for years. Whether measured by master points awarded in tournaments (5,791), trophies (some 2,000), income (about $150,000 a year, more than any other five bridge experts combined), fame (he is a household word wherever bridge is played) or influence (his bidding system is used around the world), Bachelor Goren is the king of the bridge aces. "If I stopped playing today," he gloatingly says of his master-point total, "nobody could catch up with me for five years--at least."

Goren's bridge books have sold 3,500,000 copies in the U.S. alone, have been translated into eight foreign languages. His seven-days-a-week bridge column appears in 194 U.S. newspapers with a combined circulation of 26 million, and in foreign papers from Manila to Johannesburg. Of the U.S.'s 1,000 fulltime professional bridge teachers, more than 90% teach the Goren system of bidding.

On his towering pinnacle of bridge success, Charlie Goren has plenty to keep him busy, aside from playing bridge: his syndicated column (he writes it himself, in longhand), a regular department in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, trips abroad as a sort of U.S. ambassador to overseas bridgedom, 10,000 letters a year from bridge fans (many include ticklish bridge problems, but with the help of his staff he answers them all), and a venture called Goren Enterprises, which licenses manufacture of such items as a card-table cover with rules of the game printed on it and cocktail napkins decorated with cartoons and useful bridge hints from the master.

When not busy making money, Charlie Goren, nagged by an inner streak of loneliness, likes to go where people are. He is an inveterate Broadway theatergoer, a football and baseball addict. His active sport is golf, at which he is a good bridge player, shooting about 100. Now and then he sallies out of his modest Manhattan apartment to play some nonbusiness but highly serious bridge with the experts who hang out at Manhattan's Cavendish and Regency clubs. When he plays bridge with nonexpert celebrities, as he often does, Goren is perhaps the world's most tolerant partner, never criticizes even the sloppiest bidding.

Problems of Partnership. Much of bridge's complexity--and fascination--derives from the fact that it is a partnership game, requiring that North and South, East and West inform each other of their card holdings through bidding. The 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica warned that contract bridge, then in its infancy, was "not a good game for the club cardroom" because "coordination between two partners is very necessary" and "not always easily obtained." Nearly all experts agree that bidding is the really important and difficult part of bridge. And even Goren's bitterest enemies in the cutthroat world of professional bridge admit that he is an alltime great bidder.

The bidding system that he uses in his tournament triumphs is clearly explained in his books. He worked out and popularized a system that is simple enough for any beginner and at the same time accurate enough for the experts. Goren's system made it easier for partners to communicate, even when playing together for the first time. Says a Philadelphia bridge teacher: "Charlie Goren has given bridge what it needs most: an outstanding authority, so that a bridge player from Pennsylvania can sit into a game in California and be right at home."

Largely because Charles Goren made coordination across the table easier and more accurate, bridge's popularity keeps growing. According to surveys made by the U.S.'s $29 million playing-card industry (60 million decks sold last year), the number of bridge players in the U.S. has soared from 22 million in 1940 to 35 million today, not counting the millions who study newspaper bridge columns but never take a card in hand. Over the same span, the number participating in American Contract Bridge League tournaments has exploded from 5,000 to more than 75,000. Having survived the now waning gin and canasta booms, bridge is moving ever-faster out front as the U.S.'s No. 1 card game.

The Mississippi Heart Hand. For bridge's enduring and growing popularity, urbane Novelist William Somerset Maugham has a simple explanation: "Bridge is the most entertaining and intelligent card game the wit of man has so far devised." Of all partnership card games, bridge is the most challenging to the mind. Nobody can become a good bridge player through experience and rule learning alone; the game requires thought. There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands, and the value of every one can be modified, sometimes drastically, by the distribution of unseen cards in other hands. Even an incurably cautious bidder, for example, might well leap to a grand slam bid in hearts on this hand:

A K Q A K Q J 10 9 A K Q J

But this seeming powerhouse is the famed Mississippi Heart Hand that, according to legend, riverboat gamblers used to deal out to suckers in the days of bridge's ancestor, whist. Far from taking all 13 tricks with hearts as trump, the hand can take only six, because the opponent on the left holds:

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 A K Q J 10 9

The System as Servant. Because the actual trick-taking value of a hand depends on how the other cards lie, the bridge player must strive to 1) infer the contents of the unseen hands, and 2) convey the picture of his own hand to his partner. In these tasks, a bidding system is an indispensable tool--but so are attention, memory, psychological perceptivity and clear thinking, plus that obscure talent called "card sense." In addition, a really good bridge player has a talent that Charles Goren defines as "the ability to make sound decisions under pressure." Rules, he warns, are made not as the player's master, but as servant. And despite sneers that he is a slave to his own system, few players can break the rules faster and more effectively than Charles Goren. Thus Goren once found himself in this tournament plight:

NORTH (Sobel) 6 4 10 7 6 5 10 6 Q 8 7 4 3

WEST EAST Q 5 A J 10 8 7 3 2 Q 3 J 2 Q J 8 7 5 4 A 2 A J 9 K 5

SOUTH (Goren)

K 9 A K 9 8 4 K 9 3 10 6 2

Leading against the opponents' contract of four spades (i.e., ten tricks with spades trumps), Goren took two quick tricks with the ace and king of hearts. But where could he go from there? From studying his own hand and dummy's, plus the bidding, he was sure that East held the two unseen aces, and probably the club king. A diamond lead would sacrifice Goren's king. A club lead, enabling East to play through North's queen, would establish a third club trick on which East could discard his losing diamond. And a heart lead would let East trump in dummy, discarding the diamond. That left Goren with the prospect of breaking two rules that can be glibly quoted by every tyro: 1) never lead from a king, and 2) never leave an honor unguarded. Goren unblinkingly led the nine of spades. By violating two elementary rules of play, he made the only lead that, as the cards lay, could possibly have defeated the contract. After taking the trick with dummy's queen, East led the five of spades, putting down his jack on the assumption that South, being apparently of sound mind, would never have led the nine away from K-9 of trump. Goren copped the trick with his lurking king, later brought home his king of diamonds to defeat the contract.

Russian Whist. It took a long international evolution to produce modern bridge, with its beautiful balances between competition and cooperation, system and psychology. The ancestral game of whist, which still survives in English and New England villages, was bridge without bidding: the trump suit was decided on by turning up the last card dealt. Edgar Allan Poe wrote of whist: "Men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous." But with no bidding and no exposed hand to guide the players, the game was crude and guessy compared to modern bridge.

Toward the end of the 19th century, a newcomer of obscure and disputed origin appeared in England from beyond the Channel. Called Russian whist or biritch (soon anglicized into bridge), the new game differed from standard whist in two ways: the dealer named trumps, or passed the privilege across the table to his partner, and the dealer's partner became dummy, laying down his hand for all to see. London whist players who tried the new game soon noted that the exposed hand made possible much greater subtlety and ingenuity of play. In 1903 or thereabouts, bridge-playing British civil servants stationed at a remote outpost in India hit upon the idea of bidding for the privilege of naming the trump suit. Within a decade, auction bridge had captured the card tables of the U.S. and Europe.

French Ceiling. At the height of auction's popularity in the midigsos, the keen card mind of famed Yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt focused on the game's essential defect in comparison with present-day bridge: overtricks in excess of the bid counted toward game, just like bid tricks, so that a partnership could make a game without bidding it. Card Buff Vanderbilt found in the French variety of auction called plafond (ceiling) an innovation that he liked: only tricks bid and made were scored toward game, over tricks counting as above-the-line bonuses.

Seizing on the "ceiling" principle, Vanderbilt added an idea of his own: a partnership would have to bid a slam in order to get a slam bonus (in both plafond and U.S.-British auction, the bonus was awarded whether the slam was bid or not). The mechanics and scoring of the new game--with slam bonuses increased tenfold and more--were worked out by Vanderbilt and three card-playing friends on a cruise to Havana in November 1925. Contract was born.

Scramble of the Experts. The U.S. took up contract bridge with wild and alarming enthusiasm. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, newspapers reported bridge divorces, bridge assault-and-battery cases, even bridge deaths. Cartoonist H. T. Webster recorded bridge players' foibles in a long and memorable series. A North Carolina addict swore to shoot the next man who dealt him a bad hand, dealt himself a bust--and promptly shot himself to death. In Kansas City, Mo. in 1929, Housewife Myrtle Bennett committed one of the decade's most headlined homicides by shooting her husband after a bitter quarrel about a bridge deal in which he bid one spade, she jumped to four spades, and he, as declarer, bungled the play. Naturally, she was acquitted.

Along with divorces, homicides, quarrels and bad bids, contract brought the lasting war of the bridge experts. Contract made the expert indispensable for the run-of-living-room players: arriving at game and slam contracts with even reasonable safety required standardized communication between partners. In the scramble of the experts to cash in, the man who emerged on top was slender,

Russian-born Ely Culbertson, gifted with a real talent for cards and an absolute genius for personal publicity. His Contract Bridge Blue Book leaped to the bestseller lists in 1931, sold more than 1,000,000 copies within a few years.

"Battle of the Century." Dismayed by Culbertson's lucrative preeminence, a dozen less publicized experts headed by aging Sidney Lenz banded together to publish an "Official System." Culbertson publicly laid down a challenge: he would bet $10,000 to $1,000 that, in a match of 150 rubbers, he and his wife Josephine, using the Culbertson system, would beat Lenz and any partner, using the Official System. Under Culbertson's relentless public needling, Lenz reluctantly accepted the challenge, chose as his partner hefty Oswald Jacoby, later famed as an expert on canasta and poker as well as bridge. Named as referee was Lieut. Alfred M. Gruenther, a West Point instructor and part-time bridge tournament director who rose to become Supreme Allied Commander in Europe in 1953-56.*

Billed as the "Bridge Battle of the Century," the four-week Lenz-Culbertson match was the most publicized card joust in history. The wire services had top reporters covering the match from start to finish, papers put out extras on results, and readers who could not tell a doubleton from a double followed the daily point score. Lenz and Jacoby got off to an early lead, but at the end of the 150th rubber the Culbertson partnership was ahead by 8,980 points, and Lenz paid up. That ended any small remaining doubt about whether Culbertson was the U.S.'s No. 1 bridge authority. He and his system reigned supreme from 1932 until the late 1940s, when he was pushed off the throne by a new man with a new system. The man: Charles Goren. His system: point-count bidding.

The Rough Edges. Just as bridgedom's envious experts now call Goren's hard-earned credentials into question, so a younger, hungrier Charles Goren sniped at Ely Culbertson. Ely, cried Goren in the early days, was all through--and had never been really great anyhow. The inner drive that carried Charlie Goren past Culbertson was sharpened by the rough edges of poverty in his Philadelphia childhood. The son of Russian-born Jewish immigrants, he grew up in a brawling district of "Jews, Irish and Irish." Charlie made up for small size with pugnacity, endurance, and indifference to pain. Recalls his brother Edward, a Philadelphia clothing distributor: "Charlie walked around with mumps for two weeks and never knew it. People kept telling my mother how healthy he looked, fat face and all."

Poverty left one mark on Charlie that the years have not erased: he has a nickel-nursing streak in him, even now that he rakes in a great many nickels. When he decided to donate a bridge trophy in his name several years ago, he bought an ancient horse-racing cup, had the old inscription chiseled off to make way for the new.

Charlie Goren was a very bright boy. He stayed at or near the top of his class all through school, earned pocket money in high school by tutoring less brainy kids in Latin and Greek. "We all thought he was going to be famous," a high school classmate recalls. "We figured he'd be a great lawyer or politician." After high school, Charlie worked as a department-store furniture salesman until a prosperous older cousin, living in Montreal, insisted that gifted Goren go to college. Charlie moved in with the cousin, enrolled at McGill University law school. After finishing up the regular three-year course, stayed on for a postgraduate year before going back to Philadelphia and bluffing his way through the Pennsylvania bar exam. "I had to bluff," he says. "I didn't know anything about Pennsylvania law." A fellow lawyer of the 1920s recalls Goren as "brilliant," but no one could prove it by Lawyer Goren himself. In his 13 years of practice, he never made more than $5,000 a year. "I didn't give up the law," says Goren. "It gave me up." What the law gave up, bridge took.

The Last Laugh. They laughed when he first sat down to play. Goren acutely recalls a day at McGill when a girl friend asked him if he played bridge. "I knew that girls play bridge in the afternoon," says Goren, "and I didn't see why I couldn't. I sat down to play and made a complete ass out of myself." Goren's girl laughed at him--and thin-skinned Charlie Goren, late of Philadelphia's slums, was no man to be laughed at. "It was like putting a knife through me," he says, "and I took an oath that I was never going to sit down at a card table until I knew how to play bridge." Goren returned to Philadelphia, bought a copy of Expert Milton Work's book on auction bridge, and studied it daily for nearly eight months. "If they had destroyed the plates of that book," he says, "I could have reconstructed it from memory."

Goren never played bridge again with his old girl friend--but the next time he did sit down at a bridge table, nobody laughed. He was soon winning local tournaments and rounding out his skimpy law income with bridge winnings. But as soon as he could afford to, Goren gave up playing for money. He saw that the road to bridgedom's peak lay in teaching and writing--and that a gambler's reputation could be harmful. Today he plays for money only when he feels it would be rude to refuse, and the most he has ever played for was 9-c- a point (with Aly Khan on the Riviera last year).

The Point Count. By the early 1930s, having switched to contract along with everybody else, Goren ghosted for ex-Mentor Milton Work's syndicated column. Work got about $20,000 a year out of the column, paid Goren $35 a week--a disparity that Goren still resents. A talented and proud writer with a flair for gently whimsical humor, Goren vividly recalls that Boss Work would invariably "edit out the brightness."

In 1936, already known as a highly successful tournament player, Goren published his first book, Winning Bridge Made Easy. In it he prophetically deviated from the Culbertson system. For suit bids, Goren stuck pretty much to Culbertson's elaborate "honor trick" count, but for no-trump bidding he adopted Milton Work's method of evaluating a hand with a point count: four points for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen, one for a jack. Entranced by the point count's simplicity, Goren devoted numberless hours to expanding the idea into a general bidding method. "It took me about 15 years," he says, "and I had some very expert help." Most valuable helper: Toronto Insurance Executive William M. Anderson, a bridge buff and mathematician.

The Goren system revolves around the fact that there are 40 high-card points in a deck. An opening suit bid requires 13 points, a bid is mandatory at 14 points, a partnership with 26 points should make game in a major suit (29 are needed in a minor suit), partners with 33 points should have a little slam, and 37 is the magic number for a grand slam.

Beyond its tremendous advantage of simplicity, the Goren method was more reliable than Culbertson's. Ely's honor-trick count tended to undervalue kings, queens and jacks, overvalue the ace and the A-K combination. By bringing high-card valuation more into line with play-of-the-cards realities, Goren saved bridge players countless set contracts, especially at no trump. Another virtue of Goren's method was that it supplied a practical way of taking distribution into account: on suit bids (but not on no-trump) it adds one point for a doubleton, two for a singleton, three for a void.

Goren speaks of his point-count bidding system as a "back to nature movement," meaning that it makes scant use of artificial conventions, relies on "natural" bids that are logically related to the cards in the hand. In his own play, Goren seldom uses any artificial bids except the Blackwood and Gerber slam conventions.*

Flicker of Triumph. The day Winning Bridge Made Easy was published, Charles Goren gave up the practice of law. Soon after that, Ely Culbertson issued a public challenge to all comers, apparently never dreaming that Goren would risk his growing reputation against the master. But Charlie grabbed at the opportunity. Goren still treasures Culbertson's letter explaining that a sudden business trip to Europe made it necessary to call off the match. "Ely was using good judgment," says Goren, a faint but unmistakable flicker of triumph on his face.

Closing in on Culbertson, Goren replaced him as the Chicago Tribune syndicate's bridge columnist when Ely moved over to the Sun in 1944. A year later, sprightly Columnist Goren was appearing in more papers than Culbertson. Then, in 1951 Goren published his point-count bidding system in Contract Bridge Complete, and overwhelmed Culbertson with the decisiveness of a trump ace.

The Precision Bidders. In its terrific sales, Contract Bridge Complete brought the Goren system to expert and beginner alike, placed Charles Goren on the same shaky pedestal from which he had toppled Culbertson. Writer Goren had to maintain his position at the card table, and he did it with the help of Helen Sobel, his partner for 19 years. Goren calls Sobel, fourth-ranking player in total master points (4,198), "the greatest woman bridge player in history" -- and few male experts would dispute that opinion.

Life Master Sobel, 48, whose shapely legs won her a job in the chorus line of a Broadway play in 1926, used to wear dark glasses at tournaments to help create a disarming dumb-blonde impression. Deceptively casual at the bridge table, she hums, giggles, makes unfathomable grimaces. Famed for her wariness of peeking opponents, she holds her cards close to her chest, occasionally reaches across the table to push Goren's cards back.

The bidding system that Goren and Sobel use in tournaments is the Goren system of his books, adjusted to the actual deal by hard thinking. A perfect example of Goren-Sobel precision bidding, at a U.S.-Ireland team match in Dublin last year:

NORTH (Sobel) 10 3 A Q J 7 6 3 8 7 2 A 8

WEST EAST 9 7 5 K 8 4 8 5 10 9 4 Q 9 6 5 4 K J 10 3 9 3 2 7 6 4 SOUTH (Goren) A Q J 6 2 K 2 A K Q J 10 5

SOUTH WEST NORTH EAST 1 Pass 1 Pass 2 " 3 " 3 " 4 " 4 " 4 NT " 6 " 7 " Pass "

With North holding the trump suit and South the high-card strength, few partnerships would manage to arrive at a grand slam on this deal. The Irish partners playing the identical hands at the other table stopped at six hearts. With two biddable suits and rosy game prospects, Goren opened one club to give Sobel a chance to reply at the one level in case she held a weak hand. His second-round jump, displaying a good spade suit and extra high-card strength, committed the partnership to game, so Sobel could afford to say three hearts (rather than jump to four), permitting inexpensive exploration for slam possibilities. Goren signaled that his spades were rebiddable. Sobel's four clubs showed the ace, hinted that she was thinking of slam if Goren held enough power. Goren then displayed support for hearts, and Sobel put in a Blackwood call for aces.

Goren saw that with Sobel's club ace, the texture of his own club suit gave the combined hands extra strength that Blackwood signaling could not indicate. So instead of giving the five-heart response to show two aces, he jumped to six clubs. To Sobel, the Goren message was clear: I have the missing aces and the king of hearts, but I also have solid honors in clubs, so go ahead and bid seven if you've got the hearts. She went ahead and bid seven. With Goren's club tricks available for discarding two diamonds and a spade, taking all the tricks was a cinch.

Goren's six club bid was unorthodox but brilliant. It was just the sort of bid a bridge player can make with a partner like Helen Sobel--if the player himself happens to be Charles Goren, king of the aces.

*Called "the best of the nonprofessionals" by no less an authority than Charles Goren, Gruenther also became the bridge mentor of his sometime boss, Dwight Eisenhower, the first good bridge player among U.S. Presidents. *The tournament team headed by Houston Bridge Pro John Gerber devised the Gerber convention in 1937 as a less troublesome substitute for the Blackwood, invented in 1933 by Indianapolis Insuranceman Easley Blackwood. Instead of using the Blackwood four-no-trump bid to ask partner how many aces he has, the Gerber convention starts out with four clubs, with partner responding four diamonds for one ace, four hearts for two, etc.

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