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Bridge Headquarters
Bridge Headquarters was a group of contract bridge experts organized in the early 1930s. The group was organized in July 1931. The Bridge Headquarters was organized as a formal corporation under that name. Representing bridge's "old guard", it stood in opposition to Ely Culbertson Elie Almon Culbertson (July 22, 1891 – December 27, 1955), known as Ely Culbertson, was an American contract bridge entrepreneur and personality dominant during the 1930s. He played a major role in the popularization of the new game and was wide ...'s bidding system, and with a stated purpose of standardizing bridge bidding and play. To that end, the twelve members created a system it called the Official System. Culbertson engaged in a war of words against the Bridge Headquarters, culminating in a 1931-1932 challenge match, the so-called " Bridge Battle of the Century", Culbertson and partners against Bridge Headquarters member Sidney Lenz and partners. Lenz lost, and the Official System was eventual ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contract Bridge
Contract bridge, or simply bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard 52-card deck. In its basic format, it is played by four players in two competing partnerships, with partners sitting opposite each other around a table. Millions of people play bridge worldwide in clubs, tournaments, online and with friends at home, making it one of the world's most popular card games, particularly among seniors. The World Bridge Federation (WBF) is the governing body for international competitive bridge, with numerous other bodies governing it at the regional level. The game consists of a number of , each progressing through four phases. The cards are dealt to the players; then the players ''call'' (or ''bid'') in an auction seeking to take the , specifying how many tricks the partnership receiving the contract (the declaring side) needs to take to receive points for the deal. During the auction, partners use their bids to also exchange information about their hands, including o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ely Culbertson
Elie Almon Culbertson (July 22, 1891 – December 27, 1955), known as Ely Culbertson, was an American contract bridge entrepreneur and personality dominant during the 1930s. He played a major role in the popularization of the new game and was widely regarded as "the man who made contract bridge". He was a great showman who became rich, was highly extravagant, and lost and gained fortunes several times over. Life Culbertson was born in Poiana Vărbilău in Romania to an American mining engineer, Almon Culbertson, and his Russian wife, Xenya Rogoznaya. He attended the École des sciences économiques et politiques at the Sorbonne in Paris, and the University of Geneva. His facility for languages was extraordinary: he spoke Russian, English, French, German, Czech and Spanish fluently, with a reading knowledge of five others, and a knowledge of Latin and classical Greek. In spite of his education, his erudition was largely self-acquired: he was a born autodidact. After the Russian Re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bidding System
A bidding system in contract bridge is the set of agreements and understandings assigned to calls and sequences of calls used by a partnership, and includes a full description of the meaning of each treatment and convention. The purpose of bidding is for each partnership to ascertain which contract, whether made or defeated and whether bid by them or by their opponents, would give the partnership their best scoring result. Each bidding system ascribes a meaning to every possible call by each member of a partnership, and presents a codified language which allows the players to exchange information about their card holdings. The vocabulary of is limited to 38 different calls - 35 level/denomination ''bids''A bid consists of two components — the level in range of 1-7, and one of five denominations: clubs (), diamonds (), hearts (), spades () and notrump (NT) plus ''pass'', ''double'' and ''redouble''. Any bid becomes a contract if followed by three successive passes, therefore ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bridge Battle Of The Century
The "Bridge Battle of the Century" was the name given to a celebrated 1931–1932 contract bridge challenge match between Ely Culbertson and Sidney Lenz and their partners. The match pitted Culberson's bidding system, which had been laid out in his widely selling ''Contract Bridge Blue Book'' of 1930 and was sweeping the bridge world, against the Official System which had been developed by a group calling itself the Bridge Headquarters, of which Lenz was a member along with Milton Work, Wilbur Whitehead, Edward Valentine Shepard, George Reith, and others. The two camps, Culbertson and the Bridge Headquarters, engaged in a war of words regarding which system was superior (Culbertson, on arriving from Europe on the ''Mauretania'', was quoted as describing the Official System as "Eighty percent Culbertson, twelve percent Work and Lenz, and eight percent rubbish") and Culbertson offered a challenge to Lenz's group, which was accepted. The format was to be pair-against-pair. Culbertso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Goren
Charles Henry Goren (March 4, 1901 – April 3, 1991) was an American bridge player and writer who significantly developed and popularized the game. He was the leading American bridge personality in the 1950s and 1960s – or 1940s and 1950s, as "Mr. Bridge" – as Ely Culbertson had been in the 1930s. Culbertson, Goren, and Harold Vanderbilt were the three people named when ''The Bridge World'' inaugurated a bridge "hall of fame" in 1964 and they were made founding members of the ACBL Hall of Fame in 1995. According to ''New York Times'' bridge columnist Alan Truscott, more than 10 million copies of Goren's books were sold. Among them, ''Point-Count Bidding'' (1949) "pushed the great mass of bridge players into abandoning Ely Culbertson's clumsy and inaccurate honor-trick method of valuation." Goren's widely syndicated newspaper column "Goren on Bridge" first appeared in the Chicago Tribune August 30 1944, p.15. Early years Goren was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Rus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sidney Lenz
Sidney Samuel Lenz (1873 – 1960) was an American contract bridge player and writer. He is a member of the American Contract Bridge League Hall of Fame, being inducted in the second (1965) class. Career Lenz was born July 12, 1873 in a suburb of Chicago. His parents were John J. and Joanna L. Lenz. The family moved to New York in 1888 (Lenz would have been 14 or 15) but Lenz returned to Chicago before he was 21, and he was soon successful in business, becoming owner of a lumber mill and a paper box factory. Rich by age 30, he retired from business to devote himself to his many avocations, a principal (but by no means only) one being bridge. In 1910 Lenz won the American Whist League's principal national team championship. (In his lifetime he won more than 600 whist and bridge competitions; whist is a precursor and close relative of bridge.) He learned auction bridge in 1911 from British Army officers while traveling in India, studying magic and Hindu culture. He achieved his gr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Milton Work
Milton Cooper Work (September 15, 1864 – June 27, 1934) was an American authority on whist, bridge whist, auction and contract bridge. At least during the 19th century he was a cricket player, writer, and official. Work, Sidney Lenz, and Oswald Jacoby were named to its bridge hall of fame by ''The Bridge World'' monthly magazine in 1965, which brought the number of members to six. They were all made founding members of the ACBL Hall of Fame in 1995."Induction by Year" ''Hall of Fame''. ACBL. Retrieved 2014-12-29. Life Work was born in , Pennsylvania, where he graduated from the |
Wilbur Whitehead
Wilbur Cherrier Whitehead (1866-1931) was an American auction bridge and contract bridge player and writer. Whitehead was president of the Simplex Automobile Company but retired in 1910 to devote himself to bridge. He invented several conventions of bidding and play and was instrumental in standardizing procedures in auction bridge and later in contract bridge. Whitehead was one of the members of the Bridge Headquarters, a group of experts who developed a bidding system named the Official System. Sidney Lenz (another Bridge Headquarters member) deployed this system against Ely Culbertson in the so-called "Bridge Battle of the Century" of 1931. (Whitehead had helped Culbertson during Culberton's early days of poverty). Whitehead was a member of the team that won the Vanderbilt Cup in its first year (1928) and finished second the following year. He was a contributing editor of Bridge World. He wrote a daily bridge column, "Sound Auction Bridge", which appeared in the ''New York Eve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward V
Edward V (2 November 1470 – mid-1483)R. F. Walker, "Princes in the Tower", in S. H. Steinberg et al, ''A New Dictionary of British History'', St. Martin's Press, New York, 1963, p. 286. was ''de jure'' King of England and Lord of Ireland from 9 April to 25 June 1483. He succeeded his father, Edward IV, upon the latter's death. Edward V was never crowned, and his brief reign was dominated by the influence of his uncle and Lord Protector, the Duke of Gloucester, who deposed him to reign as King Richard III Richard III (2 October 145222 August 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat and death at the Battl ...; this was confirmed by the Act of Parliament, Act entitled ''Titulus Regius'', which denounced any further claims through his father's heirs. Edward V and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, were the Prin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
