For the University bridge team, the card game is something of a lifestyle.
Whether they are playing alone online at 3 a.m. or together on a weekday evening in the basement of Dod Hall, team members cannot seem to get enough.
This enthusiasm paid off on Sunday as the team earned the right to compete in the 2006 North American College Championships finals this summer, qualifying in the online preliminary round of this year's tournament. The team won out over teams including Harvard's and Yale's to advance along with a team from the University of Illinois. The Princeton group had just missed qualifying for last year's championship.
Team founder Dan Recht '06, who started the organization during his freshman year, said the victory was especially exciting because the club is relatively new and because the undergraduate team faced many graduate opponents.
Recht has taught bridge lessons to interested students in Wilcox for most of his time at the University and now volunteers by teaching bridge to the elderly at a senior center in nearby Skillman.
To Recht, bridge's ultimate appeal is that it is a social game. He said that while he likes "brain games," he cannot get into more solitary pursuits like chess. "[Bridge] is a game that you can get better at, but not in a dark room all alone."
Recht said he has met players at tournaments from Israel, Norway, Poland and all 50 states. His teammate, Aleksandar Lishkov '09, hails from Bulgaria and has participated in international tournaments.
Two of Recht's good high school friends were fellow bridge players and are now on bridge teams at Stanford and Yale.
The rules of bridge help build close relationships between partners. Each player attempts to communicate which cards he's holding to his partner during the "bidding" phase of each game, so a good understanding of a partner's mannerisms is helpful. "You really have to understand what your partner is thinking," teammate David Y. Lin '07 said.
Club president Jon Ullman '08 offered an alternative explanation for the attractiveness of bridge. "We're competitive people," he said. "We all get together and play anything we can get our hands on." In his case, he enjoys other card games, like poker.
Ullman, unlike his teammates, is a relative newcomer to bridge. He learned the game in high school but has only been playing in tournaments for a year. Though he won in his first tournament with the team, the experience was far from glamorous. After winning a tournament the team considered "peanuts," the American Contract Bridge League featured the team in its bulletin alongside winners of major tournaments.
"We were the laughing stock of the tournament," Recht said.
Ullman added that each team member won a "cheap little plastic trophy that must have cost $3." He said that his parents still proudly show his trophy off to guests at home, despite his protests.
Would he rather have a national trophy on display at home?
"I'd really like to win this," Ullman said.
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