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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