The Rooster Crows - 1NT

Seen in the New Yorker review of the book Backwash Squeeze:

When I was in ninth grade, back in 1970, we finished our geometry textbook six weeks before the end of the school year and spent the final grading period studying our math teacher’s principal extracurricular passion, which was bridge. He gave us quizzes on the Goren bidding system, and we got so hooked that we often dealt quick hands in the halls, between classes. We played on weekends, too, sometimes at tables wreathed in marijuana smoke. Our teacher told us that we would love playing in college, as he (and most of our parents) had, but by the time I got there, in 1973, nobody seemed to know anything about it. I didn’t play again until five or six years ago, when, during a family vacation, I was reintroduced by my brother-in-law, who had begun taking lessons as part of his midlife crisis. Now it’s the main thing I think about when I’m not thinking about golf.

As a kid, I remember watching my parents play bridge with my grandparents on Friday nights. I was intrigued by the game, but by the time I was a teen the Friday bridge game had evaporated - a casualty of my grandparents' failing health and my family's increasingly busy life. I learned the basics of the game, loved it, but had few chances to play. Sadly, there were no bridge games when I went to college...

Well, I'm now devoting myself to learning the game. Only as much, of course, as a husband with two small kids and a full-time job can devote himself to anything... I have no illusions of becoming a world class player or anything of the sort. (Though, I suppose that I believe I could've been decently competitive had I started early enough)

I just want to be respectable. So, this blog will catalog my rise and far more frequent falls into the game with 635 billion hands... I welcome your comments and advice. Even more, if you're a really decent player, let me sit with you on BBO for just a couple hands and tell me what I did wrong.

Uh, switch that... Just tell me what I did right. That's bound to take less time.