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Letter from a Player
New ACBL Bronze Life Master.
New ACBL Bronze Life Master.
By Steven Stark
My wife and I met in college at Duke in the late 1960s. She was a bridge player when we met – I was not. She was bound and determine to teach me the game and she has been teaching me ever since. We were married in 1969 and moved to Lancaster, PA, where we discovered duplicate bridge and the ACBL. We were hooked from the beginning and played in clubs and tournaments all over Southeast Pennsylvania, that is until the kids were born. That put a serious damper on our duplicate attendance, in fact, a forty year damper. We played occasionally during that period when visiting relatives in Florida, but not much more than that. We were fortunate enough to take early retirement in 2003 and moved from our longtime home in the Washington, DC area to Florida shortly thereafter. My wife started playing duplicate again with other partners while I decided to concentrate on my golf game. Then Covid hit. While looking for things to do from home, we discovered Bridge Base Online, and the duplicate bug struck again. We played for a year or two online, then returned to face–to–face bridge in the Sarasota, FL area when conditions allowed. Grandfathered at the 300 point requirement for Life Master, we went on a quest to achieve that milestone. We played all over Florida and won the District 9 NAPC Championship two years in a row, winning free trips to the Nationals in both Reno and New Orleans. After about a three year quest, we both achieved Life Master in 2022. We then set our sights on the next level – Bronze Life Master. My wife had a few more points than I did from the time she was playing bridge and I was playing golf, so she made Bronze about six months ago. I was fortunate enough to make Bronze at the Nationals in Las Vegas this past December, needing only about point entering the tournament. We both consider the Bronze level personally significant since 500 points had become the Life Master standard long before we rekindled our competitive bridge lives. We relocated to Farmingdale, NJ about two years ago and are basing our quest for Silver Life Master from District 3. Hopefully, we will be able to write another chapter of our bridge story from here.