EPISODE 41: Robert Todd
Robert Todd is becoming a force in the bridge teaching world and has been called “the next generation of great bridge instructor and entertainer.” Having taught in 48 States, lectured at countless regionals, nationals, and cruises, Robert is following the path of his mentors Audrey Grant, Larry Cohen, or Barbara Seagram—some of the world’s most renowned bridge teachers.
Besides teaching professionally, Robert is heavily involved in promoting youth bridge. Using his knowledge and expertise as a top-tiered educator, Robert is helping spearhead the new ACBL Education Foundation program, Bridge Whiz. If your child is interested in learning bridge online, this 20-week long class is perfect for their needs! Learn more here.
Link to Audio Only Version of Episode
Episode Highlights:
1:20- The history of the ACBL Education Foundation
5:50- How to make learning bridge enjoyable
7:15- Robert’s teaching style and method
11:57- ACBLEDF peddling Tricky Bridge
15:10- Robert was brainwashed into loving bridge
His unique upbringing in the social bridge community influences his perspectives
22:05- Robert led a study to discover how many bridge players there are in America
27:05- Why the ACBL Education Foundation’s goal is different than the ACBL’s
32:35- Different bridge-playing communities
35:59- Professional teaching administrative details
43:52- Professional bridge and promoting bridge
50:53- Funny stories about TST Episode #31, Adam Kaplan
1:00:32- Robert’s analysis on the Meckwell partnership
1:02:44- The administrative thinking behind BridgeWhiz
Transcript:
JOHN MCALLISTER: Today on The Setting Trick, we have Robert Todd. I’m going to read – Pam Berry is a bridge teacher and influencer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and she said, “I wanted to reach out and suggest that I think Robert Todd would make an excellent guest for your podcast. He is one of the top two or three young guys who are the future of bridge teacher.” And that’s in bold and underlined – “the future of bridge teaching.” He is very involved in promoting bridge as a board member of the ACBL Education Foundation. He’s also working closely with Al Bender on the massive kids program BridgeWhiz.
Robert Todd – he’s taught in 48 states. He’s a great guy. Lots of innovative ideas. Robert Todd.
ROBERT TODD: Thanks, John. It’s great to be here. [Laughter]
JOHN MCALLISTER: Welcome. Welcome to The Setting Trick podcast. That is the first time we’ve really done an introduction like that.
So, you are the program director at the ACBL Education Foundation.
ROBERT TODD: I am.
JOHN MCALLISTER: How did you get that job?
ROBERT TODD: So, let me just tell you a little bit about the foundation because that’s a pretty good thing to start with.
JOHN MCALLISTER: OK.
ROBERT TODD: So, the Education Foundation’s been around for quite a long time, since the 80s, and it was originally part of the ACBL. And it was – and that’s where the name comes from, the ACBL Educational Foundation. And its original design was to support kind of programs and teachers through the ACBL. And I’m not exactly sure now – maybe six years ago or so, it got spun off from the ACBL and turned into a traditional 501(c)(3). And the charter was rewritten to be the good of all the bridge.
So, we kept the name, and we saw the great relationship with the ACBL. They implement a lot of the programs we want to do, like a lot of the collegiate programs, and the College Bowl, and things like that. We’re very much involved in funding those programs through the ACBL. But we also, in the process of being spun off, tried to expand our horizons a little bit. And so, I came onto the board at that time, as did a good number of other board members. There was some turnover. The board expanded and grew quite a bit. We hired an executive director for the first time, Kristen Frederick. And so, Kristen has done a great job of taking an organization that had no infrastructure and trying to give it traditional foundations of a nonprofit.
And so, we’ve organized ourselves, put together a larger team, developed committee structures, and started to organize our grant making process. Because even prior to that, we had been a pretty reactive organization. People come to us with an idea, we say that fits our charter, we have a budget for that. Hey, you want to run a summer camp? Here, you can have some money to do that. You’ve raised some money locally? We’ll help with it as well.
We are expanding and growing to the point where we can try to design and come up with ideas for our own programs, then reach out and find people to implement them for us. We’ve also been looking to build more partnerships. So, one of the things in the pre-COVID world is that we were in the process of starting a partnership with some of the Boys and Girls Clubs in the Chicago area, and they were willing to start doing some bridge programs there. And we want to find partner organizations that we can do things with, and if they are successful on a local or regional level, we can scale them. So, obviously, the Boys and Girls Clubs are a very powerful ally in that sense. If you can do something at four or five of them and it works out great, and they say they’re willing to do it at hundreds of them, the amount of impact that is possible is tremendous. So, that’s how it got to there.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Did you get recruited? Who was the person who recruited you to be on the board? Or did you put your name out there when you saw that they were going on their own?
ROBERT TODD: Barbara Heller and Sharon Anderson were the two people who kind of recruited me to come to the board. As a relatively young bridge teacher…I’m a full-time professional player and teacher, and I kind of split my time between the two. And I was very fortunate that both Audrey Grant and Larry Cohen sort of shepherded me in. They invited me to teach with them at some events, a variety of different things as I was teaching my own events. And the generation ahead of me of bridge teachers has been very supportive of me coming in and doing that stuff. Barbara Seagram, people like that.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Which do you like better – teaching or playing?
ROBERT TODD: Ooh, those things are hard to compare. When you have 150 people in a classroom and at the end of three days, you feel like you have convinced 149 of them to love bridge a lot more, and you know they’re going to leave there super excited and go out and tell their friends about how awesome bridge is – to be honest, that is a much better impact on the game than winning a regional pairs event. So, in terms of feeling like you’ve done good, teaching is certainly a better thing. But then, going out and trying to do really well in a national championship, playing with a student or client, is a different kind of accomplishment. One’s sort of more personal, and one feels like it has more impact on your community. So, hard to compare.
JOHN MCALLISTER: How do you get 149 people enthused?
ROBERT TODD: That’s a good question. I think taking the perspective that teaching bridge is a mix of education and entertainment. This is teaching a hobby. People are there by choice. They are not in this classroom because they have to graduate from this class in order to graduate from 11th grade or college. They chose to do this. So, the first thing is you have to engage with your students in a way that understands that they could walk out the door at any time. You’re supposed to be making this a fun thing for them, right? You can’t reprimand them too hard. You have to figure out how to provide an educational experience for them that also makes them excited.
JOHN MCALLISTER: I mean, teaching 150 people is a lot of people in person. That’s a lot of people.
ROBERT TODD: Yeah, that’s a lot. I mean, cruises are probably the largest we get. We’ll have about 200 people on the large cruises. You know, I would say when I’m teaching at a bridge club or a destination seminar, 60 to 100 is pretty normal. Certainly, beyond 20 tables has a very different experience. How much digital you involve in the teaching process – as you start to get to 30 tables, it gets much harder to have a personalized interaction and walk around all the tables. Yes.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Mm. I’ve been to one of Larry Cohen’s seminars, actually, probably five years ago, and he did a lot of play. He did a lot of hands where we played hands and kind of went around the table. Is that – you know, you talked about Larry being someone who’s brought you in. Is that a format that you find…?
ROBERT TODD: Yeah, I mean, certainly you want bidding play and defense to be a part of the discussion on every hand. I use a three-audience process to my teaching design, so I sort of assume that there are relatively beginning players, intermediate players, and more advanced players in the audience. Especially when I go to a bridge club, you may have a more diverse audience than if you were in a country club or private setting that’s a bunch of friends that all play at a similar level. So, you need to make sure that you have a narrative for each of the three audiences – like, what’s my takeaway to communicate with each of these groups of people? So, I kind of teach the middle of those three and try to supplement to the extreme.
And my hands – my general style is to have a lecture period because I like to kind of be a storyteller as a bridge player and a bridge teacher, and kind of give people a little background. Understand why I’m going to sell them on what I’m going to sell them at the end to believe me that you should play this way. And I try to talk to them about – oh, you play this other way, or you learn this other way – why is that? You learn two of the top three honors for your preempt. OK, why was that? OK, well, that was originally created when two bids were first created, and they were an offensively oriented tool, and the goal was to open two spades and get to three no’s, so partner could count six tricks if they had the king of your suit. Right?
And so, that’s evolved over time and kind of helps them understand the evolution and the thinking of bridge. That helps them kind of understand why you’re saying the modern style is to “x,” to focus more on the jacks, tens, and nines than the aces, kings, and queens. That kind of thought process. If they understand how it evolved, then they can say, “Oh, yeah, I learned that 30 years ago when I first started playing. People are thinking about it differently now.” You’re not just telling them they’re wrong.
JOHN MCALLISTER: In our pre-interview, you asked me a question which I didn’t really have a very good answer to, which was who do I think the audience should be for this podcast? And my question to you is, who do you think the audience should be for this podcast?
ROBERT TODD: Well, classic interviewer technique. You turned my question back around on me. Touché. From listening to a good number of your podcasts, I think it’s a good start to help share the personalities of some of the top players. One thing I noticed in listening to that was that as you’ve gone along, you’ve kind of gotten more into people who are out there promoting the game. Like when you talked to Scott Hoffer and Al Bender and some of the people. And so, I kind of feel like there should be a component of that as well, of maybe sharing some of the things that people do as they promote the game.
And so, I wondered if that was a conscious decision on your part, or just happened to be something that happened through some of the different people you invited in. Anyway, that was why I asked the question, because I wondered if you were consciously trying to pivot to that type of discussion. Because I mean, you know, we can talk about different things that occurred at early bridge regionals and things like that, or we can talk about foundation stuff, or my own teaching experiences. So, that was the reason I asked you that was sort of – what would we like to most talk about?
JOHN MCALLISTER: This podcast started as a means of sharing Double Dummy with the world, which is the documentary film that we’ve remade, which is going to be available in September for virtual events. Get my plug in there.
ROBERT TODD: Well, I’m excited to see the remake because I actually think you did a really good job on the first one. It was a really hard subject matter to blend together. And so, I’m interested to see how you’ve cut it down and kind of reshaped the story line.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Well, thank you very much.
ROBERT TODD: I can tell – I mean, the three stories you were trying to blend together was a challenge, for sure.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah. I mean, this version is more focused on the youth tournament. Really, the thing about the original version – it just never – and maybe that was a function of me – never really got beyond my own sort of…I mean, it did in some senses, for sure. But it just didn’t – it wasn’t The Queen’s Gambit. It wasn’t The Queen’s Gambit. [Laughter] And I don’t think this new one’s going to be The Queen’s Gambit. If it is The Queen’s Gambit…
ROBERT TODD: Good for you.
JOHN MCALLISTER: I’m going to be dancing in the streets. But it’s not The Queen’s Gambit yet.
You mentioned Scott Hoffer, and you mentioned Al Bender. Those are two people that the ACBL Educational Foundation has invested in pretty heavily. I had Scott on the show because I’ve been wanting an app where I can just send somebody that would teach you bridge from scratch. So that, like BridgeWhiz, heaven-sent. You know, great. And I’ve sent it to a bunch of people. I’ve heard from maybe, like, one person that got it. And I think other people are doing it, but you know, that’s the thing. How do we measure the success of your investment in Tricky Bridge?
ROBERT TODD: OK. So, just to give you a little background here, I completely agree with you that I’ve desperately wanted an app that I could say to someone, “Hey, here you can learn the basics of bridge.” And the concept of gamification is such an area of something missing from bridge software. This way that you make something sticky and make someone really enjoy playing it and want to come back.
So, when Scott approached the foundation about – he wanted to make this app, and he wanted to make an educational component within it, we need to give other ways for people to kind of get addicted to bridge, right? If we’re bridge drug dealers, for lack of a better term, we need to be addictive in lots of ways. And I think Scott, with Tricky Bridge, really did a great job of being the first bridge app you play on that’s targeted at non-bridge players. The design of it is not what a bridge player expects. The design of it is someone who plays games on their phone expects. So, his underlying assumption of not a particularly hardcore tournament bridge player is much more in line with he wanted to expand bridge to more people.
JOHN MCALLISTER: How many people are playing on Tricky Bridge? Do you know?
ROBERT TODD: That’s a good question. I haven’t talked to Scott in quite a while. As of February, he had -- 422,000 beginner bridge lessons had been gone through. So, that’s pretty good. If your average person’s doing 20, that’s still at least 20,000 people working their way through. So, yeah. I think also, the target audience for that group of people is people who download other games. His thought process is I want to build something for people who just download lots of games on their phone and try it out – that if they saw this, they would grab it and want to try it out. It would look cool. It would have the things they expect from a gaming public perspective, not an “I’m already a bridge player” perspective.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Let’s switch gears here a little bit and talk about the good of all bridge. The founding principle of the new segregated ACBL Educational Foundation. What does that mean to you?
ROBERT TODD: Can I start off by telling you a little bit about my bridge background, what’s underlined.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yes.
ROBERT TODD: So, I started playing bridge when I was about five or six years old, sitting at the corner of my parents’ kitchen table. They played complete social bridge, stayman and transfers, and that was it. And they picked me up, held me in their lap, let me hold the cards, all that sort of stuff. That’s how I learned how to play. I spent my childhood filling in in my parents’ couples bridge groups. Someone would call up on a Saturday night and say such-and-such is sick. Bring Robert. We need an eighth.
[0:15:22.7]
I accuse my mother of using brainwashing techniques to get me to fall in love with bridge because as a child, I associated bridge with staying up until midnight and eating chocolate-covered anything. Because you know, when you go to social bridge, there’s candy all over the table, and you’re a seven-year-old kid that gets to stay up until midnight. So literally, my childhood association with bridge was the best things a child could think of.
So, I didn’t actually take up duplicate until I took about a year and a half off between my undergraduate and graduate work. And that’s – I kind of made duplicate my academic study for that year. And then, all through graduate school, I taught math classes in the morning, did research in the afternoon, and taught bridge classes at night. So, I was immersing myself in duplicate, but with this background of social bridge. I really came from a social bridge community, and people had a very different perspective on the game.
So, when I first came to a duplicate club, everyone was so quiet, and it was so hardcore. Nobody looked like they were having any fun. Where my childhood bridge, people were laughing and having a good time. Someone would laugh at the next table over at the duplicate club, and everybody would look at them really weird. That took a little getting used to, just the more competitive nature of things.
And as I got to the end of graduate school, I did my postdoc interviews and thought, you know what? I don’t like these career choices. And so, I had sort of been playing bridge professionally in the club and developed students and things like that while I was in graduate school. And so, I eventually turned my hobby into my career.
So, as I’ve gone through developing as a professional bridge player and develop students and clients and people that I mentor, I sort of have always kept an eye on the larger bridge community. My bridge community wasn’t the bridge club or the bridge tournaments. That was kind of this subset of the bridge community that I was familiar with.
And so, as I became a bridge teacher, you interact with people who might play duplicate three times a year. And I play bridge three times a week. There’s a large number of people out there who do that. And so, when you asked earlier about teaching, part of the joys of being a bridge teacher is you interact with these very diverse audiences – people who come to bridge from all sorts of different backgrounds. People who just love it for fun, they love the puzzle solving. People who are super competitive. People who aren’t that competitive and are just there to have fun with their friends.
[0:18:00.4]
I think that shaped my attitude when I joined the foundation, and I liked the fact that the foundation had adopted this perspective that yes, we want to support things within the ACBL, but we also want to look at the good of all of bridge and how we could sort of have a view of bridge beyond just tournament bridge players or world championships or national championships.
I guess what I would say is that I think the ACBL traditionally has a relatively hierarchical view of bridge. You work your way up, right? When you first start out, you’re in the bridge club and then, you work your way to your sectionals, your regionals, your nationals. You kind of work your way up the ladder, where the foundation has a relatively flat view of bridge. We don’t view a national championship as very different than a game that if we got 50 tables in some social event. There’s not a hierarchical view for us, necessarily. We think there’s a lot of different ways you’d want to get people exposed to bridge.
And I think that’s particularly valuable for youth bridge because there’s going to be a subset of people who join youth bridge who get super competitive and work their way up this competitive ladder. But if you really want to spread the word of bridge, you’ve got to find a way to connect to people that are just interested in learning for fun and just find it as a fun activity. It can be a hobby. It doesn’t have to be a career. So many of the young bridge players that we see around, they’re only around because it’s their career. You don’t see a lot of relatively young bridge players who are playing bridge as a hobby. Now, that might be because a bridge session is four hours between traveling and getting there and back and all that, and not a lot of 30-year-olds have a four-hour block of time to give up.
But that, I think, has shaped a lot of my perspective on bridge, and one of the first things I did when I joined the foundation board was get the foundation to do a survey where we just sampled basically people who we thought in the U.S. would have some bridge experience. And basically, what we found out of the group we sampled, which was mostly 45+ with some college education – since if you look at most of the known bridge-playing community that had a large overlap with them – we found that about 16 million people it would scale up to sort of said, “OK, I’ve played some bridge in my life.” Fifteen, 16 million. But about 10 million hadn’t played in years and years. So, what you’re really talking about, then, is about the 5 million people who said they consider themselves bridge players. About 3 million of them say that they have only play a few times a year. Maybe they’re home for Christmas or when they’re with their families, or their brothers or sisters or whatnot. And about 2 million people self-identified as active bridge players.
And so, that’s still a sizeable group. That’s 10 times what the ACBL would have as their membership or recent membership. If you look at ACBL members, the 160,000, and you scale back at recent members, you get to a quarter million, something like that. The idea that 10 times that number of people consider themselves bridge players – part of the reason I thought that was important is that the foundation should be thinking about when we say the word “bridge player,” we need to expand that definition and think about programs that are very different. They don’t have to drive people into competitive duplicate to be successful. If they just get them interested in bridge, if we could grow the total number of bridge players of any kind, then the ACBL can work to get more of them to come to tournaments or things like that.
But we just want to create bridge players of any kind, and I was going to say, online should absolutely be one of those places that we should be bridge players of any kind.
[0:21:50.4]
JOHN MCALLISTER: I have a question. I’m not sure you’re going to want to answer it. So, I’m going to give you some wiggle room because I probably don’t think you’re going to answer it. But my question is, how much did it cost you to do the survey? And if you don’t want to tell me a number, I think you could – I’d be interested to know, how did you choose the firm that did this survey, and can you tell us about some of the ways that they came up with their numbers?
ROBERT TODD: So, we – you know, I would have to look up exactly what it cost, but less than $10,000 to do the survey because we used an online sampling survey process. So, I’d have to look up all the exact details of things. It’s been five years now, basically. But basically, we used Survey Monkey to basically create a sampling process where you basically say, “I want to get people within certain demographic,” and they send out to get people to fill out the survey for them. And people go in and start to do it and then, they stop. Or, we basically had forks in the road. Do you – we basically had, “Are you a bridge player or not?” And then, if they say no, they answered a different set of questions like, “Do you know anyone who’s a bridge player? Have you ever considered it?” We asked people that sort of thing. So, if you are a bridge player, we asked them different questions like, “What have you learned? When did you learn? What types of bridge do you play? How frequently do you play?” Age, gender, demographic information as well.
So basically, we had a short five- or six-question survey that people would do, and we sort of sampled people. So, this is all scaling. So, we sampled 45+ with some college education was the group of people there.
I would say, I believe it was like, $6,500? Something like that. So, we did not pay a professional firm $35,000 or $40,000, which would have been the minimum cost to do a nationwide survey like this. So, this was a sampling survey using sort of modern internet tools. Yeah, I would have loved to have a $100,000 cost to do a door-to-door kind of survey, but my goal actually for doing this was to really open the eyes of my fellow board members about the relative sizes of the duplicate community and people who play social bridge, or people who are exposed to bridge, because I think as we changed our charter, that kind of became important for us to zoom out a little bit. Because we are all basically tournament bridge players, right? There’s a few who are not on the board now, but the more involved with bridge you’re likely to be, the more hardcore you are.
[0:24:29.7]
If you look at the ACBL national board, those are almost all made up of tournament bridge players, not people who just play bridge in their local bridge club. Because you can’t really get elected to the ACBL board unless you’re going around all the tournaments and people know you. So, the focus tends to be on those things that the most experienced people do, not necessarily those things that the less active members do.
I could look up the exact number for you if you want but if I recall, it was probably in the $6,500 range.
JOHN MCALLISTER: And you’re a mathematician, right? Like, you have –
ROBERT TODD: That’s my background, yep. Taught math for 10 years.
JOHN MCALLISTER: And so, you feel like this survey – do you feel like the survey – like, did they extrapolate based on the answers they got to the entire population?
ROBERT TODD: Yes, so you’re sampling your population. So, just to give you a feel, in the United States, the number of people who were 45+ with some college education is about 80 million people. So then, you can say, OK, if you sampled that group, you come to the number of 16 million because that’s the percentage of the 80 million who said they had ever played bridge.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Gotcha.
ROBERT TODD: And they scraped some outlying data of the people – they did some control groups where you scrape off some crazy outlying data who answered things wildly or weirdly, or didn’t finish the survey, or things like that. But basically, you’re paying them to sample a group. You pay for questions, and you pay for restricting the group in complicated ways because the more complicated you make the group, the harder it is for them to find people who will fill it out. They’re incentivizing people or paying people to fill it out or doing whatever their process is. And so, you increase your costs the more difficult you make it to find the group of people you’re trying to survey. So, if you want to survey people – one with one blue eye and one with one green eye, it’s going to be really difficult, right? Because they’re going to have to find a statistically significant number of those people. So, you’re going to pay a significant amount of money for that.
So, that’s why we looked at the ACBL membership and general college and said, you know what? We think most bridge players are 45+ and have some college education. And so, we figured we would get most bridge players if we sampled that space instead of sampling all 300+ million Americans to getting a much higher return on your numbers there.
JOHN MCALLISTER: What has been the impact of this on the Ed Foundation, this survey?
[0:26:52.1]
ROBERT TODD: Well, I think that the survey started us thinking more about how we could grow bridge from not just doing something within a bridge club. I think it got us thinking more about youth bridge as well as – it doesn’t have to be the goal of creating junior national team players. The youth bridge just means getting young people exposed to the game, interested in the game. And we don’t have to view it as a failure if someone gets exposed, and they just like the game and play it socially, and they never become an ACBL member.
I’d also think one of the differences is when the foundation was part of the ACBL, part of the charter of the ACBL is that it’s a member-owned organization. It is there to serve its members, right? Yes, it is there to kind of promote bridge, but its number-one job isn’t to promote bridge. It’s to do things for its members. Just like a bridge club owner might do something that’s relatively short-sighted because they’re a small business owner. We would all love for them to make all of their decisions about what is good for the long-term good of bridge, but that’s not going to be their underlying, driving force. What their members want, what the people who come to their club and play every day want is what they’re going to very likely do.
And so, the fact that the foundation is now sort of said, “OK, we’re trying to think about the long-term good of bridge,” if you have an idea that doesn’t really serve ACBL members in the short term, but is good for bridge in the long term, and it’s a good idea, that’s something that we should be able to implement. And that maybe the ACBL looks at it and goes, “You know, that’s a good idea, but we don’t have the money for it,” or, “We can’t justify it to our members,” or, “We can’t convince people that this should be done.” So, they have to think a little bit more in terms of serving the members. They – I mean, I’m a member of the ACBL. But I think it’s good to have another organization that can think more about the long-term good of bridge, not necessarily supporting a membership.
The ACBL is the union of bridge club owners, right? And the operator of bridge tournaments. It has a variety of different roles that it plays. And the good of bridge is a subset of that, but it’s not, I don’t think, a primary part of the charter of it, necessarily. I mean, some people want what’s good for them, not what’s good for bridge.
JOHN MCALLISTER: So, in the process of telling friends about BridgeWhiz, I have been telling them that it is run by this organization called the ACBL Education Foundation. And…[laughter]…these are not bridge players. These are friends of mine who have children who are going to be in your sweet spot. And I wonder how you guys – if you’ve kicked around the idea of changing the name.
ROBERT TODD: Yeah, there’s pros and cons to that. We saw the strong relationship with the ACBL, and I think the ACBL implements a lot of programs for us and supports us and helps us fundraise and do charity things. And you can imagine when you’re part of an organization for a long time and then you spin outside of them, you could create a lot of conflict. And so, I think we’ve done a good job of creating a liaison committee and working to work together well and partner well. Where we have mutual goals, I think we do a good job of trying to work together on those things.
[0:30:25.6]
So, whether to change our name or not is always one of those things, or create a fictitious name that you can do business as. As a matter of fact, for the BridgeWhiz program, I think we will really market it as BridgeWhiz, right? I mean, the ACBL Educational Foundation or the ACBL EF can just be the little acronym underlying, that’s the organization supporting the program. But I really want to market the program for kids and their parents. They can find out more about the underlying foundation, but I think the real goal is to promote the program there.
JOHN MCALLISTER: So, I’ve just chosen – in the instances that I’ve been sending text messages to friends, I just say “ACBL Education Foundation.” [Laughter] Maybe I should be more BridgeWhiz centric because I’m just saying – I’m not explaining the ACBL Education Foundation. I’m just – anyway. That answer helps me.
ROBERT TODD: Yeah. I mean, I think you want to promote BridgeWhiz, right? And you can say, “Yes, if you want to support the program, you can donate to the ACBL Educational Foundation, who’s implementing the program.” And I think that’s true for a lot of nonprofits, right? Every program they do doesn’t have their name on it, necessarily – that there’s a variety of different programs that we’re going to support. And so, the underlying institution is supporting it.
But you’re right. I think there’s pros and cons to not having Bridge ACBL Educational Foundation. If you read that, if you’re a bridge player, you know exactly what that is, right?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah, sure.
ROBERT TODD: If you’re not a bridge player, it doesn’t jump out at you as the Bridge Foundation, something like that.
JOHN MCALLISTER: I think a very good outcome for BridgeWhiz would be people like, “What the hell is – “ People are like, “What do you mean, ACBL Educational Foundation? I’ve never heard of that.”
ROBERT TODD: Yeah.
JOHN MCALLISTER: You know? Then BridgeWhiz becomes sort of the nom.
ROBERT TODD: I’d be very happy with that, actually.
JOHN MCALLISTER: What percentage of your students for your teaching are members of the ACBL?
ROBERT TODD: Almost all of them. I mean, well, when you say my students – OK, they’re my clients who hire me for tournaments – those are all ACBL members, of course.
[0:32:36.2]
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah, yeah.
ROBERT TODD: There are people that take lessons with me online or attend my webinars. Those are mostly ACBL members. Some of the might play – you know, they may be ACBL members and only play 20% of their bridge in ACBL-sanctioned games. They may play in home games. They may play rubber bridge. They may play a variety of other non-ACBL bridge.
During COVID, I think we’ve seen a lot of people up their amount of ACBL bridge, right? But you know, there’s been so many other software developments in this time period. People who are playing on Tricky Bridge. People who are playing on RealBridge. Trickster Cards, right? There’s a lot of social bridge players who used to play in country clubs or home games who immediately went to Trickster when the pandemic hit because it’s really much more designed to be user friendly, only one table, very isolated. You invite your friends, they show up at the table. It’s really designed to be not like you’re in a big bridge community with hundreds of bridge players. You feel like you’re online with three friends.
And so, there are different bridge apps that serve different communities there. But I would – you know, 90% of my bridge students are probably ACBL members or have been at some point. But I think it’s the amount of time of their bridge that they actually play in the ACBL that’s very different. So, if you go to a destination seminar or a cruise, probably a cruise is something that has the highest percentage of people that are not ACBL members.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Really?
ROBERT TODD: Because in other words, if I go on a cruise and I take – not a regional at sea, but say I go on a nice cruise in the Mediterranean, take 70 people with me. There might be 30 of those that aren’t ACBL members. They play social bridge. They play bridge for fun. They have for a long time. They like to play bridge when they’re – they combined their hobby with their travel. And so, when they go on one of these cruises, they might actually be a pretty good card player, right? And they might take bridge lessons once a month at home from someone they’ve taken bridge lessons from for a long time. But they may not play in any organized duplicate games.
I think the ACBL has done a pretty good job in the last 10 years of converting a lot of these social duplicate games in country clubs and other places outside of a traditional bridge club into ACBL-sanctioned games. So, some of these people may have joined the ACBL over the last decade through that process. But for a long time, there were duplicate games in a men’s club or a women’s club or whatever that were not ACBL-sanctioned. People were playing a lot of duplicate and a lot of bridge without being members of the ACBL. They didn’t really care about Masterpoints. They didn’t even necessarily care who won, maybe other than the fact that they wanted to get their dollar back, or not get the booby prize if they came in last. For people who were there for a social experience, I think it’s a very different approach than ACBL members have.
[0:35:40.9]
JOHN MCALLISTER: You said you’re in a cruise with 70 people in the Mediterranean. Is that the entirety of the ship, or are there other people on the ship who are not involved in the Robert Todd cruising experience?
ROBERT TODD: Every now and then, I’ve rented out the whole thing, but in general, no. In general, you’re on a ship with 400 or 800, and you might take 100. I do a lot of my cruises on Crystal for that reason because they have 800ish passengers, and then I might have 100 of them. But they might have a good-sized room they can get me. So, with each cruise line, you kind of have to get your space. And so, cruise ships are pretty negotiating for bridge spaces, one of those things. When you bring 100 people out of 800, you have a little more leverage for negotiating with the cruise ship.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Do you have any of those coming up?
ROBERT TODD: I do have one in December coming up, out of South Florida. Just a little – 12 days out and back. So, that’ll be the first time since COVID hit. So, I was on one just a few weeks before COVID hit and then – so, it’s been almost two years. So, I think we have a pretty good turnout for that as well, so we’ll have to see.
JOHN MCALLISTER: So, how does that work? What happens? Do you reach out to the cruise ship? Do you decide you want to make it to this thing? Like, what is this?
ROBERT TODD: So, I have partner travel agency, and so the process there is, with Atlas Travel, we basically say OK, let’s look at what cruises they would be willing to allocate space for us. We negotiate through corporate and they say, yeah OK. Because a large part of the cruise business is groups. Whether it’s, oh, we want to bring on 100 people who are Alabama football fans, and they’re going to get the Alabama coaching staff to come on. Or, we’re going to get 100 people who like This Week in Tech, and we’re going to get Leo Laporte to come on, and we’ll bring 100 people.
And so, a large part of the cruise business – or celebrity chefs – is bringing on someone who will attract business for them, and then they accommodate that group. That’s what a lot of travel agents do is partner with someone who has a following of people who they can bring either onto a cruise or to a particular destination. Like, you might do a resort in Montana or something in the Southwest and bring people there, and you have to negotiate with the hotel for space and for all of those things. And if you’re bringing a customer base, then you have a lot more leverage to negotiate than if you just get people to randomly sign up. So, you have to have people sign up through you because you don’t have enough – the cruise line won’t give you anything if you just show up.
[0:38:22.0]
JOHN MCALLISTER: So, Atlas Travel calls you up and says, “We want to do a cruise. What’s your schedule?” Like, how does it –
ROBERT TODD: Yeah, I sit down with them and say, “Hey, OK, let’s do four cruises this year. I can allocate a certain amount of time for that.” I can say, “OK, let’s do two larger ones and two smaller ones.” So, you look on your price points. You want something that’s cheaper for people who want to come and just have a bridge experience, and then you want more luxurious stuff as well. So, I try to create a little menu for my people who want to come. Some of my people want super luxurious, and others kind of want it to be less expensive. They just want to play a lot of bridge. And so, basically, I do everything from really big ships with 3,000 people on it that has a ballroom that can hold 200+ people to ships with 500 people on it.
And same sort of thing – I think Larry Cohen was renting out a whole ship for a river cruse just before COVID. So, we’re just getting to the point where, “Oh, we’re going to bring 120 people. Let’s rent a whole river ship and just take over the whole ship with bridge players.” That’s great because you have control over the ship. That’s exciting. The downside of that is you’re renting the whole ship. If nobody shows up, you’re out a lot of money for renting an entire cruise ship. So, there’s risk and reward to these business ventures.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Who gets stuck with that? You get stuck with that?
ROBERT TODD: You get stuck with that. But you and the travel agency, of course. But yeah, I mean, if you try to rent a whole ship and nobody – if your break-even point is selling 70 tickets and you only have 50 show up…same thing if you rent a ballroom in a hotel, and they say you have to have a minimum block of, whatever, 250 room nights, 50 people staying for five nights, and if you don’t reach that block, you’ve got to write us a check for 20 grand. You’re like, OK, that’s…but if you get 70 people, that’s great.
So that’s, you know, a substantial business venture when you’re doing that. You’re sticking your neck out. You’d better have a pretty good following or partners to market with, or things like that.
But those are fun events, too. I think when they are successful, bridge players leave there extremely excited about bridge. So, it feels like it’s good for bridge. They go back home. They tell their friends. You see a flood of people signing up for my email list. You see those kinds of things. You see the effect you’re having on the bridge community there.
JOHN MCALLISTER: So today, we’re recording this conversation. It’s Saturday, August 7, and you just got back from Vail.
ROBERT TODD: I did. So, I just did a three-day teaching event in Vail, which I’ve been doing three or four years now. Obviously, I didn’t do it last year. We had about 50 people there for three days, so it was great. Everyone was extremely excited. For most people, it was kind of their first in-person event back, and they played in some bridge games, but in terms of a big group of people, everyone was – it was great to see people again. Hadn’t seen them in like, two years, lots of those people. And so, I think I personally felt great to get back in front of a group again and be teaching.
[0:41:28.2]
JOHN MCALLISTER: Was this the first time you’d done it?
ROBERT TODD: So, I had done some small groups in people’s houses here in the post-COVID era. But when vaccinations started, we got some small groups of eight and 12 people together who had been vaccinated and did stuff in people’s homes. But this was the first one that I would consider a big, larger kind of open group. Everyone was vaccinated. We were nicely spread out and kind of used – tried to be as safe as possible. But everyone was very excited to be back in person and see their friends and enjoy the social aspects of bridge that are so powerful to making us love this game.
JOHN MCALLISTER: And so, is this like, with an organizer? Is there somebody in Vail that specifically wants you there? Or how does that –
ROBERT TODD: So, when I do seminars, they could be everything from working with a bridge club. So, if I got to a particular bridge club, they’re marketing to their bridge club members. There could be a partner on the ground who’s local who I work with who runs a bridge club, so in Vail, I kind of work with some of the local people there.
And then sometimes, it might be I just pick an awesome destination, and I market it through my email list and partner organizations and say, “Hey, let’s all go to a dude ranch in Montana,” or something like that. And then, I’m just driving all of the traffic myself. So obviously, that’s a harder thing to do than having a local person on the ground that you can say, “Oh, we’re going to get half of our people turn out from here,” and then people drive in from surrounding communities, and a few people fly in for vacations, things like that. You have to decide how you’re building your event, right? I could do an event in Cabo. It’s nice to have some locals. And then a lot of people say, “Hey, I want to go to Cabo for a week and do an event there.” So, there’s a balance between those things, marketing bridge teaching events and getting people to come there.
You know, I think I learned a lot from Larry and Audrey and people like that who have been doing this (and Barbara) for a long time. I would say Larry, Audrey, Barbara, and Jerry Helms are the big four that have been doing this for a really long time.
JOHN MCALLISTER: The big four.
ROBERT TODD: The big four, you know. Eddie Cantor was in that before Eddie retired. But I think there’s been a part of promoting bridge. Think about Charles Goren. Charles was one of the first bridge clients. He was one of the first people hiring people. And he was a pretty good up and coming player, but he realized he was better at promoting the game than he was at playing the game. And so, he still wanted to play at high levels, but he pivoted all of his energies to bridge promotion – writing books and starting a TV show. At the height of his promotion, there were 160 million people in the U.S. in the early 60s, and 40 million knew how to play bridge.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Wow.
[0:44:10.8]
ROBERT TODD: That was a serious marketing force. Now, there was no internet and like, two TV channels. There wasn’t a lot going on, but Goren had his show from ’59 to ’64, and this was kind of the height of bridge promotion. So, I kind of feel like the bridge teachers who are out there pounding the pavement are part of the marketing and promotion force. I love the fact that the digital age has come in and that some of the top-tier professional players can become a marketing force for me.
When I very first went to some of my beginning regionals, I started talking bridge with a random bridge player, who I didn’t know anything about, but he seemed like he knew what he was talking about – a guy named Les Bart, who you probably know. Les has been around bridge for a long time. But I had no idea if he knew what he was talking about or not. So, I just walked up to Jeff Meckstroth, who clearly I knew. So, I said, “Hey, I’ve been talking bridge with this guy Les. Does he know what he’s talking about?” And Jeff was like, “Yeah, he knows what he’s talking about.”
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: So, I knew Jeff would definitely be like…and so, you know, as you find these things out, I started asking Jeff different questions over the years. Early on, when I was going to start going down a full-time professional bridge career, I’d just grab dinner with Jeff. And I would just ask him some advice. And Jeff said something to me that kind of stuck with me. He said, “You know, different bridge professionals have different strengths, but you have the ability to sit at a bridge table and beat up on someone, but make them enjoy it.”
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: He’s like, “When I sit at a table, and I’m crushing them, they’re like really not having…” Not his, you know, entertaining them is not his cup of tea. He’s like, “You have a way of being nice to them. You’re slaughtering them. You’re in a pairs event, and they’re relatively beginning players, but they’re having a good time while it’s happening to them. That’s a good thing. You should keep doing that.”
[0:46:10.2]
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: And I think that’s true. There’s a lot of bridge players that should be out there promoting the game. And there’s some bridge players who shouldn’t be out there promoting the game, right? They’re just not the face you want to put on things. Or, you want to give them to a very specific target audience, let’s say. So, that sort of helped me understand what my role should be within professional bridge. And so that, I think, was one of those things. I come from a teaching background, so I always knew teaching would be a part of it. But kind of doing a diverse set of things, which involves teaching bridge, promoting bridge, a lot of different aspects of the game, as well as playing at a high level.
JOHN MCALLISTER: How many people on your email list?
ROBERT TODD: Five thousand or so, I would say. Maybe more. There’s another set as well. I would say my email list is pretty well set up to be people that – I don’t spam my email list. My email list is pretty tightly controlled. It’s people that pretty much have either been to one of my events, or who I know. I would say if I went down the list, I would recognize a large amount of the names.
So, there’s two different ways you can have an email list. You can try to have a massive email list that you randomly hit and sell products to. I send out one to two emails a week talking about my weekly lesson that comes out. So, I do a “This Week in Bridge” article. And then, I have digital products that go along with that, practice hands and videos, and a webinar once a week. And during COVID, I had time to put together a membership club and things like that.
But, you know, this isn’t people I’m sending out an email to every couple of months for a big event. I sort of keep a separate email of people who just come on cruises or things like that that aren’t a part of the hardcore list.
But that’s the hardcore list. And I think I could grow that quite a bit, do some other marketing tools. Digital marketing tools are getting more and more sophisticated. But I’ve been pretty happy also just interacting with people that you know. It doesn’t feel great to spam people with stuff.
JOHN MCALLISTER: No.
ROBERT TODD: If you know that they’re liking getting your product, then that makes you feel good about producing it. So, I’m sure when you’re promoting Double Dummy, that’s one of those things. Like, how aggressively do you promote it, right?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah, yeah. I mean, actually, I feel like that’s almost the most personal question I’ve asked you. How many people are on your email list?
ROBERT TODD: [Laughter]
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: How many people are on my email list. [Laughter] Well, I have a giant database of people that I’ve collected from whatever, but like I said, I don’t spam people to 100,000 random people who play bridge, right? It’s very much an opt-in thing, so my email list is very collated. So, yeah. I think I could be much more aggressive about collecting 1,000 emails here, 1,000 emails there, and just spamming people, but that’s not what I want.
[0:49:03.1]
JOHN MCALLISTER: Do you feel like your list is pretty hot, I guess?
ROBERT TODD: Yeah, yeah. I think it probably has like, a 70% open rate, something like that?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Wow.
ROBERT TODD: Which is very high. Forty to fifty percent is pretty high, normally. So, like I said, I try to just get people to be on it that want to be on it and want to learn bridge. Not people that just – I’m not randomly trying to grow the numbers. Since I’m not selling advertising on it, then I want to be that way.
JOHN MCALLISTER: You have –
ROBERT TODD: You do, too. You have an email for Double Dummy, right?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah.
ROBERT TODD: Did you try to grow that? You’re selling a one-time specific product, right?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah. I mean, I’ve sold – we’ve done it on – like, during the Bermuda Bowl in 2015, we sold advertisements on Bridge Base, I think. I’m not saying – I know –
ROBERT TODD: You bought advertisements on Bridge Base?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah, yeah. We bought advertisements asking people to sign up for our Facebook because I don’t think we had a website even then. So, I’m not very systematic about the distribution and creation of this film. [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: Fair enough. Learn as you go, learn as you go, right?
JOHN MCALLISTER: I think we could use some more systems. But I was going to ask you about – I think you have a top ten, at least one in a national event with the inspiration for Double Dummy, Adam Kaplan.
[0:50:32.0]
ROBERT TODD: Yes, we have a fourth-place finish in a national pairs event. Adam is a great – I call him a great kid, but he’s not a kid anymore. So, I’m from Tallahassee, Florida, and Adam is down in the Tampa area. And so, I met Adam probably at a regional, and he was playing with his father. And he was kind of yelling at his father for all the stupid stuff he was doing. I mean, yelling at him for stupid opening leads. And so, the director grabbed me and said, “Could you talk to Adam? People around him are complaining that he’s yelling at his dad so much.”
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah.
ROBERT TODD: So, I kind of grabbed Adam and said, “Look, I know your dad yells at you at home a lot, and you’re trying to make up for it for all the stupid things you do at home. But you don’t need to get over all of it right now.” I was of course kidding, but I mean, “Adam, you don’t have to yell at him every time he’s stupid. You can just write a note down in your book, ‘Stupid Dad,’” you know, or something like that. I mean, can you imagine a 10-year-old kid who’s better than his father, right? You’re going to feel like, “I have an opportunity to get mad at Dad. He gets mad at me all the time for stupid things. I’m going to get mad at him for stupid things.”
So, that was actually kind of how I got to be friends with Adam. And then, as Adam finished up high school pretty young, and he just homeschooled and he was 14 or 15 and was taking classes at the community college just trying to decide what to do, he would just get bored or frustrated. And I would be off at a bridge regional playing with two of my students and on a team with some teammates. And he just said, “Hey, can I come show up at your regional and tack on as a fifth?” So, he would just show up and hang out, and I got to know his dad and family over the years. That was kind of my process of getting to know Adam. He would be like, “I’m going crazy at home. Where are you at?” I’m like, “I’m playing in Atlanta.” He’s like, “I’m getting on a plane. I’ll be there in the morning. I’ll be your fifth on the next knockout.”
And Adam’s a terrific guy, too. I mean, so, I’ll tell you…what you don’t want is to get Adam to play bridge early in the morning. We have a famous story where Adam was playing at the other table, but it was a morning knockout starting at 9 a.m. And Adam’s not so good at 9 in the morning. If there’s a 9:00 session, he will arrive at 9:05 at the earliest.
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: That’s, you know, he’s one of those kids who wants to go to bed at 3 and get up at noon. And so, there was a morning KO where he actually had his head on the table half asleep and was executing a squeeze. But he wasn’t even looking at the cards. He had his head face down. It was quite amusing. And of course, the opponents were taking forever to discard, and he was just playing the cards without evening looking at them.
But Adam’s a great kid, and the fact that he was sort of the inspiration behind Double Dummy was pretty terrific, seeing him there. And Tom Carmichael, and a lot of the people you’ve had on, it’s a pretty great group. As you can imagine, the bridge world is a pretty small world. We all know each other pretty well, and so, yeah. Tom being in that movie, and we all know each other, so.
[0:53:49.1]
JOHN MCALLISTER: Did you broker Adam’s first professional action?
ROBERT TODD: So, I think early on, Adam was mainly focused on applying on the junior team. And so yeah, he was doing – come to a tournament, whatever, get your expenses paid. That’s the kind of thing most professional kids start out with. When I first started traveling and playing professionally, I’m already at the tournament. They tack you onto a team because they need a fifth. And so, they cover some of your expenses or are giving you a small amount of money. And you know, some of my students – Adam was this wonder kid, right? They were super happy to play with Adam. So yes, there was some early professional stuff with him.
But I mean, his success at the junior program and being youngest Lifemaster certainly gave him plenty of PR for people to start inviting him on. Just the fact that he’s out at a regional now, people are going to come up to him and say, “Hey, can you come to some other regional and be on my team?” Or do whatever. I mean, getting out there and having success and showing that you’re interested in being a professional player is the number one way to get other people engaged with you. Get other pros who have teams, doing that sort of stuff.
It can be a little competitive, but I personally took the approach of wanting to build almost all of my students from scratch because I sort of wanted to serve as a mentor to my students – a long-term mentor, not a hired gun.
And so, my relationship with my students is very much them seeking advice from me, whether that’s sitting at the table as their partner, or when they’re playing with another partner at their club, or even when they hire other pros, right? I have a lot of my bridge students who I recommend other pros for them to play with when I don’t have time, and they’re constantly asking me questions, things like that. And that just feels good, as someone – you’re just trying to get them better at bridge, and that’s a nice part of not feeling like – because bridge pros have a complicated career, right? If they have basically one revenue source, if they have one big client who hires them for all the nationals, they have a cycle contract, they’re very much dependent on that one person. It’d be like having a law firm with only one client. Having a diverse source of incomes is a good thing to do, but hard for a lot of professional bridge players to be able to do.
[0:56:07.4]
JOHN MCALLISTER: Were you at the meeting in Memphis in 2012 about how do we get more young people interested in learning bridge that sort of spawned Double Dummy?
ROBERT TODD: I don’t know if I was in Memphis in ’12. I was at that nationals for sure. Probably not, I guess.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Mm, OK, alright. So, it’s not on you.
ROBERT TODD: It’s not on me. Why? What was the –
JOHN MCALLISTER: No, I mean, Greg – I mean, I’m just curious, you know. I remember Joel Woolridge was there. Greg Humphries invited me. I can remember some of the people who spoke. I played a knockout with Carrie Andino and Max – I don’t know how to say his last name.
ROBERT TODD: [Inaudible.]
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Inaudible]
ROBERT TODD: All of those people have worked for me at some point.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Who are on the AIB website. So, Greg Humphries was the person who invited me to the dinner.
ROBERT TODD: Sure. I met you in Charlottesville at the club, right?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Right, yeah, yeah. No, I played my first national, and that was Greg. We played in pairs.
ROBERT TODD: I think the first time I met you in person was maybe at some Western Virginia or West Virginia sectional. I was there playing with one of my students from the D.C. area.
JOHN MCALLISTER: No, I knew you already. I was going to say that. It was in Buena Vista. There was a sectional in Buena Vista, and I remember being pleasantly surprised. “Oh my gosh, Robert’s here.”
ROBERT TODD: I know, I know! I was like, “Wait, I actually got someone here!”
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: I was doing this sectional. I had no idea if I was going to know anyone. I was like, “McAllister’s here. Great!”
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter] But I don’t remember – maybe I met you in Memphis. I don’t know. I met Adam in Memphis.
[0:57:38.6]
ROBERT TODD: You’ve been playing Greg for everything, so I think you should just bring Greg for everything.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Adam was rooming with Greg, and that’s how I met Adam. And I remember he was making fun of Greg for how Greg was thinking about different deals that we played.
ROBERT TODD: I’m sure he makes fun of Greg for every other bid because when they played together at the table, it was pretty funny.
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter] Greg was on the AIB team as well?
ROBERT TODD: Yeah, yes.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Did he get fired?
ROBERT TODD: No, no. [Laughter]
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: I mean, maybe we could have. Adam could have fired him every other board, but as Adam said in the podcast with him, he was like the worst partner ever. Right? [Laughter] So, he said something about being horrible. I think he made some comment about a two-way finesse. If you got it wrong, you were an idiot. [Laughter]
JOHN MCALLISTER: What was your favorite podcast of the ones that you listened to?
ROBERT TODD: Well, I have to say, since I’ve been spending so much time with Al, hearing Al super excited – because Al’s a pretty measured guy in general. He’s very thoughtful and trying to think about how to do things. And I’ve spent a lot of time with him, but on your podcast – maybe because I was listening to it on double speed, but he seemed very enthusiastic and gung ho.
I’m old friends with Joel Woolridge as well, so hearing Joel talk about his days. Actually, Les Bart played with Joel at a regional in Buffalo when Joel was just getting going. And he said they played a two-session pairs, and Joel’s defense was just spectacular for two sessions in a row. And Les was like, “This kid’s going to be amazing.” Because defense is so hard, right? Like, no beginning bridge player’s defense is just incredible. And Joel’s defense from the very beginning was just spectacular.
JOHN MCALLISTER: That gives me chills. Joel Woolridge, for people who don’t know him, was the ACBL Player of the Year. He lost in the finals of the Bermuda Bowl in 2011. He’s one of the top bridge players in the world. I think that’s fair to say.
[0:59:45.6]
ROBERT TODD: Sure. And so, he’s in my generation of bridge players. And so, yeah, I enjoyed hearing Joel talk about his bridge experiences, for sure. I’ll listen to more and if it changes, I will tell you.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Well, we had Meckstroth on. Unfortunately, the audio on the Meckstroth one is sort of like – we’ve prioritized audio more, and I hate that the – anyway, it’s a little scratchy at times. But Jeff is an amazing guest. Great storyteller.
ROBERT TODD: And Jeff’s hilarious. I mean, the thing about Jeff is that you can see his brain is going a million miles an hour under that kind of…you know, when you look at Jeff, he doesn’t look like someone you should be intellectually scared of. He’s very kind of disarming, and he’s very friendly. You come up to him, he’s quiet but he’s friendly. And then, but you should be intellectually scared when you sit down at the bridge table. His brain’s going – my experience of watching Jeff play is he’s just half a step ahead of so many players. So many extremely good players, right? He’s just thinking ahead. And he trusts his instincts more than any bridge player I’ve seen. There are a lot of bridge players who are very analytical and very technical, and Jeff seems to trust his instincts more than anything. You start out early doing that, then yeah, I think you develop that skill, and I suspect he’s been that way his whole life.
He and Rodwell were such an amazing partnership because they approach the game so differently, right? I mean, Eric is so analytical. You can see him number crunching, feels like figuring out percentages and just calculating in his brain. And Jeff plays so fast and so instinctively. And so, if you’re two people who thrive in very different ways, and then you learn from each other for so long, I think Rodwell has probably learned a lot of tactics from Jeff over the years, and Jeff will say he has improved his technical card play from watching Rodwell over the years. It’s like having two prodigies who approach it from completely opposite strengths, and then you partner up and sponge off of each other. I have to believe that they’ve both improved their games from learning from each other in that way.
JOHN MCALLISTER: That’s a good insight.
ROBERT TODD: And to think about, they’ve been playing together since they were teenagers, right?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Right, yeah.
ROBERT TODD: That’s an incredible amount of time to play with another person who’s that strong. And to last that long, right? How many marriages last that long, or bridge partnerships, or whatnot?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Well, to wrap it up, you mentioned Al Bender, who’s – I don’t know what his official title is with BridgeWhiz, but I think he said he’s running the program for you. What’s been your role in making BridgeWhiz happen?
[1:02:31.0]
ROBERT TODD: Sure. So, for those who hadn’t heard the Al podcast, the Educational Foundation, ACBL Educational Foundation, basically took a look at, how could we create a program for teaching bridge online to kids? And we started to look around at all the different programs existed. Michael Xu. We talked to a lot of different people.
And what we eventually came to the conclusion was that our best approach was to take the program in Seattle that Al was a part of and try to take it and scale it from a regional-level program to a national-level program and figure out the funding to make that happen. Because one of the things we’ve done is that out in the Bridge for Youth in Seattle, those are volunteer teachers. In order to make a national, stable program, we’re paying the teachers. You can only push your volunteers for so long, right? And so, we wanted to make something that was going to exist and grow. We felt like we needed to pay teachers. So, that was part of the process.
We also looked at a scale. What should we start with? Had the goal of getting 100 students in Seattle. We set the goal of getting 1,000 students. And we also wanted to use a lot of the things that Al talked about, like Peach Jar and other ways to see if we could systematically reach kids. Getting a ton of people to get their kids and grandkids to come out, get the program going, that kind of thing – that will be fabulous. But to be honest, we would like to figure out a systematic marketing way that we can spend money to get kids in to become bridge players. That we’re not dependent on everyone doing this.
Now, I definitely want to say, we seriously want everyone to get their kids and grandkids involved in the program. But from a design perspective of a program for stability, we want to figure out how we can use modern digital marketing tools to get parents to sign their kids up. So, that was another attractive thing about the Bridge for Youth program, was the fact that they had used sort of modern, technical marketing tools to reach out to schools and to connect to the parent groups. Al talked about this, where they used Peach Jar. And Peach Jar’s the main one that allows you to reach the parents of kids in a particular school or particular school district. And so, that has been our process.
And so, we reached out to Bridge for Youth. We talked to them about taking their program as a seed for our program, and then recruiting teachers and trying to grow it from there. And Al Bender’s been great, along with Joel Cramer and Kristen Frederickson and myself. That’s our sort of steering committee for this. That’s our president of our foundation, myself, and our executive director. We’ve all been working with Al, and as we worked with Al, Al agreed to run the program for the first year for us, which is terrific. We’re very excited because he has the background.
And all of the people in Bridge for Youth have been terrific in saying yeah, this is what we did. We’ll help you select teachers. We’ll help you understand our curriculum, how we came about it. All of those things.
[1:05:39.5]
And so, we’re just at a point now where we’ve selected our first crew of teachers, and we’re excited to start getting them organized, train them on the existing curriculum, start to get their feedback as they use it in going forward. Because we really are trying to design this program as something that can exist for a long time, that can grow, iterate, and improve.
We even have people that are talking about using this curriculum in person, so people that have a teaching bridge to kids in a school, they actually just want the kids to play on their iPads right there and teach in person, but have everyone use Shark Bridge and use these tools. So, I think what’s going to happen is as the program gets up and running, and as we get our first collection of kids, we’re going to get a lot of innovation of things we can do to spin off of it. I suspect we’ll be giving grants to people who come up with little ideas for how to spin this off. Let’s try this out. We’ll see if it can be successful in this area. And if it is, then maybe we can scale that or add it to the program, or create another program, things like that.
When you’re dealing with kids, there’s a lot of complexity. When you’re dealing with kids and the internet, there’s more issues. And so, the fact that Bridge for Youth had already run a couple of programs and tackled these things made it very attractive to say, OK, let’s scale the existing program.
Did you get a lot of feedback when Al was on your show before, or what?
JOHN MCALLISTER: No. [Laughter]
ROBERT TODD: No, nobody liked it. I guess he had already published his Bridge Winners article, so. I
JOHN MCALLISTER: I mean, you know, I’ve heard from – I hear kind of sporadically from people about the show. You know, Pam Barry mentioned it in the email suggesting you as a guest.
I saw that you’re spending $100,000. Is that just on the Peach Jar? Is that just on flyers?
ROBERT TODD: So, we are paying teachers $60 a session, so 40 bucks and hour. And they’re paying for 20 weeks, so each teacher is $1,200. So, there’s 30 teachers. So, just the teaching side of the program is like, $3,600. There’s legal stuff. We have to develop policies. We have paper background checks –
JOHN MCALLISTER: Wait, I think you missed a zero on that.
ROBERT TODD: $36,000?
JOHN MCALLISTER: Oh, you said – I thought you said $3,600.
[1:08:02.5]
ROBERT TODD: Sorry, $36,000. That’s about a third of the budget of the program is teachers. You have legal things. You have background checks for every teacher. Shark Bridge costs some money, though they’re doing a great job giving us a very discounted rate. Then, Peach Jar is the other major expense. If you’re marketing to a school, and you’re going to market to 1,000 schools or something to try to get 1,000 kids, you easily spend $15-20,000 there. And that’s just for the beginning program. Then, we’re going to have an improver program over the summer that will be another 20 weeks or so that will be a follow-up as part of our first-year budget.
So, Al is actually volunteering to do this for the first year. I think the cost will go up substantially when we have to have – when we’re paying a person to do it later, or paying multiple people to do different parts of it. We’ve allocated 100 grand here to start with. If we reach our goal of 300,000 students in the next year, probably will cost $200,000 or $250,000.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Three thousand. You said 300,000.
ROBERT TODD: Sorry, 3,000 students and can cost $300,000. We don’t know how much performance we’re going to get out of these things. For example, one kid per school was the Peach Jar return when Seattle did it. But when we scale that to a national level, maybe that’s half? Maybe that’s one and a half kids per school, right? We don’t really know if that’s – if the fact that it’s localized to the Seattle area, if that tool’s going to work the same nationwide.
So, how much marketing we have to do…but I think that just falls on the foundation, right? If we have a program that’s great for kids and teaches them bridge, and we can get 3,000 students going in it, and we need to raise $250,000 to run it every year, then that’s the development committee and the foundation’s job is to go out and say look, it’s a great program.
We’re doing these things. There are resources in the bridge community for doing that, but you just have to demonstrate that you can do a good job. So, the foundation, the board was willing to say yes, we will spend $100,000 the first year and get this program up and running. We’ll try to scale it next year and grow it substantially, and then the cost will go up from there. But if we’ve shown that we did a good job the first year, we should be able to sit down with people and say, “Hey, can you give us $100, or $1,000, or $5,000.” Or some people would write even bigger checks.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Yeah.
ROBERT TODD: But I think one of the things we like about this is that it’s a lot easier to fundraise for a program when you’ve said it’s been successful at a local level. You’ve scaled it to a national level and showed that we could do a good job. We invested some of our own money into it. We got it up and running. Now, we’re really trying to grow it. It’s a lot easier to ask Gates or Buffett or anyone like that for a big chunk of money when you’ve already demonstrated that you’ve got skin in the game, and you’ve got multiple levels of success, as opposed to us saying, “Hey, give me a bunch of money. I haven’t proved that I can do anything yet.”
[1:11:06.0]
JOHN MCALLISTER: What do you think we’re going to – in 20 weeks – so, it starts the week of October 25. What’s your hunch after the 20 weeks? How many students do you think are going to get signed up?
ROBERT TODD: So, it’s hard to say. We’re hoping to get 1,000 through Peach Jar, and then maybe two to three hundred more through other marketing channels, through people. It could be that we only end up with 700 through Peach Jar, but it also could be that we end up with 800 from people signing up their kids and grandkids, if people are very excited about the idea of signing up their kids and grandkids. So, I would be very surprised if we had fewer than 1,000 people sign up to start with. I’m thinking between 1,000 and 1,500.
And then, what our retention rate is over 20 weeks is also going to be a hard thing to judge. If you keep 60%, I think that would be pretty good. You’re going to lose a good chunk in the first week or two, anyway. People who sign up who don’t show up, and people who just don’t decide bridge is for them. You can’t try to keep everybody.
So, I think I would be relatively happy if we had 1,200+ kids sign up and had 750 at the end, 700, 750 at the end of 20 weeks. That feels like a pretty good group of kids to have gotten interested in bridge. And then, when they graduate, I think some of those will – we’re going to have events for them along the way. Starting about halfway through the program, we’ll start doing things like little tournaments for them and different types of events. We’ll get some of the teachers to brainstorm things that they think the kids would like and stuff like that. We may partner with Bridge for Youth, or Michael has asked – Michael Xu has sort of said he would help out in hosting some of these events.
I think we’re going to try to bring in other organizations to do things with us here as well. Because to be honest, we’d like to have partners in this, and so partner organizations has actually become kind of a big push for the foundation. Modern nonprofit work is a lot about not doing stuff only on your own. Finding another organization where you have intersecting goals and say, “Let’s work together to accomplish something.” Because they are going to bring a very different approach and if something falls on your side, they may keep the program going. And if something falls apart on their side, you may keep the program going. So, programs tend to be more successful when they’re built through multiple organizations working together.
JOHN MCALLISTER: What are you asking people to do? Did you say anything about BridgeWhiz at your Vail to the group?
ROBERT TODD: So, I just started talking about it. We’ve just sort of gotten to the point where we’re selecting teachers. We’re not registering kids quite yet. I laid out the foundation a little bit to them. I will definitely put stuff in my email list to people as well. We want people to help us with the classes, help us with the marketing of things early on. There’s definitely a lot of things that people can do to help the program, but we’re still in the process of getting organized. You don’t want to make an ask until you know exactly what you want. So, fundraising is of course one thing you always can do. You have on the ACBL Educational Foundation website, there’s a BridgeWhiz where you can sponsor a student, or sponsor a table, or things like that. We will have a way for you to download flyers and pass them out at your local schools or school districts as well. So, in terms of promoting the program, marketing, telling your kids and grandkids and some of their friends, I think those are the small things people can do. And then, just being involved. We’ll need a set of volunteers as teacher aides for the program as well. I think we’ll be able to collect those pretty well. Those are kind of our starting points. But I think within the next month or so, you’ll see us start ramping up, reaching out about what’s going on. More articles in the bulletin to let people know about that, more emails. You’ve got to build into these things.
Also, the way Peach Jar works is that – so, into late October is our launch date. You don’t want to really be signing kids up or marketing the program until a month to six weeks beforehand. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to market three months in advance, then have people forget about it and having to go back. So, when you make that contact point with the kids. So, part of the reason that we’re starting a little bit later is that the kids come to school and then, that’s the point when our six-week to one-month clock kind of starts, where we can really start the program there. You don’t want to be marketing to kids at a particular school when nobody’s in school yet, especially the rising fifth graders. Those are some of the best kids to get. The older the kids get, the more distractions they have, and the more conflicts there are. And so, you want to get those kids who are moving from fifth grade into sixth grade and get their parents interested in signing them up.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Alright. Robert Todd. You’ve heard it here. Any closing thoughts?
ROBERT TODD: No, I just want to say thank you for doing the podcast. I think it’s pretty great to see that someone’s doing a podcast on bridge and bridge people, and people who are out there pushing the envelopes of playing the game at high levels, or pushing the envelopes of trying to promote the game. So, I try to split my time between all of those things, so it’s certainly a lot of fun. So, I appreciate that you’re – because it’s a lot of work, I know. You probably spend a lot of time editing things.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Well, you know, I have somebody who does that for me now.
ROBERT TODD: [Laughter] Touché, touché.
JOHN MCALLISTER: But thank you, man. It’s good to see you.
ROBERT TODD: You too.
JOHN MCALLISTER: I appreciate it. I’m excited for what you guys are doing, both with Scott and with BridgeWhiz. And I’m one of your missionaries, so I’m spreading the word.
ROBERT TODD: Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Alright. So, I look forward to seeing you at the table. Do you think Austin’s going to happen?
ROBERT TODD: Oh, I hope so. But obviously, it depends on a lot of things. I was able to do my event just this past week, I think primarily because everybody was vaccinated there. And even though it’s not a perfect solution for protecting people, I think it made a difference in whether people were willing to come. And the ACBL canceling their events had a good amount to do with they weren’t able to require vaccinations in every state. So, complicated things like that.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Get vaccinated, people.
ROBERT TODD: Yeah, it’s 50-50, I think, whether Austin’s going to happen.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Alright, 50-50. I hope it happens.
ROBERT TODD: I hope it does, too.
JOHN MCALLISTER: Alright, you can buy me a drink.
ROBERT TODD: Alright, great to see you man.
JOHN MCALLISTER: [Laughter] Alright, later.