John welcomes back his first-ever guest, Gavin Wolpert! Gavin is a seven-time NABC winner, including the 2021 Soloway Knockout and the 2005 Blue Ribbon Pairs the latter which we won with his wife, Jenny. He is also two-time bronze medal winner in Open World Championships.
Gavin is one of the internet's favorite Bridge teachers, using interactive problems to allow students to make mistakes and learn from them. He emphasizes practicing and failing as an essential component in becoming a better bridge player. He is at the cutting edge of implementing technology to provide opportunities for targeted practice.
Gavin shares his thoughts on the need for more structured and accessible bridge programs for kids and families at North American Bridge Championships. He discusses the importance of enticing kids to play bridge and creating a fun environment for them. He discusses how that process is going with his own children.
Gavin is a true bridge champion!
Play with your favorite Setting Trick guest or John as part of the 2024 SPARK Auction for Junior bridge. Act now, bidding ends on July 7th at 9 pm EDT!
[1:40] Gavin’s online teaching and video production. The challenges and rewards of
teaching.
[5:57] Interactive problems based on the idea you need to make mistakes to learn.
[10:15] Gavin’s brainstorming for his current video project: playing his system with a
robot on IntoBridge. The depth of the content of his lessons, the ability to re-watch
them. Practice is a critical component.
[17:48] What’s the best way to introduce brand-new people to bridge?
[21:56] Where are Gavin’s kids on the spectrum of realizing bridge is a fun game to
play? The summer Nationals, the Youth NABC and the desperate need for childcare to
return to the NABCs.
[26:30] What Gavin and Jenny’s kids say they do for a living.
[31:33] Gavin’s secret dream of having his kids play bridge.
[41:09] Gavin’s passion and unconditional acceptance of bridge. Bridge means never
having to say you’re sorry.
[51:42] Playing with and against his wife, Jenny.
[54:39] Juniors all over the world get free access to Gavin’s lessons.
[1:06:52 ] Gavin’s favorite treatment for responding to a weak two-bid.
John McAllister: Hi. My name's John McAllister. Welcome to The Setting Trick Podcast, where we get inside the minds of some of the world's greatest Bridge players. If you're looking for a way to engage with Bridge away from the table, then The Setting Trick is here for you.
I am here with the 2000 King of Bridge, a seven-time NABC winner, including the 2021 Soloway Knockout and the 2005 Blue Ribbon Pairs with his wife, and a two-time bronze medal winner in Open World Championships, one of the internet's favorite Bridge teachers, and also a defenseman on the Spartan’s Club hockey team, Gavin Wolpert, the first ever guest on The Setting Trick. It's great to have you back.
Gavin Wolpert: Thank you for having me back. Excited to get a second shot, and now that you've got the full production team and this is a whole ordeal, it's pretty cool.
John McAllister: Well, I was Googling you earlier today, and the original conversation came up on YouTube, and I was a little afraid to watch it. I was afraid of the horrors that I might've committed as a first-time podcaster.
Gavin Wolpert: So you didn't look at it or you did?
John McAllister: I turned it immediately off, and then I couldn't find it again. Weirdly, it's not linked from our website. I found some random YouTube page.
Gavin Wolpert: Maybe the video was bad enough that whoever was in charge of the website was like, "Let's leave that one off. We'll start from episode two."
John McAllister: You're doing a lot of video stuff yourself now.
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah. Basically, once the pandemic started, I just jumped in pretty hard into the online teaching, and I had experience from back ... When we started Bridge Winners, one of the types of content that I was pumping out to get people to come visit the site were videos, but it was like before the days of this streaming software. I was using pretty high-end video editing software called Camtasia. It's not that high-end. I'm overselling it a little, but basically, it was like I was piecing together a Bridge-based table and my video and audio, and doing it at the time.
At the time, it was an insane amount of effort because the software wasn't built out, but then when the pandemic came and it was clear that lots and lots of Bridge players were going to suddenly be forced to not be able to do anything, I jumped into the lesson teaching and streaming thing, and discovered that software had come a long way in that decade. It's amazing how much easier it is to produce content now than it was back then.
John McAllister: My desire to interview you again started from a conversation we had around that time because you told me that you were enjoying teaching so much. You didn't expect yourself to love it. I think the one thing, which also stuck out, was your students had bought you a membership to be a member of the American Bridge Teachers Association, which I thought was a really sweet gesture.
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah. It was cool for them to do that. So when I moved to Florida, I started teaching and tried to break into the country club. I grew up with my mom as a Bridge teacher, so that's always been a part of who I am. I would always go to her classes, and she would let me skip school and show up at her classes. So I was around Bridge teaching a lot, but then when I moved to Florida, I tried to give it a go of teaching at country clubs. I was doing well. I was breaking in, but the problem was at country clubs is I would go and I would teach a lesson on a Thursday morning on Stayman, and then I would come back a week later, and say, "Do you guys remember? Let's review what we learned last time."
I was looking at a sea of faces that nobody was playing Bridge between when ... Well, it wasn't about the people, it was that they were just showing up for their Thursday classes and not going and reinforcing it at all during the week. I just didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy just basically just showing up and talking about and not having people learn, but then when the pandemic ... When people were all they could do was sit at home and watch my lessons and then go and practice on BBO, it was people were actually rewarding me by showing me that they were learning what I was teaching them and I actually felt useful.
So it gave me an energy about teaching that I had lost. I gave it up. I didn't even want to do it anymore at the country clubs. I stopped on my own accord. I just told the clubs I didn't want to do it anymore, and went more in a route of professional poker, and also more one-on-one pro playing at the club. It's much easier to teach somebody one-on-one and see the reward of teaching them.
John McAllister: So you send out a weekly email, which you run through like a play problem, and then you give the reader the opportunity to play the hand. Recently, I had a friend, a high school classmate who's taken up Bridge in the last couple years. I see him on Bridge Base a lot, which is exciting, and so I actually forwarded him your weekly hand because I think it gives somebody ... I really like that you've got a structure to what you're doing. I love to hear you say how you want to see people really learn. I just thought it was a great way. Even though he's relatively a beginner, I think it gives him a great opportunity to see Bridge, what's possible, and I think ... So I'm excited to be able to share that with-
Gavin Wolpert: So the interactive problems, it's based on the idea that I really think that you need to actually make mistakes to learn. I think that, really, no matter what, there's no amount of lessons that you can come to where you're just hearing it and hearing it and hearing it that you can't process all that information. You need to actually get at the table having real-world experience. So the interactive problems, take advantage of Shark's amazing software. It's really unbelievable where I can put in a single hand, and tell the robots a little bit what to do, what to lead, what the bidding is, and I can drop the person into the seat of the declarer, in this case, declarer. There's ways of doing other kinds of problems, but for these interactive problems that I'm sending out, basically, I record myself for five minutes playing the hand. Maybe I'd do a video where I start by saying, "Well, this is how the auction went, and now this is the setting. Now go ahead and play the hand."
Then they click the button. They play the hand themselves. They make the mistakes, which you have to make. Everybody makes them. Once you've made them, it's like in the bank, and it's part of who you are as a Bridge player. That's how I got better. I didn't have any fast track to learning. I was younger, so maybe it came quicker, but really, it's been a process of 30 years of making mistake after mistake after mistake and just having seen things before. So the interactive problems are just a really bite-sized way to learn.
John McAllister: How many lessons do you have now in your online?
Gavin Wolpert: My store, I would say something like 100, 100, and each one is really its own little encyclopedia on the topic. I really made it an effort to go all out overboard, to be honest with you, on every single one of my classes so that I felt ... Because I always felt like I wanted it such that anybody who was a first time student who would ever discover one of my classes, I wanted them to have a good experience that time, and I didn't want to have them come and be like, "Oh, this wasn't worth 15 bucks," or whatever I was charging for it.
So I feel like that was always been my goal when I'm making a lesson is to make it so good and so thorough that if you came looking for a topic that you, for sure, would walk away saying, "Man, I learned everything I wanted to learn about that topic, and I can't wait to learn more." That's been my MO for the whole time. Drove myself a little bit crazy, honestly.
When I set up a lesson and I put a topic on the board, I spend hours and hours thinking about what to talk about, planning it. Really, also, even though I am an expert player, I also like to have everything that I'm teaching double checked. So I check with all of my friends and partners. I ask people lots of questions just to double check, "Am I really teaching the right thing? Is this really what people play?" so that I feel like my end product, the thing that I'm presenting to my students is I can feel proud that they're getting what they want. So yeah, basically 100 classes.
My most popular series is my master series, which is where I got the idea that I wanted to just share what an expert system was. It's not the expert system. It's not expert standard. It's what I play when I play with my partners like Kran or Vinny or what I was playing with Warren. So I just taught that stuff from start to finish. Although there's still a few missing pieces, I'm going to have to finish off the series.
What happens is people come and they take one class, and I can see their path of their customer, and then a couple hours later, they buy another one, and then they get another one, and they get hooked on it because it's like that. You realize ... Because I tried to make sure in every class that I was teaching something like style-oriented so that even if you're not going to play any of my expert methods, you're going to hear me talk a little bit about my style like opening bids, why I open light, why we went to two over one or whatever, things that anybody can apply to their game.
Then I talk about, obviously, the actual system and why I play it, and just making sure that the advanced players get what they want, the intermediate players get what they want, and everybody comes out of each lesson learning something. You don't have to play the whole system to get a lot out of that series or any of the series.
John McAllister: What's the video you're working on right now?
Gavin Wolpert: So it's funny the video, I have not started working on it. I'm brainstorming phase still, but what's happened is in the last few months on IntoBridge, they program their robot to play my system. So now, I get a chance to play with the robot that plays my system, which I love. It's awesome. It's awesome for my students to be able to go and practice what they've learned with the robot, but what's happened is every so often, I come to a spot and the robot doesn't play what I play when I'm playing with Kran or Vinny, and I'm like, "Oh, because I haven't taught this yet, and I really ..." So, it's frustrating me that the robot isn't. So the thing I'm working on right now is on my how to bid over weak twos. It tilts me that it doesn't play preempt key card over weak twos. So that's one thing that I ...
So I'm going to go do a whole lesson on preempts. I'm going to talk about my style based on vulnerability, seat and vulnerability, how to further the preempt, but also what I like to play for two of a major or two anything - 2NT and preempt keycard, and just go through everything I do. I take a whole topic, and just go start to finish, and feel like I've taught the whole subject, and feel like I can be done with it. So that's my next topic.
John McAllister: So that lesson would be, like what would be the title of that lesson?
Gavin Wolpert: Weak Twos and Preempts, maybe. I'll call it something like that.
John McAllister: That's going to be one lesson, all that?
Gavin Wolpert: It's one lesson. That's what I've been doing. I go overboard. I make sure to fill 90 minutes, but I've never been able to finish a class in 90 minutes because I always just want to make sure that I get the whole topic taught.
John McAllister: So one lesson is 90 minutes of video.
Gavin Wolpert: 90 minutes, and honestly, the reality is each lesson, if you really want to get it, you're going to have to watch it a few times. It's enough content that you can come back to it. I built the lessons with that in mind, that knowing that I would be giving the student access to just review it over and over again. The notes are really, really thorough. It's basically almost like an encyclopedia that the students can go back to look through when they need to like, "Oh, this situation came up. Let me go back there," and they go to the no trump opening section and they see and then they can read what I wrote.
So in the process of doing those lessons, again, I was teaching so much content. Really, you can't learn things and then just play them perfectly. You need practice. Practice is a critical component. So about a year into my pandemic experience and teaching online, I discovered Shark Bridge and their ability to put the students in seats. So I developed a couple different type class types through Shark. One was those declarer play where you have the hero in the south seat playing the hand with a pre-designed auction and a lead so that the student ... But then the other is bidding practice, and bidding practice reinforces topics.
So I'll give you as an example, and I'm not sure if I've talked about this online or not before, but with reverses. Reverses, I have thorough classes on expert system over reverses, like how to slow down after reverses because it's a complicated topic that most teachers don't get into because it's a little bit too difficult for early Bridge players to really understand the complexities of it. So they leave it off to the side, and nobody ever really did a good job of teaching it. So my reverses class, actually, got shared a lot. People when they found it, they're like, "Oh, finally somebody's teaching stuff over reverses."
So the student learns about reverses, and it all makes sense during the class, but the problem is that after the class, how long does it take for reverses to naturally come up at the table? You have to be playing relentlessly, for example hands to come up. So what Shark enables you to do is give the student repeated reverse practice, like 20 hands or 30 hands at a time. So when I started using the Shark software, the first time I organized the class, and at that time, everybody was showing up at the same time, they would come and I could watch everybody bid the hands.
So I put the students into their tables as partnerships and I watched them bid the first practice set that I designed for reverses, and it was scary. I'm like, "Oh, man, I can't believe how little that they were able to retain." So I'm like, "Well, we have to keep at this. I'm not going to give up on it." So then the next week, we did a second week with another 20 example hands, and it was slightly better. Then the third week, we did another 15 or 20 reverse hands, and it was getting significantly better. By the fourth week of relentlessly practicing reverses, everybody was using the slow down effectively. It was like night and day, mind-blowing like, "Wow, okay." Now I understand the recipe for how to teach and have somebody get something, that it's irresponsible to just teach a topic. It has to be a topic with associated practice because the practice is really what reinforces.
That's what makes us Bridge players is we learn something, we see it at the table, we screw it up, we see it again, we screw it up again, and eventually, we get it and we're able to effectively do it. So what technology is now letting people do is fast track. Like rather than letting it come up organically, we can artificially build that experience. So I've done that for all of my topics that I've taught now, built associated practice sets for people to go and reinforce the topic.
John McAllister: And is that on Shark Bridge, like it's part of your thing?
Gavin Wolpert: It's interesting. When it started, Shark was this live software where there had to be a controller, a person who sat the people down, but the problem was that as the restrictions from the pandemic started lifting, people weren't able to be at this place at 11:00 AM on a Wednesday or whatever. So it became not so practical for me to run these classes because I wasn't earning enough. Until now, Shark developed the software where you can access the hands on the website without somebody controlling it, which is where it is now. So now, I've started, they built up and they're available in the store where you can go and buy the practice hands.
John McAllister: Can you do that with a computer partner and also with the actual partner?
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah, both. You load up the set, and then as soon as you're in the chair, there's a little button that lets you type an email address in. You type it in, your partner gets a link, and then they just come to the table and they're sitting and you can bid. It's pretty cool because after you're done bidding the hand, it pops up with your auction, my suggested auction, and what I've written about the hand. So you can kind of digest it, see where you went wrong, which bid was where we deviated.
Honestly, sometimes people decide to play their own system and they still come and do these practicing, and as long as they're getting to the right final contracts all the time, you don't have to bid the hand the way that I said that you had to bid it, but all I'm doing is saying what I think I would bid with both hands and why.
John McAllister: Okay. I've got a friend. So my friend, we'll come back to this, but my friend is the director of golf at my golf club. He and another golfing friend of mine want to learn Bridge. So if you were me and you had these two people thinking live, what would you do?
Gavin Wolpert: I've been struggling with this question a lot lately. I've had a lot of people coming up to me and asking me that, almost framing it exactly that way. There's not an amazing way to quickly pick up the game on the internet. Tricky Bridge is pretty cool. We're working with Audrey Grant. I'm working with Audrey Grant to help get her content available with her practice hands and her lessons online for new beginners to. I mean, it depends what kind of people they are. If they have an endless amount of time, I would probably search out a teacher in their area and have them sit and work with them, but there needs to be a software solution where people can go and just rip through a bunch of quick lessons and get on board.
I'm dealing with this with my kids too. It's really a difficult problem. I want them to play Bridge, but there's not an easy solution. Even Tricky Bridge, it's slow in its own way for them. They didn't get hooked on it, which seems like a pretty cool concept, the Tricky Bridge, and I think that they're doing pretty well with getting lots of people on board. My kids were not jumping at it, so I don't know, but that's kids anyway. I don't know if it's even built for your two golfer friends. It's a hard problem. It's a hard problem.
John McAllister: Say you had first crack with them though. Let's say you've got one session, like you're going to give them an intro to Bridge. What are you going to do?
Gavin Wolpert: Well, do they know anything about the mechanics at all?
John McAllister: I think they know tricks. I think they know trick-taking. Maybe they've played Spades.
Gavin Wolpert: So I mean, I would start by doing very quick review of the mechanics of the game. I would get them playing cards very, very quickly. I would give them ... Again, it's easier to do from a single-person perspective, like we're putting them in a declarer play chair and saying, "Hey, here. Try to take tricks," and give them a contract and get them hooked on that idea. Then if I had one hour, that's what I would be doing. I would probably be showing them the early stage Bridge Master hands, which are super simple and give you a chance to tell them the goal. You have to take nine tricks and see if they're interested in that.
If they get hooked in that, then finding them a path for how to learn bidding. I mean, it would depend on how they like to learn, finding them a book or I've never been able to learn from books. Books is the last way that I would ever be able to process learning a new game. I would need somebody to explain it, and really, I just need to be playing whatever game it is, doing badly at it and figuring it out as I go. That's who I am. I don't know how people learn. I'm not a beginner teacher. That is definitely not what I am. I've found my way with teaching intermediate players how to be advanced players. That's really the market that I am after, that I enjoy anyway.
John McAllister: But I really think, honestly, and maybe I'm just totally in the clouds about this, I'm going to give them your email thing because I think it's really helpful to have someone explaining higher level and walking through higher level concepts and giving them a chance to play. Maybe it's a waste of time, but-
Gavin Wolpert: Well, no, the interactive problems are awesome because the interactive problems, you don't make them bid. That's the hard part for new Bridge players is getting people bidding. That's what I've seen with my kids. They're perfectly happy playing cards and trying to take tricks, but the bidding, even explaining the goal of the game is to find a trump suit and to bid game to get the game bonus, it's complicated.
John McAllister: Yeah, totally.
Gavin Wolpert: So your trick with your friends and I think with anybody is finding them a route that they realize that they love the game. They don't need to become good at all. They just need to realize that it's a fun game to play.
John McAllister: So where are your kids on that spectrum then?
Gavin Wolpert: They're getting there. They've got it in. They think that they're Bridge players for one thing. If you ask them, "Do you know how to play Bridge?" they're like, "Yeah, I know how to play Bridge." That's their answer. I mean, they know how to count their points. They know how to open the bidding. They know the mechanics of the game very well and giving them a rough idea that you need to draw trumps before you can enjoy your side suit winners. They've learned the hard way by trying to take tricks outside and having their stuff get ruffed, but where are they? They only really want to play Bridge with other kids. They're not interested in going online even, which is surprising to me with the amount of video games and Fortnite and Brawl Stars or whatever that they play.
They play the number of games that they play, but Bridge on the internet really, it didn't hook them in. They want to be playing with other kids. So every Summer Nationals, we throw them in there at the Youth NABC and they have a bunch of kids there, which is an amazing thing. I just wish that at the Nationals, they had more than those three days of the youth NABC, where kids of parents who are Bridge players could come and just either learn card games, just some kind of childcare that's not based on putting the kids in front of a DVD, but rather having them learning on a path to Bridge. I wish there was something like that because that's where my kids, that's their entire Bridge experience has been at the Youth NABC.
Playing in the side room where they have helpers at every table, which is fantastic, they do an amazing job. I just wish it was longer and more structured for kids to feel comfortable that have never played before, and to give us an area where kids who have learned but are still very, very early and just separating out the groups that I think that I wish they had more of that at tournaments. I think they need more of that at tournaments to entice parents to come to tournaments as well because that's lost.
When I was a kid, the Nationals, my parents would bring me and they had amazing childcare, absolutely amazing childcare. I went to one, the Washington NABC was when, I don't know, maybe like I want to say 1990. It was about '91, somewhere in there, '92. They dropped me at childcare and went to play in the tournament. The childcare was so amazing that I couldn't wait to come back to the tournament. The thing was there were a lot of Bridge players who had kids back then, so it was a little different time. Obviously, as the decades have passed, there haven't been a new influx of 40-year-olds or 30-year-olds that have 10-year-old kids. There aren't those people, but they need to try to get that market back. The problem is that they completely eliminated the childcare from the Nationals. There's no childcare at all.
John McAllister: Oh, really?
Gavin Wolpert: So people with kids who want to come to the Nationals, there's nothing. You can't do anything. There's no solution. So we are obviously a special case because we're Bridge Pros and we desperately need it for our own business, but obviously, we can afford to hire a babysitter or do whatever because we're being paid to be there, but for the average person coming on a vacation wanting to come play Bridge at the Nationals, if they have kids, then there's nothing that they can do. They could use that, I think, as a way to both seed the younger people with cards, which I think is such an important thing, and that's the one thing we've done with our kids our whole lives is we got cards in their hands when they were three years old, whether it was with Go Fish or random games from Sweden that Jenny played as a kid or that I played as a kid, and we've just kept relentlessly playing new games, teaching them new games, not so much with tricks, but just getting them strategizing and planning and counting cards and doing stuff.
I think that the ACBL could do better with that, with enticing kids to come to the Nationals and more enticing parents to come to Nationals who have kids, and then by doing that, by providing the kids with something fun, that gets them to start to like the game.
John McAllister: What does it sound like when you say, overhear one of your children describe what you and Jenny do for a living? Have you got any funny stories about-
Gavin Wolpert: I mean, they're really just proud. They think I'm a YouTube celebrity, which is so awesome. They're like, "Oh, my dad's a streamer." They're all really happy to tell their friends, but yeah, no, they're pretty proud of us. They think we're really good and they're proud of it. You can hear them telling their friends like, "Oh, our parents are amazing Bridge players," and they're proud of it, so it's cool. I don't know, not funny, but they definitely think that we're ... It’s nice that they are proud of it. It's cool.
John McAllister: Well, I imagine, I mean, there are a handful of, I mean, you definitely live in a pocket where there's more Bridge pros than other parts of the US, but I would imagine you're fairly unique in terms of that for the other kids that your kids are-
Gavin Wolpert: Oh, they have no, yeah, exactly. No, there's no Bridge. Well, except Kevin Bathurst lives just down my street and my kids are close friends with his kids, and so they know that he's also a Bridge professional or whatever. So it's a little less unique, but for everybody else, obviously, it's just, yeah, it's a cool story for them to tell people and for us to ... Also us, when people meet us, they're like ... My hockey team, when they found out that I was a professional Bridge player, they're like, "A professional Bridge player? What's that?" and then I told them that Vinny was too and they're like, "What? How is it possible that you both are Bridge players?"
John McAllister: I was trying to find out if you guys were the first line defense on the Spartan’s?
Gavin Wolpert: They usually list us first. We're pretty good at not letting the opponent score when we're on the ice. I'm physically not as capable. Vinny skated his whole life, so he's unbelievable, actually. He's so much fun to watch play. He's skating, his size. He's a big guy. He's just a great, great, great hockey player, and the team loves having him around because he's amazing. I am not nearly the same level because I didn't start skating even until I was 36 years old.
John McAllister: Oh, wow.
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah. So for me, it was like I've had to pick it up and learn how to skate and keep up, but I found that my mental game, being able to stay a step ahead of the play, I'm able to cover for the fact that I'm physically not as good as a lot of the people on the ice by just being in the right place at the right time, and it's amplified. When I'm on the ice with Vinny, who's thinking at the same level and same pace that I am, we know where each other are, where to be. We're very complementary to each other. I say this because he's unbelievable, so it's easy to complement him, but I feel like I complement him well because he knows that I'm thinking at the same pace that he is. So he sends the puck to places knowing I'm going to be there, not without seeing me there kind of thing. We definitely very rarely get scored on when we're out on the ice.
John McAllister: Your team must have been happy to have two Canadians on it when they-
Gavin Wolpert: Until they saw me skating, they're like, "You're not Canadian."
John McAllister: Just to give you how little I know about hockey in spite of your encouraging me to learn more about it when we did this previously. I was playing at a golf tournament at my friend's club in Maryland, and this guy, John Carlson, who's a defenseman for the Capitals-
Gavin Wolpert: For the Capitals, yeah.
John McAllister: ... was there and he had played in the morning, and I didn't meet him, but he was, literally, he was right by me, and one of the guys who played with him and he said, "He plays hockey," and I said ... He played in the group with John, and I said, "Is he any good?"
Gavin Wolpert: He's good.
John McAllister: So that was my little celebrity run. I think they won the tournament. I think he's a pretty good golfer. I think they shot 900.
Gavin Wolpert: I think there's a correlation between hockey and golf, not just because you're swinging a stick that's very similar in size and whatever, and it's the same hip rotation and stuff when you're really trying to get power into a slap shot and sending a golf ball, but also, they play hockey in the winter and they have summers off. So I think that golf is a natural thing to do in the summer in a lot of places.
John McAllister: Who are you rooting for in the Stanley Cup Finals?
Gavin Wolpert: If my friends from Florida are watching, Florida, if my family and friends from Canada are watching, the Oilers. I don't know, whatever. When the Leafs lose, I disconnect a little bit, which is every single year. So since I became a Leafs fan when I could ... Eight years old, they've been terrible since I was born.
John McAllister: We recently were talking at the team trials and you said ... I was talking about Aaron Silverstein and his daughter Avery and how much she's gotten into it, and you said that's the dream about your kids. Do they kind of know that or-
Gavin Wolpert: No. Oh, no.
John McAllister: No?
Gavin Wolpert: No, no, I would never let them know that I want them to play Bridge. No chance. Luckily, we're we're long enough into this podcast that there's no chance they would've made it this far. No, I've gotten the route of, "Whatever you guys want. If you want to play Bridge, you should play Bridge. If you don't want to play Bridge, don't play Bridge. Don't play because we want you to play. It's got to be because you want to play." That's always been the thing I'm like, but the one thing I do implore, tell them is, "Look, we love Bridge enough to make it our entire life, and it's done amazing things for us. We've gotten to meet friends and travel all over world and do amazing things and because of it." I'm like, "It might be worth looking into and if you want to, you've got some good resources around the house that can help you," but not try to force them into it, definitely not.
Now, we're making a push to enable them because I really believe ... Well, first of all, from what we were talking about about childcare, obviously, our lives would get infinitely easier if their childcare was playing in the duplicate game as opposed to us having to figure out. I just see families where their kids are playing. It's so cool. I would love to have ... I love what I had. I got to play Bridge with my grandma and my parents. I want my kids to play with my mom. She would love to play with them, and I would love them to have that same experience that I had just because I think that Bridge is an amazing thing for young people to learn how to interact with older people as well, just learning how to respect older people and just being ...
Even though I'm sure when I was a kid I was very disrespectful to the older people. You still learn as you grow up, how to behave around people in a different way and work together with people. So I definitely want, desperately want them to, and I think that we're on the path. We're actually discussing. It isn't set yet, even flying out to San Francisco. This is going to probably be released later than this has happened already because they're running one of those camps at the Palo Alto Bridge Club like Kevin Rosenberg and Amber Lin and Will Watson, and those guys do a camp for their local kids. We were thinking, "Hey, maybe that's the answer, just to fly them out there," which is a little ridiculous to fly for six hours.
When I emailed them about it, they're like, "We were not really doing this for people to come from out of town. I don't know what you're expecting." I'm like, "No, it's not about that though." Honestly, what we're thinking is if we go there, we can learn the formula and maybe replicate it over here because that's what we would really like is to give our kids an environment locally where there are other kids that they can befriend.
John McAllister: Totally.
Gavin Wolpert: Because it's not just about playing against other kids. Kids who are into Bridge, I've seen it with them in chess, they're like-minded kids. When you surround yourself with other kids who like to play games, board games and card games, they're similar to you. So it's creating a nice natural environment of kids that you can get along with where just, yeah.
John McAllister: Right. When is the camp?
Gavin Wolpert: It's next weekend. It's the 29th. I think it's both weekends, but this weekend's not happening because our daughter's still at some overnight camp, and we're going to Universal Studios for a few days and getting the kids that fun on their ... They just did the whole Harry Potter thing, so they watched all the movies, so we're going to go take them to Universal.
John McAllister: And how old are they?
Gavin Wolpert: Our daughter is 14, almost 15, and our boys are 12 and 8.
John McAllister: Because you really got into the Mind with your youngest, I think.
Gavin Wolpert: Actually, yeah, we just played it the other day. The four of us with our two boys, we got through six levels without a mistake, and then level seven, oh, we lost every life. Yeah, it's a great game, really fun game. I mean, it teaches you to have an internal clock and work together as teammates. It's a little easier now that our 8-year-old is eight as opposed to even when we taught the game, even in the last six months or whatever, you can see so much development in his patience and his understanding of his internal clock. He was way better when we were playing yesterday than he was last time. Fun game.
John McAllister: Do you guys play games after dinner or what's-
Gavin Wolpert: Well, we always bring a deck of cards when we go to restaurants. That's one thing that we do because we've tried not to let them be on iPads and phones at the dinner table. It's not always possible, but that's been our mentality. So we bring a deck of cards to dinner. When we're out waiting for food, we will play card games. At home, after ... We just play. We're home a lot with our kids. We don't have a normal life where we're working until ... I mean, I actually have turned my life into more of a 9:00 to 5:00-y type of thing where I'm booking all of my hours and doing that, but Jenny's around. We play lots of games but at random times. It's not after dinner, I would say.
After dinner, we're usually at the stage of the day where we finally let them watch some TV and chill out. It's earlier in the day that we're trying to keep them off the screens. That's when we're putting in our time with the board games and stuff. That is the constant battle of parenting right now is keeping your kids off of devices. It's something that no other generation had to deal with and it's brutal.
John McAllister: So what's your card game of choice with them?
Gavin Wolpert: So we play a bunch of games. There's a Swedish game called Gurka, which cucumber in English that we play. It's good for many people because it doesn't really matter. You get six cards each, so you can have, I guess, up to, what? Nine people, eight people, I guess eight people would be the max. So we can play, and if we have an extra people, it's good for five and then we can add six. We play this game called Cochon, which is pig in French. It's a trump game, which I'm sure you've played, where you start with one card each, and you got to guess how many tricks you're going to take. You flip one card up to say what the trumps are, and then you guess, and then two cards and then three cards with the trumps always being exposed, but the last person isn't allowed to make it correct. We play that game a lot.
We play what we call President or what do we call Deuces, yeah, Deuces. We've renamed it Deuces. What else do we play? We play Bridge. The kids actually ask to play Bridge a lot, whether it be three-handed or honeymoon Bridge or depending on how many people we have like 9-5-2. Do you know that game? Well, I mean, it's three-handed Bridge. You take out one card so that it divides by 51. You usually take out the two of clubs and one person has to take nine tricks and that person gets to pick trumps. One person has to take five tricks, which is actually the hardest of the three, and one person gets to take two tricks and you got to go plus ... If the person who has to take two tricks take six, they go plus four, and the goal of the game is to get to 10.
John McAllister: Oh, so you want to ... It's not a cooperative game.
Gavin Wolpert: No, it's three-handed. Everybody's on their own.
John McAllister: That's interesting.
Gavin Wolpert: But it's the same idea, trick-taking game, and so we do that.
John McAllister: Would you consider that for my three person, these two golfers?
Gavin Wolpert: No. I think with three people, you've got enough to put down a dummy and have two people defend and one person declare. I think that's the way to do it. I think that that's what you ... You want people playing cards. I wish it was more of a repository of good hands that you could just sit down for new players. There probably should be just basic hands where there's kind of a general concept on defense and a general concept on declare play, but it doesn't have to be complicated.
In fact, the reality is in the beginning, it doesn't have to be hard. There doesn't even need to be a point to the hand. It just needs to be a makeable hand. That's what I was thinking. For my kids, they don't need to be tricked on the first hand that they're playing. The first hand, they can have nine obvious tricks, and if they get their nine tricks, you'd be like, "Well done. Great. Congratulations." If they don't, whatever, you move to the next hand. I don't think that you even need to start with anything even slightly complicated or I don't even think there needs to be a problem. It's hard enough for them to sort their cards and realize not to play their aces and kings on the same tricks and things like that.
The little mechanics of it take a while to get used to, so you got to go. I would ease them in, but if I had three people and they were actually people who wanted to play Bridge, I would pre-deal the hands. That's the hard part, pre-dealing hands, because if you pre-deal the hands, you can put them in a contract and a reasonable contract. No trumps, honestly, for the start, and then pick a trump suit for them and tell them a goal. Eventually, you can explain to them that in the future we're going to be bidding and that's how we're going to decide the contract, but in the beginning, just getting them trying to make a contract and trying to beat a contract seems like a good place to start.
John McAllister: I don't think I've told this story before, but it's amusing to me. Your passion for Bridge is really palpable. Just like you're in this virtual space where we're talking, your enthusiasm, I love it. It's a little bit of a surprise to me just because one time at the San Francisco Nationals, I think it was in 2012, I was talking to you and this is different, but I was talking to you after a day of play, and I guess I was complaining, I guess I was whining about how I didn't do as well as I wanted to or I messed up on a couple things and you said to me and it totally shut me up, "Yeah, I played Bridge today too."
Gavin Wolpert: It's the truth. That's funny.
John McAllister: One thing Kranyak said to me, a partner of yours and a teammate of yours when you guys were on a great run, he said that you do not want somebody to come back or you don't want to hear somebody say you're sorry.
Gavin Wolpert: Who me?
John McAllister: Yeah. He didn't say it in a negative way.
Gavin Wolpert: Well, I mean, my opinion when you're playing, at least in an expert level, is that everybody knows they've made mistakes and everybody knows that they've known they've made mistakes and everybody wants to win. I say sorry too much. It's funny to hear that he has the impression that I don't like it when he says sorry because I'm very self-reflective. I feel sorry always. My life is in a state of sorry when I'm playing Bridge, always. I never feel comfortable, never confident, always on my own case like, "Man, I should have got that right. I should have got that right," but I'm feeling sorry all the time that I don't think that you need to express it to everybody. I think it gets annoying, not annoying, but it's just like we're all sorry, we're all sorry.
John McAllister: Yeah, but how do you think you channel that in a way? Because you feel it, how do you channel it in a way where you're not actually telling people you're sorry? Do you think about that at all?
Gavin Wolpert: Well, I don't think about it, but I've definitely adjusted my behavior to ... I preempt my opponents, my partner. That's one thing that I do is I preempt my partner. When we have a bad board, I'm very quick to say, "Man, your two of spades should have been enough for me," something like that like, "That was a good card that you played," and I'll say the word sorry, but it's more about making my partner not be anxious because usually when you get a hand wrong, especially on defense, both people could have done something very often. So I'm very quick to take the blame. That's who I am.
So I think that's helpful for my partners. I hope it's helpful for my partners to take some weight off of them so that they're not sitting and second-guessing themselves because I don't mind that feeling of the weight on me. I don't mind if people think that losing is my fault. At the end of the day, you either win or you lose, and I feel like the more weight that I can take off of my teammates and my partners, the more likely I am to win because I think I can handle it. I think I'm used to it. I'm feeling that way anyway, so I really try my best to make my partners feel confident and feel like it.
So maybe at the end of the day, people start, they're like, "Oh, man, he sucks. He could have got so many of these hands wrong," but I don't think so. I think that in the end what really comes out is that they're playing their best and therefore we're doing better.
John McAllister: Different subject. Your partner in your Bridge teaching it seems like is your mother.
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah. So that was honestly the best part about the pandemic by far. It was that my mom and I, who I moved away from her, I moved to Florida and in a totally different environment. I barely ever spoke to her. I mean, I call her when I'm on my way to hockey and stuff, but I didn't get to spend time with her. Then when the pandemic hit, it was like we were living in the same house. We would go and she was unbelievably helpful. First of all, we taught lessons together, which was really fun, but more importantly, we designed the lessons together.
So we talked through all these hands and we changed the cards and it was fun arguing with her because sometimes I wanted it to be a little more aggressive and she's like, "Are you crazy?" going to the back and forth. In retrospect, I wish we had recorded our lesson creations, Zooms, because it was really fun to argue back and forth. So I got to spend a ton of quality time with her.
So we did a whole series, which honestly, that might be the best series of lessons that we have on my website, which is the competitive bidding series, where it's more focused on lower intermediates and teach unbelievably ... There's some things that I'm amazed that the world doesn't know that are completely standard. We did this class called Dealing with Overcalls, and Dealing with Overcalls, we did it in two parts and the competitive doubles. I open a club, they overcall a spade, you bid two hearts and they bid two spades. That opener on their second turn, when they double, that they're just saying, "I have a good hand," it's forward-going, it says like, "Okay. I have too good of a hand to pass."
The same thing if over two spades of opener passes and it comes past back to the two heart bidder, it's the same idea that doubles a way of getting back to say, "I just have a good hand. It's our hand. Let's go." That's a concept that nobody knows. So when we started doing the dealing with Overcalls 1 class, everybody in our whole class was like, "I've never heard of this. What is the name for this? What is this?" My mom and I were like, "These are just standard doubles." So we realized, "Okay. We really need to reinforce this." So then the next class, Dealing with Overcalls 2, really dug into those doubles.
So those intermediate classes, actually, are some of the most ... If you can know those competitive bidding agreements really well, that gets you so far in your scores and how you're doing. Fundamentally, taking tricks and competitive bidding are what win or lose your club games, and what most people play, our club games. They're playing pair games, whether it's on BBO, speedballs or 18-board things or going to their club or going ... Everybody's playing pairs these days, and those to me are the two easiest ways to get better scores are learning how to get more over tricks. So I really put a focus. I don't know if you've noticed the flavor of these interactive problems is almost always it's about over tricks and not about making your contract.
John McAllister: Yeah, that's true. That is true. That is true.
Gavin Wolpert: Because when you read books, it's always focused on making your contract, but everybody's playing the form of the game where over tricks are just as important and nobody's really taught. So I've really put much more of a focus. I really try hard to add over tricks, available over tricks in my problems purposely, and I don't really tell the student to look for that over trick, but you want to have a mentality of just like, "How can I make that extra trick?"
So anyway, the competitive bidding thing, this all started with us talking about my mom. So we did that series together. Lately, I've been really busy, she's been really busy. We haven't done as much together, but every time we talk, we're like, "We need to just get back to work and build more classes together and do the stuff." So I'm guessing that when things calm down a little, we will probably start working together a little bit more.
She just won the Canadian Women's Championship, so she's going to go to Argentina on the Canadian women's team. So I'm so pumped for her. It's so excited. I'm going anyway to play the Transnationals, so I'll see her there and I'm just really happy for her. She loves the game. As much as you can see, my enthusiasm for the game, my mom has exactly the same. That's where I got it all. She loves the game as much as anybody that you'll ever meet. Obsessed. She's an obsessive games player, so is my grandma, her mom.
My grandma, the thing that I remember with her was every day ... First of all, she was a completely obsessed Bridge player. If she ended up in hospital, the moment they discharge her, her words were, "Take me to the Bridge Club." When she would come home from the Bridge Club in the afternoon, she would come back from my mom's game, they would come home together and my grandma would sit down and she would just start playing these three different variants of solitaire, constantly just challenging herself mentally to stay focused on cards.
My mom is the same, except for with my mom now, it's Wordle, it's the IntoBridge daily. She does her little ... But she's just constantly playing games and keeping their mind active, and because of that, I believe that they're sharper than the average person. My grandma, when she was in her 80s, was as sharp as anybody you could come ... When you play Bridge with her, she was feisty and with it and never lost a beat. My mom is similar. So I think that we all have that. I've got that in my blood or whatever. I've copied their behavior.
John McAllister: How proud of you was your grandmother of your accomplishments?
Gavin Wolpert: Well, she didn't really get to experience so much of my accomplishments. She didn't last until when I really became a Bridge pro. I played with her every week at the Bridge Club. We had our moments because I was still a little bit of a trouble-making kid. I had a big mouth and a little bit disrespectful. That's part of what I mean about learning how to behave around older people. No, I don't think so. I'm thinking how old was I when she ... I don't remember the timing, but I don't believe that she was around when I started to really succeed at a national and international level.
John McAllister: So your wife Jenny is also a professional Bridge player. How often do you guys play against each other?
Gavin Wolpert: Almost never, yeah, almost never, once in a blue moon. I think BBO has good software that stops it from happening or maybe because I feel like ... Because we're in the same IP address or whatever that maybe it keeps us away from or I don't know, but it feels like almost never, but maybe once in a blue moon on BBO. We used to a little bit more frequently at the Bridge Club, except usually because the Bridge Club owner, there were multiple sections and they tried to seed the field. We would usually be in separate sections, so not so often.
We've just been talking about when we will start to play together. The problem is ... So before we had kids, it was amazing for us to be at the same tournament at the same time because we were together anyway. So we were paying for the hotel room and we were paying for the flights, and once we're there, it was great for us to work together, but then when we had kids, it became way different where one of us needed to be available for the kids. So we've stayed away from playing at the same time for the last 15 years or so, but now we're just ...
Our little one's eight. We're talking about maybe this trials, playing the mixed trials together, but it's just we're thinking next one or whatever, but we're almost at that stage where we can start going away at the same time again and not feel like we're really harming the kids by leaving them home for ... The World Championships is a bit of an hassle because it's like two weeks is the tournament plus-
John McAllister: In October this year too or something?
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah, and plus, often this time, actually, at least it's in the same time zone or a similar time zone, but if the tournament's ever in China or India or whatever, you have to leave, it's an extra days of travel and extra ... In Marrakesh, it's a big time change. We both went. It was leaving our kids for three weeks and it was hard on them, hard, hard, hard on them. In fact, when we got back from Marrakesh, we were like, "Yeah, we can't let this happen again for a little while."
So even for the trial situation this time, we both played on the Rosenthal team, so that way if I didn't qualify in the open, then she would get to play the mixed. So it was a little bit easier for us to regulate that. It feels like every time I win the trials, she wins her trials right after. It's been that way, anyway.
John McAllister: But you've never played against each other in a big-
Gavin Wolpert: Well, we have. If you watch the old documentary that they made on CTV, they filmed us. She psyched against me in the Reisinger and won a board, and we ended up missing qualifying by a half a board, and they caught on me giving her a hard time about like, "I can't believe you psyched against me," Yeah, no, we don't play in the same events. She's usually, in the last 15 years, playing women's events, so we don't really compete against each other so much.
John McAllister: We've got a couple of the UVA Bridge Club kids. I think you gave them full access to your library of deals. I spoke to both of them this morning. They're both very complimentary and thankful. It sounds like you gave the entire, all the kids in the US Bridge Federation.
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah, and it's not just US. If you're out there and watching this podcast, if you're from Canada or you're from Denmark or whatever, if you're young, I want to help young people. I'm not in the business of selling lessons to kids. The more young people that we have becoming experts is the better, and that's what my lessons are for. They're mostly for helping people go from intermediate, actually, to expert. So yeah, no, basically, just if you're a young person, you can just reach out by email and we'll just get you set up with lessons, for sure.
John McAllister: You're doing a lot of stuff with IntoBridge. How did it come to pass? I don't remember if you won the-
Gavin Wolpert: It's all organic. It's all organic. They sent ... Basically, anytime somebody starts something new related to Bridge, I'm early adopter. I check it out, see what's going on, and I tried their product with Ranked Games. I loved it and I played a bunch of it and I gave them a bunch of feedback. I'm like, "I need this, I want this, I want this," but I'm just a player on their site. I don't work with them or for them, but at some point when they were ... So basically, I just want to embrace new things at Bridge and want them to get bigger because I think the more convent competitive of an environment there is in the playing space, then in my opinion, if there's ... Bridge Base when they were on their own, they weren't doing enough to grow the game. So the more competitors that they have, I just think it's good for the world.
I love Bridge Base, actually. I think Bridge Base is amazing. I have nothing against Bridge Base. I just think that the best outcome for Bridge would be us to have a lot of platforms that instead of fighting for the same pie of Bridge players, that they're compelled to each work on their own initiatives to bring new players into game because that's going to be the easiest way for them to make money is to get a new customer rather than fighting to pull customers from the other platforms.
So whenever somebody's doing something new, I just want to support them. So I got on board with IntoBridge just by playing and giving them feedback and helping them, and then I played the Rank Games and I was very happy for them to use my name to promote it in any way because, obviously, the more experts they have on the site, the better. Then eventually, they were developing their robot Leah and they kind of said to me, "Hey, we are going to eventually allow Leah to play different systems. Would you like us to work on your system?" and I'm like, "That would be absolutely amazing," because my students, their biggest problem is that when they learn my system that they're like, "I don't have anybody to play within my area."
So I basically gave Luke their program or access to all of my lessons and all of my practice sets so that he could not only use the lessons to teach the robots, but to use the practice sets to reinforce whether the robot was doing what it was supposed to do. Basically, and it's amazing how good it is. Having an expert Bridge player programming the robot turned out to be amazing because also, my interactions with Luke where he's like, "I'm not sure what you mean here or what's going on here," and I could just explain to him in very few words and then he makes the proper fix.
Now, what's also better is because I love playing on IntoBridge, I can go and practice with this robot and I am playing my system with the robot and when it does something it doesn't like, I quickly take a screenshot, send it in a WhatsApp message to Luke and he gives me the thumbs up, "Got it," and boom, it's going to be fixed for the next batch. So it's getting better. If you saw my text thread with Luke, I can go for ... I have sent him so many. Poor guy. I'm sure he deals with it with lots of people.
They've also made a partnership with CueBids. CueBids, also, which also absolutely amazing app. If anybody hasn't heard of CueBids, it is awesome for bidding with your partner. I love the weekly. I bid with Raj every week in the weekly because the weekly, all these good pairs are doing it. I can go see how Joe and Brad bid their hands or Sjoert and Bas or whatever, all these expert pairs, and it's really great bidding software, but it is even better now that they have a robot, and even better now that the robot can play my system.
So now, what I can do is go in CueBids and I can say dealing with no trump interference. My partner opens one, no, I want to practice my transfer Lebensohl. I set up a set on no trump entry and I deal myself, but instead of it being like an asynchronous thing where I bid and I wait for my partner to bid, the robot immediately ... So I'm actually just bidding hands with the robot and it's quick, and the amount of practice you can get. Bridge players are going to have the ability to get better so much quicker now than they ever were before. It's kind of amazing.
But it's cool the power of working together. These are two unrelated companies, CueBids and IntoBridge, that they're collaborating on the robot, and then the fact that I collaborated with them with my lessons, the power of working together is pretty amazing. We're just starting, so we're seeing it's going to get better and better.
John McAllister: So with Luke, for example, when you tell him about a situation where the computer didn't do what you wanted it to do with your system, how does he-
Gavin Wolpert: Well, most of them are obvious like the robot does something ridiculous, and so he knows and he's able ... In fact, it's better if I don't say anything to him because he can see why it's done this ridiculous thing a lot faster than I can. So basically, I just show him the things that it doesn't do, but occasionally, I'll be in a spot where I really want to make a bid, but I can see that the explanation for all of my bids are not good. This happens to me on BBO all the time where you have no bids that fit your hand.
So I might send them a spot like that where I would be like every bit in this auction, I had no way forward. So I do something like that, but otherwise, yeah, sometimes he clarifies like, "Well, it did this because of this, and do you agree with that?" and I'll be like ... We'll have a back-and-forth about it, but very often, it's just obvious and he just fixes whatever was going wrong.
John McAllister: And do you find instances of one thing where you've given it to them? Has that same problem come up?
Gavin Wolpert: Well, it takes them a week or two to release the fixes, but no, I haven't seen a repetitive problem. Usually, within two weeks or so the problem's fixed, and maybe it wasn't fixed properly and something else will go wrong, but I have not experienced the same problems coming up. No, I think that it's definitely moving forward.
John McAllister: It just seems like part of the challenges of bidding is creating a robot that bids well is that. How do you even ... Then maybe this is more of a software problem and not necessarily something that you can answer, but how do you even standardize it so that outside of one situation, like the Meta rules or whatever.
Gavin Wolpert: It's definitely not a problem that I would want to be solving, but he seems to be doing a really good job with it. I'll tell you that at least my experience with my system, I don't know what's going on with the other system, but my experience with my system is that she's good at evaluating, she's good at using the tools and knowing which things to use when. So he's doing something right, for sure.
John McAllister: And we're going to be able to get better as Bridge players because we're able to primarily like bidding focus you're saying because we can-
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah, bidding, bidding. I just think bidding is the hardest thing to get really good at because it's very hard to ... Things don't come up enough for you to actually get better at them. You don't see Lebensohl. It's a perfect example where if you go to the Bridge Club and you ask, it's like one of the hardest systems. It's most messed up system. People make mistakes with it. Forget it because the problem is it just doesn't come up enough. If it came up 17 times in a week, by the end of that week you'd be like, "I know Lebensohl. I'm never going to forget it ever again." The problem is that it comes up once in January and then again in March. Sometimes you're playing with one partner that doesn't play Lebensohl or whatever. It just doesn't happen, and so it just never gets reinforced.
But if you go to CueBids and you select my robot and you're playing my transfer Lebensohl, you can solidify it in a matter of hours and you'll never mess it up again because once it's in there, it's in there. You don't screw up Stayman, right? The things that come up all the time, you don't ... I mean, obviously some, but some things that come up all the time you do, but you definitely reinforce practice is the way to get really, really good at something and ingrain it into your mind.
Now, is that going to teach you proper bidding judgment? No. The only thing that's going to teach you proper bidding judgment is being out there playing in high level competition and getting burned for your mistakes and seeing other people not make those mistakes and trying and working to understand what they were thinking to get their decisions right. That's always been how I've gotten better is I'm introspective. I look at a hand and be like, "Oh, I could have made that. Should I have made that? Was there anything there that I could have seen that would've helped me make that decision?" and then, "Oh yeah, I should have known that. That was exactly what I needed to think." Then the next time, maybe I don't note it again, but as long as you keep thinking about what you should have seen, eventually you start to see it when you need to see it.
John McAllister: You started a partnership recently with Chris Willenken. Are you playing your system? He says he likes to play his partner's system.
Gavin Wolpert: We just played one event. It wasn't really a partnership. He's got his own Nationals partner and I've got my own. It was for the trials, but he was great to talk system with. He's a really high-level thinker about the game. Really good player. We met halfway. I started by sending him notes that I played with Warren and we trimmed them down. He saw holes in some of our agreements where he's like, "I can see this leading to a problem if I try to apply this here," and then we talked it through and edited the document down. He had some things that he demanded or not demanded, but very strongly suggested that's what he wanted to do like adding multi and just little things.
He had this thing about transfer Lebensohl that he didn't want to play. The transfers were invitational plus. He wanted to always transfer weak or better and have two no always show clubs and three clubs always show diamonds, whatever. I was happy to play with it. I could adjust little details, but overall, the structure was he played what I played, but I play very simple things. My system is not complicated. So yeah, I mean, it's complicated to a low-level. Intermediate would look at some of the stuff that we play and be like, "That's ridiculous. It's way too complicated," but most of the stuff that I play is expert standard like transfers after two no rebid, transfer Lebensohl. Most of the stuff that I play is very straightforward in standard, so that he was very quick and easy to talk about the system. We bid a bunch of hands and-
John McAllister: Okay. Last question, maybe, perhaps last question. What do you like to play when you open a weak two? What do you like to play to know as?
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah, so we play Vinny. Vinny invented a system that I really, really love. So that's going to be part of my weak two classes, like introducing Vinny. I ask them, I'm like, "What do you guys call it?" Kran and Vinny because of what they play and they're like, "Vinny." They don't even play it anymore because they've started playing two clubs, 18, 19 and all this stuff. So they've changed their system since, but yeah, it's basically like if you think about when you would normally want a bid two no over two of a major, there's basically two circumstances. You're either inviting game or you're looking for slam, right?
John McAllister: Yeah.
Gavin Wolpert: So they play that two no, first of all, does partner, are you minimum or are you maximum? Which is kind of a normal thing, which I've never really subscribed to the Ogust.
John McAllister: I think it's terrible.
Gavin Wolpert: It's a little bit like, is this a good suit? Is this a bad suit? It's just too complicated. So instead, basically the way it works, I can just explain it in two seconds here. Three clubs says I like my hand. I have at least a medium or better hand. Going back to three of your major is I hate my hand, and the other three steps are showing six fours, low, middle, high. So the idea is that finding the four-four fit in the secondary suit can be absolutely huge. We often open with four card majors, week twos. So yeah, so that's the idea.
Then the only other thing is that over three clubs, I like my hand, three diamonds ask for shortness and it's shocking how good finding out whether the week two bitter has shortness or not can help you for slam. It's amazing how often that can ... and it's not just that they have shortness, you also know they're 6-3-3-1 because they didn't show the six-four. So you end up being able to find side suit fits. It's a pretty good system.
John McAllister: So 6-4-3 shows 6-4?
Gavin Wolpert: Yeah. I mean, you're not really opening week twos with 6-4-3 so often, But yeah, it just doesn't come up very often. The idea that it's way more rare as far as percentage of time you're dealt it. Plus, you have to decide to open a weak two bid. You don't love opening weak two bids with side voids because it really, it adds a little bit of playing strength. I don't have a rule like I wouldn't open with a void, but you got to be careful when you have a random first round control that isn't counted by your high cards. It's like partner's never going to really envision that, so sometimes can not find slams. So I'm not really worried about 6-4-3, but 6-4, basically, you show your 6-4 only when you like your hand.
John McAllister: How long do you think it's going to take you to produce this next one?
Gavin Wolpert: I would say that every lesson takes me between outlining it and then ordering it and making the diagrams for the new things that I haven't really like when I'm explaining a new system, the whole process I would say is something like 20 hours, 15 hours, something like that that I would put it, but I am crazy. I am sure I could do it in much less time, but I refuse to cut corners, and I am obsessive about making sure that the end product is the best quality that I can put out.
John McAllister: What's the best and worst feedback you've gotten on one of your lessons?
Gavin Wolpert: I mean, the best feedback, it's hard to say that there's been best feedback, but tons of people saying, "Wow, finally, I understand this subject," or, "This is just the greatest." The number one feedback I get from people is, "I've been waiting my whole life for somebody to teach lessons about things like this. It's never been content like this." That's my favorite compliment that I get. My feedback, people are pretty hesitant to give negative feedback. Sometimes like once I would give a class and people would say it's too complicated, it was more complicated than it needed to be. That would be probably feedback or, "This wasn't at the level of your other master series classes. I've gotten that one a couple times where it was too easy," which that's my hardest part as a teacher is really judging difficulty because everything is the same level to me kind of thing.
So understanding what people are going to perceive as hard and what they're going to perceive as not as less difficult, it's hard for me. One of my students has been on my case that I say things are hard too frequently, that I'm constantly apologizing for the difficulty level. I don't know. That's who I am.
John McAllister: Well, Gavin, it's been super fun to catch up with you. Like I said earlier, your enthusiasm is really fun to be around and I look forward to seeing you soon in Toronto.
Gavin Wolpert: Thank you for having me, John.
John McAllister: Thank you for listening to another episode of The Setting Trick. If you've ever wanted to partner with me or one of our guests, 33 past Setting Trick guests are available for bid in the Spark education auction. There is a Pro-Am, which is taking place on July 15th where you'll get to play against a lot of great players, and then there's also the opportunity for an 18-board BBO game after the upcoming Toronto NABC. I'm even bidding on some of these Bridge players, so don't steal my bids. You can play with me. You can play with today's guest, Gavin, Bob Hammond, Adam and Zach Grossack, Kevin and Michael Rosenberg, Aaron Silverstein, Jenni and Tom Carmichael, Olivia Shurson, Ron Smith, Adam Vildosky, Joel Wooldridge, Amber Lin, James Holzhauer, Robert Todd, Walt Schafer, Bart Bramley, Greg Hinze, Kitty Cooper, Olin Hubert, Phil Clayton, Ron Smith, Adam Kaplan, Alex and Finn Kolesnik, Anam Teba, Andrew Chen. Jacob Freeman, Joe Grue. I forgot about Joe Grue, John Kranyak, Migry, and Sophie Baldysz.
You want see what you got? You're going to get a full review of the play with your partner. You can go up against Larry Cohen, Ralph Katz. This is a big event and it's raising money for Junior Bridge, some initiatives of the ACBL Education Foundation for juniors, for junior travel, and it's a lot of fun. So there's a link in our show notes, The Setting Trick under the episode, Gavin Wolpert, this most recent one, and thanks for your consideration.