Matthew Granovetter is a six-time NABC champion. He also won a world championship, the Mixed Pairs, in 2006. He is a popular author and teacher, along with his wife, Pamela. They are best known for their theories on bidding via their system GUS (Granovetter Unified System) and their books on defensive play.
Matthew is Hasidic (a branch of Orthodox Judaism); his spirituality is woven throughout his life and bridge – the two are inseparable. His latest book on Method Bridge is his proudest contribution to the game.
[1:08] The influence of the late Kathie Wei on Granovetter’s life.
[6:55] One hand that affected Granovetter’s bridge game for years.
[10:59] Granovetter’s wife, Pamela, Zia, Wall Street and “Bridge Today.”
[13:09] The Granovetters transition to religion and a brief lesson on Hebrew and bridge.
[18:05] Praying at the world championships.
[20:50] Working around the 39 prohibitions of the Sabbath while traveling to bridge tournaments.
[30:00] Meeting Pamela.
[39:15] Virginia Woolf inspired the Granovetter’s writing and publishing business and the internet opened up opportunities for their family.
[44:57] How it all comes together: bridge and Judaism, thanks in part to Patty Cayne.
[56:25] Investigating different branches of Judaism; the importance of not rejecting something because you don’t understand it.
[1:15:15] Meeting with CC Wei in Chinatown to study precision and learning how to eat with chopsticks.
[1:22:14] First exciting win and an Omar story.
[1:32:34] Systems and obvious shift.
The Setting Trick
Episode 80
Matt Granovetter
John McAllister: I am excited to welcome Matt Granovetter onto The Setting Trick. We recorded a test audio session a week ago, and you started telling me the story, Matt, about meeting or kibitzing Kathie Wei, and I just wanted to go straight into that.
Matt Granovetter: Okay. Did you tell everybody that we haven't discussed one word about what I'm talking about today? There's no preparation on this.
John McAllister: No, I have not.
Matt Granovetter: Okay, well now.
John McAllister: My listeners will know that I'm erratic about how I prepare for these things.
Matt Granovetter: This is all off the cuff, so to speak.
John McAllister: Indeed.
Matt Granovetter: Okay. So Kathie Wei, who passed away recently, it was interesting, she was very big in my life. Of course, when I was maybe 20 years old, I was at the New York Hilton and I didn't have a partner, so I kibitzed her at the tournament, and she was playing with her teacher, and we started chatting and after that, I got to meet her husband who was C.C. Wei or Charles Wei at the time. And he had invented this new system called Precision. He was sponsoring many little teams. This was before they won any championships. And I was on the C Team, and at one point, I moved up to the B Team, but this was my introduction to professional bridge, really through her. But she ended up having an enormous effect on my life because, besides the fact that I was privileged to know her and her husband, her husband should have been in the Hall of Fame years ago. He was a charismatic person and the inventor of a system that the entire country took up at the time.
Anyway, when he passed away, she later remarried a Jewish man and went to Israel to see Israel, the country of Israel. And in the meantime, this was now when I was in my late 30s, 40... Actually, it's almost 20 years later, and I was living in Upstate New York with my wife and two children, and Kathie Wei suggested that we go to Israel for the Tel Aviv Bridge Festival. So, we went to the bridge festival with Kathie, and Pamela and I, we ended up with the three of us together winning three events, which was unusual
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: In a short week of about four or five events. And that was supernatural. And we got to see Israel, and we decided that was like a pilot trip. And then suddenly, we got the urge to live in Israel from this. She didn't leave it at that. First of all, one of the things she did was a funny thing. After we made all this money at the bridge festival, she took us to her favorite jewelry store in Tel Aviv. And when I came in, Kathie, who was a very strong person, she said, "You have to buy your wife a nice jewel now. You have to buy her." I said, "Sure, sure." But the guy brings out a price tag, which was like 2,700 shekels. "What?" My wife likes to tell the story that I almost fainted.
So, we bought that and there went the profits, but that was okay. Later on, we decided then, suddenly, "Well, Israel is for us. This is wow. Easy." We won at the bridge. The country's beautiful. We had spiritual ... The next thing you know, we're moving to Israel. And what does Kathie Wei do? She tells us where we should move to as well. She said, "Move to the city of Netanya." So she and my mom, they went to Netanya and they found us the apartment overlooking the sea where we moved to. And you could see how she affected ... I lived there for 12 years and we had another baby there, so she affected my entire life.
With her, going back when I was 21 years old, I was in Las Vegas for a Blue Team versus Aces special match that they were having. And they had a tournament, but they also had this special match between the Italian Blue Team and the Aces. And when I was there, I met Benito Garozzo for the first time, and it was my birthday in December, and I said to Kathie, we were near a roulette table. I said, "Kathie, maybe I could play. Could you get me a session with Benito?" Of course, there were side games. So she said, "I am going to arrange it. I will arrange it." And she did. And I got my jacket on and I put a tie on.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: That's my mentality at that time and not to be a slob and everything. And we played. And because of this, there was one hand that affected my whole bridge game for years.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: And that hand was where I had a singleton to lead against a suit contract, or I had a king, queen combination to lead, and I led the king queen combination. And the singleton would've worked smoother. It would've gone ace, ruff, ace, ruff, down one. And Benito took me aside. His English wasn't so good yet. He said, "Matthew, I tell you a story. When I was your age, when I was a boy, I learned always lead a singleton, always. Then, Matthew, I grow up, I learn many different plays and ideas and I become Blue Team star. And I realized, 'No, you must think before opening lead, you must think. Sometimes it's wrong to lead a singleton.' Then as time went on, I keep leading other suits from singleton, but no, it's always the singleton that beats the contract. And now, in my older age, I always lead my singleton." So he went from one stage to another, and after that, I always got my singleton and it worked pretty well. And I asked my partners also, "Please lead your singleton."
John McAllister: Did you beat the contract in this particular deal that Benito...
Matt Granovetter: Benito's advice was to lead the singleton.
John McAllister: No, did you beat the contract that led him to tell you this when you led the king-queen?
Matt Granovetter: No, we didn't.
John McAllister: You did not?
Matt Granovetter: When I led the king-queen, we didn't beat the contract.
John McAllister: You didn't beat the contract.
Matt Granovetter: I had to lead the singleton. Right?
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: And he was adamant, always lead the singleton. Later on, I wrote a book called Murder at the Bridge Table, and I put Benito in the book telling me the story to always lead my singleton. That was a fictitious book but it was ... It was fiction but it was about a guy that played in an individual years ago and was murdered by all his partners sort of in the Agatha Christie method because he and all his partners pinned to his shirt in the hotel room, all the bridge crimes he had committed. They pinned to his shirt all their hand records, and they would circle the cards and what he did to drive them crazy to hate it. One of the thing was he didn't lead his singleton. Anyway, that was a thrilling experience for me when I first met Benito, and he wasn't that old. To me, he was old because I was 21, and maybe he was as old as 40 at that time.
John McAllister: I didn't do a very good job of introducing you I realize.
Matt Granovetter: That's all right.
John McAllister: So, you've won six NABC titles, I think, including the Spingold in 2009. You won the Mixed Pairs World Championship in 2006. You've written and published something like 20 bridge books and have a bridge magazine, which has moved online, called Bridge Today.
Matt Granovetter: Bridge Today, we published. When my wife and I, Pamela, got married in 1983, it's a long time ago, '93, over 40 years ago. Hey, maybe I missed our anniversary this year. We were avid bridge players. Our best friend was a guy named Zia, a young guy from Pakistan, and he would meet us after his ... We were working down on Wall Street on the stock exchange, the American Stock Exchange, where all the option traders were working. And he would meet us at the end of the day and tell us his stories about what happened at the rubber bridge table, because that's how he spent his day, and we would laugh so hard. But we then decided, we left Wall Street because we had a baby, and we left Wall Street because also we didn't like it. It wasn't our talent.
John McAllister: Got it.
Matt Granovetter: But the reason I say we had a baby is because my wife had to leave because she had a baby, because we were both on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. But we weren't money hungry, right or wrong. It wasn't that type of thing. Our first date together was to go to a bookstore and buy a book that we each liked. We were sort of like ... We had other interests than bridge as well, and it wasn't religion at all. Well, actually even more than Orthodox, we're Hasidic.
John McAllister: Hasidic, okay.
Matt Granovetter: Hasidic. The guys from the 18th century who walk around with long jackets and black hats and white... We don't have white stockings, but we're modern Hasidic. We're with a movement called Lubavitch or Chabad. Chabad is an acronym for three Hebrew words, which come from Kabbalah. Chabad, in English it's spelled C-H-A-B-A-D. But in Hebrew, Chokmah is the first word with a C. Binah and Daas. Now, Chokmah means... And I explain this in my new book this year in Method Bridge, which I sent you. You got a copy right away.
John McAllister: Yeah, I've got a signed copy.
Matt Granovetter: You got to forward copy right away until I fixed it. And Chokmah, Binah and Daas and how you use that also when you play bridge as a declarer, when you're... Chokmah is the first flash of an idea that a person gets about any subject. You see something, you get an idea. So in bridge, dummy comes down, you're the declarer, you get an idea, "Oh, there's a singleton. I'm going to ruff cards." Or "There's a suit I'm going to set up." Something that strikes your fancy right away. Then, Binah is the second word, Chokmah, Binah and Daas. Binah is the feminine form, and it's the extension of the idea where you think it through, "Well, how am I going to do it? How am I going to go about and make this idea happen?"
And then Daas spelled maybe D-A-A-S in English, Daas means knowledge. Adam knew Eve, Daas, Adam daas Eve. Also, it means to know. At that point, after you've done the flash of an idea and you've thought it through, then suddenly, you have it and you're just sure that you know what you're doing. And then, you call your first card from dummy. Obviously, this is the first thing we teach beginners – don't call a card from dummy until you make a plan. Why am I saying that? Oh, that's the acronym for the organization, the branch of Judaism that we belong to, which is a Hasidic branch that goes way back to the mystical Baal Shem Tov in the early part of the 17th century, 18th century. 18th century is the 1700s, right? 18th century.
John McAllister: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: Right, right, right, right, right. And it's still flourishing today, and it's filled with, not only intellectual ideas, like I just mentioned from Kabbalah, but it's also filled with joy and warmth, which is an important thing in any walk of life.
John McAllister: Sure.
Matt Granovetter: And having a sense of humor. And if you play bridge, you have to have a sense of humor, otherwise, you'd never sleep at night. So somehow, my life changed, and we went from completely secular to adopting this religious lifestyle partly through Kathie Wei. And partly because, when we moved upstate in New York, we met certain people and we took our first lesson in Chassidism, which is a religious form of Kabbalah, and people don't understand it at all who haven't experienced it, what it is, why we're so interested in it, and why we love it so much. But it's a whole lifestyle from the time we get up in the morning until the time we go to sleep, it encompasses our life, even when we're playing bridge.
You mentioned my only world championship that I won, the mixed pairs, and during that world championship, there were screens at the table. And during the day, one of the things that we have to do as members of Chabad is to say a number of Tehillim. Tehillim are psalms. There are 150 psalms in a... I don't have it here. There are 150 psalms penned by King David and some by Moses that go all the way back 3,000 years. So, every day there's a portion that's divided in the month. Say there's 30 days in a month and 150 psalms, so you might say around five Psalms a day. But some are longer days and some are shorter days. Some days, they're longer, some days, they're shorter. So, when I don't have time, because we're starting early in the morning playing bridge and finishing late, I take my... And Pamela does this too, we take our book of psalms to the bridge table.
Now, screens help a lot because the screen goes up and you're not facing your partner. And you could even lean the book against the screen near the bidding box. And when you're dummy, you have time, you can take it and start mumbling your psalms. But at the same time, you have to keep an ear out for your partner who's calling the cards so that you pull the right card. So, I was doing that near the end of the tournament, and then somebody at the end of the tournament, which we won, a very nice French woman comes over and said, "Monsieur Granovetter, I wish somebody would pray for me when I play the hand. I wish my partner would pray for me." But I wasn't really doing that. I was just fulfilling my quota for the day by my religious duties. It had nothing to do with the bridge. Anyway.
John McAllister: But you're kind of rare in terms of high-level bridge. Both you and Pam, both being Hasidic, I remember being at a regional tournament, and going to a service in your room on the Sabbath.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah, that was nice. That's one of the problems with traveling. But it's a good thing too. On Friday night, we usually would have a service in our room and invite people.
John McAllister: But you can't lock the doors and then you can't keep score.
Matt Granovetter: Well, you can't use electricity because electricity is fire. You can't use fire. There are 39 prohibitions during the Sabbath that were all things that they did when they were building the tabernacle in the desert that the Jewish people did while they were building the tabernacle between the time of getting out of Egypt and the 40 years in the desert to get to the land of Israel. And during that time, there was a building of a... Like a traveling tabernacle, and the 40 different jobs that are used, like hammering or making a fire, et cetera, are the prohibitions that we have for Sabbath. So, when you go to a hotel room, you have an electric key, so electricity is out. So, it's a problem.
John McAllister: So, what do you do?
Matt Granovetter: Especially if the door is locked. One time, I was at a tournament by myself and and I had a friend who was... And I couldn't get into my room. And the key was, I had put in the fire... There's a little fire extinguisher, I don't know if you notice this. In hotel floors, you'll always see a couple of fire extinguishers in a glass case. And before Shabbat... That's Sabbath. Before Shabbat, we'd put the key in there so we would have it after Shabbat just in case to get back in the room at the end of the day on Saturday. But sometimes, the maid would come by and we would try to get the maid to open the door for us with the key because we couldn't do it.
But there's a prohibition also to ask somebody else to do it. There's no such thing as a Shabbat goy, so to speak. You're not allowed to ask somebody to do it, because it says in our prayers even, neither you nor your servant, nor your friend, nobody is allowed to do it for you. So, it requires some finesse because, if somebody is around you who's not Jewish, and you're able to get that person to open the door for you, you try to get the person to do it without directly asking them to do it. Somebody passes the door and I want to get in and I say, "Hi. Hi, you want to come in for a drink?" I start out that way, but I don't ask them to do it.
So, on this one occasion, I had a friend who was three doors down and I honestly didn't know if he was Jewish or not. And I said, "Oh, good evening." He was going into his room three doors down. I said, "By the way, I always wanted to know, are you Jewish?" And he said, "Well, my father was, but not my mother." Now, in the Jewish religion, it has to be the mother whom Jewish. So I said, "That's interesting. You want to have a drink? I want to discuss that." He said, "Sure." And he comes over. "But I can't get in my room because..." I said, "I'm not allowed to open the door because of Shabbat." But I didn't ask him to. I just said, "I'm not allowed to." He said, "Oh, well, I'll do it." And he did it. So, that's how I got in that time. So, how do you remember that?
John McAllister: Well, it's probably the only Jewish religious ceremony I've been to in my life, and it was in a hotel room at a bridge tournament. It was a pretty unique experience.
Matt Granovetter: So, we have all sorts of people on Friday night, but that's been a... Actually, not a while. We were at a regional in Orlando this year, and we did that also.
John McAllister: You had a service?
Matt Granovetter: Yeah. A regional. Yeah, during. Well, because that's part of it. You have to have that service. It's called kiddish, and you sanctify the Sabbath by saying a few prayers and drinking wine and saying the 23rd psalm and a couple of things.
John McAllister: It was funny because I grew up in the Episcopalian church, and so it was actually, a lot of it was familiar to me, which was a surprise for me.
Matt Granovetter: Because each religion takes a part of something. What's Episcopalian?
John McAllister: It's a Protestant religion. So, I've heard that it's very close to Catholicism. We went to church, just my mother sort of. I didn't like going, but we went. We had to go as children. And then, two of the schools that I went to also had chapel. And so, I don't really know how to describe it. I guess
Matt Granovetter: No, no. But I have empathy for you. I didn't like going either when I was a boy to synagogue. And unless you learn about it, it's just like anything else, who would like to play bridge if you didn't learn anything about it, right? If you were just throwing cards, it wouldn't be anything. So, you have to learn about it and get into it to do something, anything.
John McAllister: But you're devoted to it. If anybody can't tell just based on the story that you just told, it's an inconvenience for sure, like for example, with this... I'm not saying that it's an inconvenience as a whole, but not being able to... Having to work around your hotel room key. I've heard stories about you and Pamela, your wife, doing a comparison in a knockout match, and neither of you were able to write down the scores. So that
Matt Granovetter: Right.
John McAllister: The scores.
Matt Granovetter: Right, right. Basically, for years, I would play on Sabbath, which wasn't really... It was only kosher technically.
John McAllister: Okay.
Matt Granovetter: It wasn't kosher in the spirit of Shabbos. It wasn't kosher, and I've tried to reduce that and not do that anymore if I can help it. Sometimes there'll be a Vanderbilt or Spingold and then it reaches that Saturday.
John McAllister: Yeah, that's good. That's a good thing. That's a good problem to have.
Matt Granovetter: That's a problem. That would be a good problem when it reaches that, as long as it doesn't start out... Right. Right. So I've had ups and downs about this. I've sort of been ousted in recent years from the USBF, United States Bridge Federation tournaments because they're using electronics instead of cards. So using electronics, I can't possibly compete over Shabbos. Maybe I could convince them to make Saturday an off day or something like that.
John McAllister: Yeah, I don't think so.
Matt Granovetter: Then they don't want to because then it inconveniences other people.
John McAllister: Yeah, that would be a big ask.
Matt Granovetter: So anyway, that's all right. That's the way it is, but it's, right, right. What you said is right. I always feel a little embarrassed about that, about having to keep score without writing down the scores. It's not the way to do it. Right.
John McAllister: So your primary bridge partner is your wife, and it says you met her at the Olympiad, at a bridge tournament in the Netherlands.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah. That was in 1980. 1980 was an Olympiad in the Netherlands and in some obscure town in the Netherlands. It was called Valkenburg, Netherlands. And what had happened was that tournament, the American team, the Aces lost to the French team in the final. And because of the rules in those days, there was a rule about how you were able to compete in the trials for the North American team that are different from the rules today. Today anybody can compete. It's completely open.
In those days, you had to qualify by achieving certain good results in the American tournaments over the year. And the Aces were made up of Bobby Wolff and Bobby Hamman and Fred Hamilton and Ira Rubin, who also had a nickname, the Beast. Did you know Ira Rubin?
John McAllister: No.
Matt Granovetter: No. And Mike Passell and Paul Soloway.
John McAllister: Okay.
Matt Granovetter: And that was the team in the Olympiad. However, they switched partnerships in the Olympiad and Mike Passell played with Fred Hamilton and Ira Rubin played with Soloway. In the Olympiad, you play against a lot of teams to qualify for the final. And you have to not only beat the weaker teams, you have to score very high in each match. You have to blitz them to keep on top. And Soloway and Rubin were a blitz pair. They could completely score well against a weaker pair.
But what I was saying was what happened was that for the next, for 1981, Paul Soloway was ineligible to play on the team because of the rules, because he hadn't won enough points to play on the team. And I had, so this was my one and only time on the Aces. I got to play on the Aces, but my partner was Ira Rubin, the Beast. So I went to Europe to watch them play, and at the same time, suddenly out from a match between the Canadian women and some other team comes this girl who I went, "Wow, who is she?"
Okay. So I go running over, I get introduced, but she, forget it. She's busy with her scorecard. She just came out of 20 hard hands of bridge. And she said, "Oh." She said hello, and then just walked right by me, still arguing, discussing the bridge hands with her partner, Karen Allison. So that was my introduction. That was my big meeting. That was my big meeting.
My real meeting took place, she was living in Toronto a year later. A year later, and this is how there's something in the Jewish tradition called Shedachs. A Shedach is a matchmaker. A matchmaker comes and matches up two people who might be compatible and they make a Shedach. But it's very hard to make a Shedach, as you know, because there's so many divorces in the world. How do you do that?
Well, sometimes the only being that can make a Shedach is God. God makes the Shedach if you're lucky, and He finds you the right mate. So what God did was He had... Did you know Alan Rita Rand from New York? This was Sam Stayman's sister-in-law and brother-in-law and they were my clients in New York, and we would play bridge all the time. And they came to me in April and said, "Our accountant told us that if we're out of the country on April 15th, we could save a lot of money with our taxes." So I said, "So why are you telling me?" He said, "We have to find a bridge tournament outside the country." I said, "Oh, okay."
So we found the Toronto Regional was during the April 15th. So I go up to the Toronto Regional. Now we go to Pamela's side. Pamela, after the world championship, after discussing hands and after her whole experience, and she would go to the bar at night and she would listen to the Irish team discuss bridge hands, and she would say to herself, "I don't know anything about bridge, and I'm playing at a world championship. These guys are way over me." And she came back to Toronto and gave up bridge from that summer. And she gave up bridge and took a job as a systems analyst, and that was it.
Now that regional, which was three quarters of a year later, her partner, Karen Allison "accidentally," she says accidentally, there's nothing accidental, books two people two professional dates for the Toronto Regional in one day. And she's searching and searching and asking people, "Who will play? I need one person to play for me." And she can't find anyone. And then she asks Pamela and Pamela says, "No, I'm working now. I don't play bridge anymore." And she said, "Come on, come on. I'll do anything for you." And finally, she convinces her to come to the tournament.
So when I enter the room, there's Pamela. All this had to take place for me with my client's accountant and Karen Allison making two dates. All this had to take place for me to meet my wife. And of course, I saw her and I go zooming across the room. And I say, "Hi, remember me?" And she says, "No." I said, "In Valkenburg." She said, "Valkenburg?" And then I said, "You want to have a drink or dinner?" And she says, "I'll take the dinner." And that was it. I made her pay anyway. I didn't have any Canadian money. So on our first date, we went to a bookstore and that was it from then on.
John McAllister: Did you buy a book for the other one or did you buy a book for yourself with the other one's help?
Matt Granovetter: I bought her a book on capitalism, and she gave me a book on socialism.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: All right, because I was a capitalist and she was a socialist.
John McAllister: Right.
Matt Granovetter: Today we're both capitalists. Nothing to do with that. Just that you grow up and you grow out of socialism.
John McAllister: Yeah. That's a good story, man.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah. Anyway, so then what happened to us? So after, we're in New York and we go to the stock exchange and all that, because everybody's going to the stock exchange. You've heard of all the rich boys who went to the stock exchange in those days.
John McAllister: Yeah, right, sure.
Matt Granovetter: And we got tired of it and we decided... My wife loved Virginia Woolf and all her writings. To the Lighthouse, everything. And Virginia Woolf had a husband and they had their own publishing company. So I said, "Well, if we want to have a family, we can't go trouncing around to bridge tournaments all the time. We have to have a base at home, so we have to do our bridge from home." So we decided to start our own bridge book publishing company and magazine, and that worked excellently. It was a miracle. I don't know how it worked.
John McAllister: So she got into bridge again once she met you at this [inaudible 00:40:02]
Matt Granovetter: At that time, I was also into the theater world because I had gone back to school at Hunter and gotten a Master's Degree in Children's Theater, and I was writing little children's theater musicals at Hunter College. However, even when I met Pamela and she came to New York, however, when Pamela got her eye on all the actresses that I was hanging around with, she said, "No, I think we should stick to bridge." And she immediately got a job as a house player at the Cavendish and I quit the theater world eventually. Eventually, not quite, but eventually.
And then that was our common interest. And then I ended up using theater and writing by being a writer and publisher as well, which is part of the art of writing and everything, as you know. So it all came out well, and we were able to have a family.
And when we were sitting with dinner with a friend in Philadelphia, I'll try to remember his name, but he told us, this was around 1992 this person told us that, "You know you can go to Israel." We were discussing moving to Israel possibly, and the person said, "You can do that now because there's a new thing called the internet, and you'll be able to publish through the internet." And we didn't know much about it. It was just starting.
And he convinced us and we ended up bringing our magazine to Israel and publishing our magazine and books in America from Israel. He was right. We were able to do that to some degree, and that's how we ended up combining the two and having a family at the same time. Pamela gave up, she didn't give up bridge completely because there was Israeli bridge, but basically tournaments she had to give up for 20 years to help raise the family, to raise children, because you can't always be away from the children a week at a time.
John McAllister: So would you come back to the United States for the Nationals back in those days?
Matt Granovetter: I would come back. She came back once or twice. I came back several times to play in America. And I was the first person to work on BBO. The year was 1999, and we were living in Netanya where [inaudible 00:43:19] put us. I got an invitation to play on a trials team with Ronnie Rubin, who was a longtime partner in New York. You know Ronnie Rubin?
John McAllister: Yes.
Matt Granovetter: And we didn't know how we're going to practice, but Fred Gitelman, who was a friend of Ronnie's, said, "You practice on my new invention, BridgeBase Online." So I was sitting in an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean, and Ronnie was in Las Vegas, and we both got online and we got on something called BBO, and there were only three people. You know how you come online now? There's 44,000 players, 8,000 players. There were three people on BBO.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: Fred, me and Ronnie, and he took us to the bidding room. He directed us where we could bid and practice our system on BBO long distance. It was amazing.
John McAllister: Is Ron Ira's, the Beast's son?
Matt Granovetter: Huh?
John McAllister: Is Ron the Beast's son?
Matt Granovetter: Ron? No, no, no. He has no relation.
John McAllister: He's not related to Ira Rubin?
Matt Granovetter: No, no. Different Rubin.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: Different Rubin family. Right. Hey, that's interesting that I played both Rubins. Right. I never realized that. I think of the people by their first name often and not their second name. So it all comes together in the strangest things. I'm trying to write a book about my life because the strange thing about the world of bridge and the world of Judaism is that there's a lot in common. People don't realize it. The way we became religious again was initially through Patty Cayne. Now, Patty Cayne is Jimmy Cayne’s wife.
John McAllister: Yeah. Now we know.
Matt Granovetter: And is a dear friend for 50 years with us. And right before we decided, maybe right when we moved upstate, which was about 1988 we moved upstate. Patty Cayne was playing bridge with my wife and talking about the Bible, and my wife was cringing, and I was cringing. We all thought that Patty had lost a little bit of her marbles. Right? She was talking about the Bible.
What had happened was she had seen a Holocaust survivor rabbi's wife on TV in New York and was enamored with her and brought her to her house to learn Torah together, and the next thing you know, she had 40 Park Avenue women coming every week to the women's class in her own apartment.
And when she was playing bridge with Pamela in Washington DC, she was talking in between hands. "Oh, you see, when I played the 2 instead of the 4, it's same thing in Hebrew. If you do this letter instead of that letter, it changes the meaning of it and the order that you do it." And then my wife's listening, but she's still not convinced.
So I was a closet Orthodox. I had had a little of it when I was a kid, and Patty Cayne said, "You have to come down from Albany and come to one of my classes." So Pamela went to one of her classes and met this rebbetzin, Jungreis her name was. And Rebbetzin Jungreis, the first thing she did was when she saw my wife, she grabbed her by her face and said, "I love you." They had immediate chemistry together. That's a good opening. That's always you like somebody who does that. Right? That's a good way to make friends.
John McAllister: I mean, potentially. It could be a little disturbing also.
Matt Granovetter: Right. It depends. As long as you know the person.
John McAllister: No. I mean, you know.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah, she's at Patty Cayne's house.
John McAllister: I could see the other side of it, but go on.
Matt Granovetter: Right, right. I could see that too. Right. But she gave a whole lecture about the portion in the Bible, in the Torah where Rachel and where Jacob goes to work for his future father-in-law to marry Rachel. He works for several years and he's going to marry Rachel. And then when he goes to the wedding canopy, there's a veil and he ends up, the father gives him Leah instead, the older daughter instead of Rachel, even though he had agreed to give Rachel. So what happened? I guess they kept the veil on because he didn't know it wasn't Rachel.
John McAllister: Right.
Matt Granovetter: Okay. He thought it was Rachel. So what happened was that before that, just to make the story clear, Rachel tells Jacob before the wedding that, "You know that my father might bring Leah, right? And I'll be covered up. So we'll have a code and you'll ask me the code and I'll answer under the wedding canopy, and that's how you'll know it's me." So that was the arrangement. So under the wedding canopy he goes and he asks, and Leah gives the answer to the code. Rachel's sister Leah knows the answer because Rachel told Leah, her sister. Sort of, she double crossed Jacob and told the answer to her. And the reason she told the answer was because it would be so embarrassing for her sister if there was a wedding going on, and suddenly he realized it wasn't the right woman and he left the wedding canopy, and she didn't want her sister to be embarrassed. So she was willing to give up her husband so that her sister wouldn't be embarrassed.
Well, this story had such an effect on my wife, Pamela, because we were brought up with the secular idea that you're a good person if you don't hurt anyone. That's it. That's all you have to do. Just don't. If you don't hurt anyone, you're good. We didn't know you actually had to go the extra mile and give up your husband just so that your brother or sister isn't embarrassed, which was Rachel's ethic there.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: Anyway, going back to the Bible, it worked out all right in the Bible because Jacob got to work for another seven years and got Rachel anyway, also. In those days, you could marry more than one.
John McAllister: I see.
Matt Granovetter: Right, right. But anyway, that was how she got Pamela got captured by it, by the kindness, by the story of the kindness that was from Rachel and Leah. And maybe you would think maybe that's not so kind to Jacob, but Jacob could handle it. He was a man. It's the woman that sometimes can't handle it, if you know what I mean. Men can take punches. Women don't take punches. Right?
John McAllister: Well, sadly, I have to pause our conversation
Matt Granovetter: Unless you're in the Olympics. Okay. Right. Okay. We'll pause now and we'll talk some more sometime. So you see, you asked me a question, John, and it brings out a lot of memories. I have to remember everything.
John McAllister: All right, well
Matt Granovetter: Anyway, I hope this is what, this worked out with what you want.
John McAllister: Yeah, well it's interesting. It's definitely interesting. That's for sure.
Matt Granovetter: Okay. I'm not talking much bridge, but a little.
John McAllister: No, we will get there and it's the jumping off point for all of this.
Matt Granovetter: Ask me next time about Israel because it was our bridge magazine and our bridge subscribers in Israel who helped us get over the culture shock in Israel. Okay.
John McAllister: All right.
Matt Granovetter: Remind me of that story amongst others. It doesn't matter. You can tell me anything. Every day there's another story in my life, it seems.
John McAllister: All right, well I'll be in touch.
Matt Granovetter: Okay, John, I'll let you go. I wasn't watching the clock. I'll see you later.
John McAllister: All right, thanks, man.
Matt Granovetter: Okay, I'll be in touch.
John McAllister: Bye.
Matt Granovetter: Okay, bye.
John McAllister: Hearing the story of Rachel and how that inspired her and subsequently you, I think to really become devoted.
Matt Granovetter: That's right. At that time we were living in Ballston, New York, which is between Saratoga and Albany, and this was our third or fourth year. We had bought a house there, and it was in the middle of nowhere and it was because our friends, Paul and Sandy Trent, had a house there in the area near Saratoga, and somehow we went up to visit them and found a house we liked there.
John McAllister: Okay.
Matt Granovetter: I don't know. Later on, we found that in Chassidus, everything is planned out. In other words, we don't believe in such a thing as a coincidence, but there's a whole plan, divine plan. And then it's good to actually see the plan, if you can, in everything you do in life. Sometimes you miss the bus to work or you miss an airplane or you get stopped in traffic and you have to say to yourself, "There's a reason for this."
Sometimes when I'm in traffic, I call this traffic control. The angels are conducting, making sure the cars aren't crashing, so they had to use you just to put you here to stop. Sometimes things happen and then you don't see the good result from it until maybe the next day or a week later or even a year later and then you realize, "Hey, that was good that that happened," even though at first it looked bad.
John McAllister: Yeah. Right.
Matt Granovetter: Anyway, that's not how we got caught up in it. After my wife came back from New York and Patty Cayne had her session with all with Rabbi and Rebbetzin Jungreis I had mentioned, and all the people there and the story of Rachel and Leah and how she was kind to her sister to give her the code under the canopy that she wouldn't be embarrassed. And we came back and then we had always realized after we had two children that there was something... That was a stunning thing for us. In other words, we realized that it can't just be Darwin's theory that we had two children, there's something wrong. All right. It's too miraculous that you have relations and suddenly you have these children.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: All right. And so we started to investigate different branches of Judaism.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: First we went to, there's different branches. There's this called a reform movement. There's a conservative movement, there's an Orthodox movement, and there's a Hasidic group known as Chabad, which is the most famous, which is the most popular of the Hasidic groups. And then there's a million other Hasidic groups in Brooklyn, but they're usually just in Brooklyn or in Israel. Chabad is all over the world.
So we were very lucky that we rejected the reform and the conservative because we went to the reform and the rabbi was a woman and her kids were running around and the father was praying and there was no order in it, right? We wanted some kind of order. Right? So we also at that time, met Dennis Prager. I don't know if you know Dennis Prager.
John McAllister: No.
Matt Granovetter: Dennis Prager is a popular talk show, conservative talk show host. And he wrote a whole series of weekly things called ultimate issues, and we started subscribing to it. And he would bring you in. He was Jewish and he's still around. And he would bring you into the idea of studying the Torah and Judaism in a purely logical way, not by faith, but by logic. For example, at that time, he used to tell the story. Say you were in a dark alley in New York City at night, and suddenly you saw these three big husky guys walking towards you, right, with bracelets around their necks and everything. All right?
John McAllister: Okay.
Matt Granovetter: And then would you be happy or not to know that they had just come from a Bible study?
John McAllister: Probably happy, I would think. Okay.
Matt Granovetter: All right. So religion, I don't say that religion can't cause bad things, but at that time, that was a good approach that he made. But he made other arguments and things to show that it's a good idea to believe in God. That was his approach. And he's an excellent talker. You should look him up. I think he has a whole show on the internet now, he's very prominent. Okay, so he goes to Prager University now. Anyway, after that, we saw an advertisement in a Albany newspaper that there was going to be a Chanukah party at the Y. Okay.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: So it said Chanukah party run by C-H-A-B-A-D. And we said, what's Chabad? Chabad? What is that? It's not really Chabad, but it's the guttural pronunciation of the C-H, Chabad, which you can't write in English. You could probably write it in, it's probably in maybe German or another language. But Chabad. So we didn't know. So we called up, we had friends in a conservative school, which is not Hasidic, and we asked them, "What is this? What is this Chabad? What is this? They're running a Chanukah party." And they said, "Oh, no, no, no, you don't want to go there." I said, "Why not?" He said, "Oh, they're crazy. They're really crazy." All right. "They're off beat completely." Okay.
So of course when my wife and I heard that, we said, "Ah, that's the place for us." We enjoy characters. We came from the bridge world and who did we like most? But people who were unusual, right? We like to be entertained. So we went to that party and there were no cups, there were no forks. We were shocked they actually had soda out. Coca-Cola. We were off that. We were health nuts a little bit. But anyway, they were incredibly warm people and they were the opposite of the Prager idea. They were spiritual. They were just totally, totally loving warmth. All right. So we made fast friends with them, with the family that was the head of the area of Albany. And we soon started learning from them.
But our first lesson was remarkable. We went to their house and he wanted to teach us something about Chesitis, which is a religious version of Kabbalah. And he took a piece of paper and he made a circle and the world and this. And then he pointed this way, and then it lasted about one minute. And we looked at each other and we turned to him and said, "We don't know what you're talking about, but we know that if we study, we'll learn."
Because what our students do in bridge is they come to us and they don't know what we're talking about in bridge when we say to count this and the shape of the hand and this and that. So we know from being bridge teachers ourselves that we should never reject anything because we don't understand at the beginning. We have to learn it and study it to understand it.
John McAllister: Right.
Matt Granovetter: So that was lucky that we came from the bridge world and from the bridge teaching world, so that we knew to be humble about how to learn about Chesitis. And prolonging this, I'll go, so we eventually studied and learn and joined with their philosophy.
But then the next thing we knew, in 1993, we had somebody not Chesitis, somebody had a lecture, they called it a lunch and learn at a synagogue. And they were talking about mitzvahs, which was, a mitzvah is a good deed that you do that God commands you to do, like give sudaka, like give money to charity and is one of hundreds. But we were discussing Maimonides, who was a philosopher. Maimonides determined, yes, it is one of the mitzvahs. And we looked at each other and said, "Well, if that's one of the mitzvahs, why don't we do it? We should move to Israel." So you see, I don't know how we got that idea, how we took that idea and ran with it, but it must have been implanted on us because who would say to that, right? But we were young and idealistic.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: You know what I mean? And we said, "We have to go. We have to go." Okay. So I investigate, and then that's what I told you that Kathie Wei, who's a prominent bridge player, she told us there's a tournament in Tel Aviv. And that's how we ended up going as a pilot trip to Israel. And then we ended up going, even though it has nothing to do with being Hasidic, to go to Israel, in fact, we learned later that most of the people who are Hasidic in Lubavitch, Lubavitch is another word for Chabad. Because Lubavitch is the city in Europe where it came from in the 18th century. Well, most of them have the philosophy of not necessarily to move to Israel. There is a large Chabad in Israel. But the main philosophy is wherever you are, make Israel there. In other words, make where you live a place of holiness.
And then on top of that, make your home a holy home. All right. And on top of that, there's something in the Bible that says, God says, "You shall make a tabernacle," he's talking to the people in the desert, "And make it holy." But what it really means on the Kabbalistic or Hasidic level is you shall make your mind, your body, yourself is your tabernacle. And you should make yourself work on yourself and work on your character traits and work on... And by doing that, you'll make the world better, just by starting with yourself. So that's when anyone says, what should I do to make the world better? There's so many people who make the world better and they end up making the world worse because they have this mission or that mission. Work on yourself, work on you children, they're good to work on too. You make yourself better, you make the world better.
So we didn't have to move to Israel. But of course we moved to Israel. And then when we got there, there was a note on our door in Netanya, our apartment door, it said, "Hi, my name is Sarah Wertheimer. I live down the block and I subscribe to your bridge magazine and if you come to me, I'll help you with all your, to get around town and everything and do everything for you." And we did. And she was a great help. So that's one connection where our bridge magazine and the subscriber helped us with life in Israel.
Here's how she helped us. She would take us to the municipality and she spoke full Hebrew. We didn't speak at all well. So she would say they need electricity in their apartment, they need their telephone, this or that. But the way she would do it is, for us it sounded like this, she would go up to the person in charge and she would say, ra, ra, ra, ra, ra, and they would go, [inaudible 01:08:16]. That's what it sounded to us. And then they started screaming at each other. And then everything quieted down. And she turned to us and said, "It's all settled."
So she knew how to deal with all the somewhat communist because there's sort of a communist element, there was then. It became more capitalistic as time went on. But we also had a third baby there. So then we were there for 12 years and then our children were coming back here and we came back here and that's what happened.
John McAllister: Did you become a citizen of Israel?
Matt Granovetter: Yeah, we became a citizen when we went because you got a lot of freebies. But we came back because, one of the reasons we came back is because we were unhappy with the government of Israel as a state. We were there for spiritual reasons, but the government of Israel wasn't protecting their people. We never understood the government. Luckily, we never really learned Israeli Hebrew well, because otherwise we would've been listening to all sorts of terrible things on the news, because there's constant news there all the time. Israelis love to listen to the news shows best. And as you could see, they never solved the problem between the, I hate to call them Palestinians because my mother and father were Palestinians. They moved to Israel in '48, 1948 and came back a year later. But all the Jewish people in Israel were called Palestinians then because it was named Palestine by the Romans 2000 years ago.
So there was no Arab group called the Palestinians. They took name from the Jewish people and called themselves Palestinians. So now in general, people think Palestinians are them versus the Jews. But no, the Jews were all Palestinians. Spangorian was a Palestinian. I'm reading a book that it was written in 1970 all about Israel and really about how Americans helped with all the airplanes and arms that went to Israel in 1948 to win the war in 1948. And the book, the entire book, all calls every Israeli a Palestinian. They don't say the Israelis.
It only became the Israelis versus the Palestinians when Arafat took the name of Palestine that he was a Palestinian. Of course he was never a Palestinian, he was Egyptian. So that's a long story. I didn't mean to go into all these politics, but if you look at history, it's all stupid. Israel was supposed to be the homeland of the Jewish people. And then all these workers came in in 1948, '49, '50, all these migrants came in and they suddenly got a leader in 1975, '80, maybe '80 of this horrible guy named Arafat. And they created a whole new culture claiming that they were there for thousands of years but they were never there. They were just there for the last 20 years. But the whole thing is silly because the government of Israel has never figured out how to handle the situation. So I don't know what to say. I don't want to …
John McAllister: Okay, we'll move on.
Matt Granovetter: I'll say this. I'll say this. They should have their own place.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: If you see a map, they should have their own place somewhere in the Mid East if they want. Or they could have it in Kentucky or wherever they want. But there shouldn't be one spot in Israel where there's a group of people teaching their children to kill Jews. That's stupid beyond belief, right? You can't have an enclave of people smack in the middle of your state or country that are taught to destroy you, the country. It's just dumb beyond belief. But with politics and everything. And I guess we won't go into the deep state now. Okay.
John McAllister: Good.
Matt Granovetter: All right, good. All right, now we'll go to bridge.
John McAllister: Initially we started out this conversation with Kathie Wei.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah.
John McAllister: And you talked about her, like how she helped you go to Israel, but more what was just, your father was a professional bridge player. You were obviously a good player at this time when you're [inaudible 01:14:11] Kathie. You started, she hired you to be her partner. You were her teacher. What was the-
Matt Granovetter: Right, right. Her husband, CC Wei had teams. He invented the Precision Club. And he had teams. And also I was friends with Ronnie Rubin from childhood. And he was working down on Wall Street. I was 22 years old. So he called me up one day and said, "Do you want to play the Vanderbilt?" Which is a big knockout in the spring. And he was working for Sam Stayman, a company called Strand, which was an investment company. And they said they were looking for a partner for him. So he knew me and he said, "I'll play with you and Sam will play with Victor Mitchell and Johnny Crawford will play with John Solodar."
John McAllister: Okay.
Matt Granovetter: Okay. And I said, "Great." But he said, "We have to practice." We had started to play Precision already. So we made our version of precision and we would meet in Chinatown near where he worked, and we would bid hands. And the best way to practice is always to bid hands, especially if you're planning to play a complicated system and you want to be comfortable and used to what you're doing. It's like hitting a ball against the wall. You have to hit the ball against the wall in tennis a thousand times to be comfortable. And we would meet in Chinatown and CC Wei would come down and meet us at the restaurant and he would make us practice. He had strips of hands that would practice. Then he taught us how to do it with a deck of cards.
You just take out the twos, threes and fours and you two hands. And he also taught us how to use chopsticks properly, because we were doing it wrong. He actually put the food in the rice bowl. We took the food and put it in the rice bowl and then ate from the rice bowl.
John McAllister: Got it. Was CC Wei a strong player?
Matt Granovetter: No. No, he was an average player, but he was smart.
John McAllister: Didn't the blue team already play? Didn't they already play Strong Club? How is it different?
Matt Granovetter: The blue team, you mean the aces team?
John McAllister: No, I mean Italian blue team, they played-
Matt Granovetter: The Italian team played three different versions of Strong Club, Forquet and Garozzo played the Blue Team Club. And then Belladonna played some other version. And then Pabis Ticci and his partner played some other version. So they were the first people playing Strong Club. Then CC Wei invented a simpler Strong Club that anybody could pick up because the Blue Team Club and their versions were canape. You opened a four-card major with a longer minor. You bid a controls over one club, et cetera.
But CC Wei's was brilliant because it was natural and easy. A club a heart showed five hearts. A club a spade showed five spades. It was simple. All right. And at that time, everybody, all the average players in New York that I knew took it up. And suddenly they could win a Swiss team because they could outbid their opponents. Right?
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: [inaudible 01:18:16] one slam. I thought it was brilliant. So anyway, we took it up. And after that CC Wei got a team together from China and Taiwan, some combination, and went to the world championships and came in second in the world championships promoting his system. And Alan Truscott helped him a lot. And he was the writer for the New York Times.
John McAllister: So what was kind of the juice for him in terms of having created the system?
Matt Granovetter: What was the what?
John McAllister: The juice for him? What motivated him do you think?
Matt Granovetter: I think he had read a book by a Chinese player called The Theory of Distribution, which I don't know. And then suddenly he brought it to bridge. I remember that book. It was all about what's the chance of this distribution or that distribution? And he brought it to bridge. He was a great, I went to his house and he and his friends were there playing Mahjong. I thought Mahjong was a game played in the Catskills by Jewish ladies and things. But crack bam, I don't know if you know Mahjong
John McAllister: I played it when I was a kid.
Matt Granovetter: It's tiles. Right.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: But the way these Chinese were playing it, it was for money. And it was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It was really professional.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: So he was pretty smart as a games player in general. And I played with him at Al Roth's Mayfair Club in the Wednesday night IMP game several times. We would go there and play. And he was just somebody that people didn't seem to know well, maybe because, I don't know why. Maybe because Kathie outshone him. She was glamorous and he was sort of in the background.
John McAllister: Did you ever win that IMP game?
Matt Granovetter: One time with him.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: He was so excited. Anyway.
John McAllister: I had a question. Oh, you've won a world championship, the mixed pairs, and you've also won the Spingold. Are those your two biggest wins?
Matt Granovetter: Not necessarily.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: The Spingold was easy. I don't know why. We just floated through the whole week and we were never down in any quarter from beginning to end.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: It was amazing.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: But we had a Dutch trio and me, Russell Ekeblad and Ronnie Rubin. And for some reason it just worked easy. I don't know why. And the mixed pairs was another story. I was playing with Karen McCallum and she had just gotten over cancer. And we were both there. We didn't have a partner, so we played.
John McAllister: Wow.
Matt Granovetter: And again, as you know, in bridge, the best way to win is for your opponents to make mistakes.
John McAllister: For sure.
Matt Granovetter: So our opponents were very cooperative and made a million mistakes. Right? So that was good. But my first exciting win was the Lancia Cup when I was 25. There was a tour of four cities in the United States where the Italian champions would come with Omar Sharif. And they challenged a team in each city. And if you beat them, the prize was a Lancia car.
John McAllister: Right.
Matt Granovetter: Right. So this was a promotion by Lancia and Alitalia Airline. So we represented the New York. First we had to win someone day Swiss, which was a miraculous also because only one team can win. And I was playing with Ronnie Rubin.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: And Peter Weichsel was playing with Alan Sontag and we were all in our twenties.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: And so we met, we went to play and we met Omar and we were all charmed by him and everything. And that was the most exciting tournament. I'll tell you my favorite story about Omar if you like.
John McAllister: Okay, please. Yeah, absolutely.
Matt Granovetter: Omar, I hope everybody knows Omar, he was a famous actor. Hey guys, did you see Funny Girl? Or his famous role was in, what's the Russian Civil War? A novel. Doctor Zhivago.
John McAllister: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah. That was his...
Matt Granovetter: Doctor Zhivago.
John McAllister: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah, that was his best.
John McAllister: Right.
Matt Granovetter: Right, right. So this was right after that, and he was very famous, but he loved a number of things
John McAllister: Oh, this is a story that you told on Sorry, Partner about the note at the table?
Matt Granovetter: Yeah. Oh, did I tell that already? Okay, [inaudible 01:24:21]-
John McAllister: You told it on the other podcast.
Matt Granovetter: Okay, told it on another podcast. Sorry, all right. Well, anyway, okay, I won't tell it, but Omar had started playing badly towards the end of the match, because he got a new... I can give you the punchline right now, from a woman who was waiting. It wasn't clear to me whether [inaudible 01:24:45], who loved gourmet food, horse racing, bridge, acting, and women, which one he liked, in what order? Maybe it was even, 20%. We used to go to a tournament and he would have his own chef. When we went to The Hague and I played with Zia in The Hague in 1987 or something, Omar was there, and he brought his own chef to the tournament to cook food after the session, so he could chat about the [inaudible 01:25:21] with everybody and eat gourmet food.
John McAllister: How did you and Pamela become such good buddies with Zia?
Matt Granovetter: Because when we first met, Pamela and I, she moved from Canada to New York. She had been living in Canada, and we had met in 1980, and in 1981, the World Championships.
John McAllister: Yeah, you told that story.
Matt Granovetter: While we were in New York.
John McAllister: Oh, okay.
Matt Granovetter: Okay, and at the Bermuda Bowl, there was this guy, Zia. And the Pakistan team had won the European something, and this guy Zia was there, and we became friends with him, and that's where. And then, he said, "The Pakistan team needs a coach. Why don't you be our coach?" I said, "Well, I'll be the coach. What do they want?" And he said, "Well, come to a meeting." So we go to the meeting, and the Pakistan team, I never said anything like this, that had their culture, they had no shoes on, and they like to hold their foot, and they're really oriental. And he said, "What is it that you want most from me as a coach?" And they said, "We want to meet the available American women."
John McAllister: That sounds like
Matt Granovetter: I said, "Oh, that's what you want from me?" "Oh, you will be the best coach."
John McAllister: Were you still in the theater at that time?
Matt Granovetter: What's that?
John McAllister: Did you still have your theatrical connections at that time?
Matt Granovetter: What connections?
John McAllister: You said that there were beautiful women in the theater. I said were you still in the theater at that time?
Matt Granovetter: No, no, no. For them, they wanted the beautiful women at the bridge tournament.
John McAllister: Got it.
Matt Granovetter: And they're playing in the women's championship.
John McAllister: Got it.
Matt Granovetter: But in my experience, there aren't usually too many beautiful women in the women's championship, nor are there beautiful men in the men's
John McAllister: Be careful. Be careful [inaudible 01:27:45]-
Matt Granovetter: Generally, the men have big stomachs and the women... But no, I think they're all, to me, they're all beautiful. But, and as you grow older, they're even more beautiful. But the Pakistani team was excited, and they actually reached the final in that tournament, and that was the first World Championship for Meckstroth and Rodwell that they won. But they were angry with us at first, that we were the so-called coaches, but they didn't realize that we weren't coaching them anything about bridge.
John McAllister: So how were you as a matchmaker?
Matt Granovetter: We were just telling, "This woman is married. No, this woman is not married," you know? All right, so that's how we became friends. And then, he moved to New York and wanted to get into the big money game, with Jack Dreyfuss, and Milton, Petrie, and all people with millions of dollars. And they were playing for 10 cents a... No, they were playing for a dollar a point and Zia was a rubber bridge player, and he was friends also with Michael Rosenberg, who also moved at that time to New York. And we were very close to Michael, although we didn't understand what he was saying a lot of the time, because his English was so Scottish. But we ended up on the American Stock Exchange because Michael wanted us on his... He was kind and brought us down to work there, but Zia, he just wanted to play rubber bridge in the big game.
So we introduced him to Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne, and he worked his way into the game, and he was very happy, because he could make a living in New York, when he was in New York, and he got an apartment in Trump Tower. He was very happy. So that's how we became friends. He sent me his last book, he sends me hands by email. I have to check out this, edit that, do this, do that. He likes to involve everybody in his books and his programs, but he's a character beyond belief, right?
John McAllister: Didn't Pietro Campanile work for your bridge magazine, in Israel Bridge Today?
Matt Granovetter: Pietro Campanile is Migry's husband.
John McAllister: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah, no, no, but he gave us a lot of advice and things. Migry played with my wife some, and he visited, and we socialized with the two of them. And I think he helped develop our strong club a bit. He was giving advice from his experience. Why, you know him?
John McAllister: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think I remember when I first... Because I played with Migry for a period of time, and I thought I remember him saying that he wrote for a bridge magazine in Israel that I thought was yours.
Matt Granovetter: Oh, he also wrote for Bridge Today. Right, right.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: He would send articles for Bridge Today. Of course, of course. Yeah, yeah. He was a wonderful... He also helped us to modify our spaghetti sauce. He was very upset when, after the pasta was cooked, that we would rinse it. He said, "No, no, don't rinse the pasta." So we learned a lot from him, besides bridge. He gave us a second good sauce, I remember.
John McAllister: Were you going to say something else?
Matt Granovetter: No, no.
John McAllister: So I got an email. So the reason that I just reached out about interviewing you, which was a while ago, is because I got an email from a fellow named Michael Botwin, who's a bridge player. You know him?
Matt Granovetter: Probably, and I don't recognize the name. Michael Botwin?
John McAllister: Yeah, so he said he suggested that you talk about CC Wei and Al Roth, but he said he's more interested in hearing where you are right now with some of your ideas in theory, including he was very impressed by obvious shift signaling concept, but your most recent book didn't refer to it at all. And he's also interested in your Gus system.
Matt Granovetter: Oh, well, the Gus system was based on a system when was 20 years old that Dave Cliff came over at my house and taught us how the Italian system was wrong, that they were treating singletons like kings.
They would cuebid a king or they would cuebid a singleton. But a cudebid of a king is so different from a singleton, because you might make a cuebid and your partner has A Q J x x, and in one case, you have five tricks. In another case, you have a singleton opposite the A Q J x x. So he said, "We have to do away with that." And he had developed a system. So Ronnie and I adopted his system, which became a system called The Ultimate Club.
And Ronnie was very successful, and won a number of American championships and a World Championship with Mike Becker playing the system. And then, Gus, I played mainly with my wife. And that was a system that was also developed with Ronnie Rubin later on, and [inaudible 01:34:10], which was, I guess it was a simpler version than the previous one. And what it was is that if one hand is the captain and one hand is the crew, so the captain would ask questions with a big hand, and the crew would tell his exact shape, and strength, and so forth. We did this even at the very beginning with Dave Cooke system, back years ago.
But it became, we just made it more sophisticated when we realized, and simpler, when we realized that it's the balanced hand in general that wants to hear from the distributional hand, not the other way around, because of the distributional hand hears from the balanced hand, you don't know what's the opposite your singleton. But if the balanced hand knows the singleton is in clubs, or hearts, or diamonds, he can look at his suit, and he knows just like a splinter bit. It makes sense. So that's the Gus system, and where we try to make it different compartments and make it... We made a number of booklets on it, but it didn't really take off, and it's really too hard for the average player, but it's great fun to play.
We played it with some other people. We played it with Joanna, my wife played it with Joanna Stansby successfully. And I played it, I just played one day, one time with Sylvia Shi, and we were second in the Blue Ribbon, and we played it. She was able to learn it quickly, and I played it with Russ Ekeblad, but he also wanted to play canape with it, so we had to change it. And we did very well with him. I did very well with him playing similar system. And it's great, it's fun, because if you're bidding and you know your partner's shape, it's so exciting to be able to figure out where should we play the hand, and where should we place the final contract? Okay, so you asked me about that. What did you ask me about before that?
John McAllister: Obvious Shift.
Matt Granovetter: Obvious Shift was something, was a book that mainly Pamela wrote when we were living in Israel. And all it did was... You know how you lead a suit against a contract, and your partner can only give you two signals, a high one or a low one? There's no way you could do three signals. It's usually high or low. So high means continue, in traditional methods. High is continue and low is shift, but what does low mean to shift to? Which suit do you shift to?
When I was playing with one of my dad's cronies, when I was 15 years old, at the duplicate in West Orange, New Jersey, I remember a hand where he led a card against the suit contract dummy, had Ace King, Jack, fourth, and I had Queen, third behind it. And declarer played the ace and I played low, instead of playing encouraging, okay? When he got back in, he shifted to dummy's weak suit, three little away from his king, and I didn't have anything to help. And he was so upset at me, as you would be. He took the card, he took from my Queen, third, he took the middle card out of my hand and said, "This is what you play. You tell me you want me to continue, you don't tell me to shift, all right?"
So I always remembered that, that was a big lesson. And sometimes, when dummy has Ace, King, Jack, fourth, and you have three little, you also encourage partner to shift... To continue. Why would you ask partner to continue from the ace? Dummy has Ace, King, Jack, fourth, and you have three little. He leads low, he goes Ace, and you say, "Please continue." Why? Because in the other suit, and dummy has three little and you have three little, and you don't want him to shift to that suit, because that suit, the three little suit, your dummy, is called the Obvious Shift.
John McAllister: Got it.
Matt Granovetter: So the Obvious Shift system goes way back to the beginning of bridge. There's nothing new about it, it's just using your brain. Don't just signal in the suit that was led, but signal about the whole hand. In your opinion, is it better to continue or better to shift to dummy's weak suit? And that was the whole thing with Obvious Shift.
John McAllister: Got it.
Matt Granovetter: Some people got it.
John McAllister: I was surprised in researching for this interview that you've never won an NABC event with your wife?
Matt Granovetter: I wish you wouldn't bring that up, but maybe she won't listen to this. If we ever have dinner, when we next have dinner together, please don't mention that.
John McAllister: Okay.
Matt Granovetter: The closest we came was we were paid in the National Mixed Pairs a few years ago, and near the end of the event, I forgot that my nine was high, or my eight, and I didn't cash it, and I played another suit, and then my wife got squeezed, and then [inaudible 01:40:31] over trick. Well, on the last hand, Kerri Sanborn and her husband, bid a remarkable slam to win just edges, by a couple of matchpoints. So it's a sore point. I would like it never to mention this again.
John McAllister: Okay.
Matt Granovetter: [inaudible 01:41:01]. Mainly because another reason is we didn't have that many chances, of course, because she was home as a mother for 20 years. And then, professional bridge, I got hired with people like Ronnie or Russ on teams, and she'd get hired on women's teams. So sometimes, you don't have that many chances to win. You'd have to be, right, playing a lot more than we were playing. I mean, another one of my favorite wins was the Cavendish with Michael Rosenberg. We won with the lowest score ever in the Cavendish Money Tournament, which was [inaudible 01:42:00]-
John McAllister: The pairs?
Matt Granovetter: As a pair.
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: But I also won with my wife, see, in the Cavendish teams, with Zia, and with Jimmy Cayne, and with Ace Greenberg, and with Sparky Rosenblum. Did you know him, [inaudible 01:42:19] Rosenblum?
John McAllister: No, that's the only name I don't know.
Matt Granovetter: Right, right, so we won that a couple of times. That was fun, but we didn't play... Playing pairs with your wife is much harder than playing teams, because every trick counts, right? Right?
John McAllister: Yeah, yeah.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah, it's a more volatile game, and you have to take chances, and make bad bids to do well sometimes. So it's a different game. When we came back from Israel, my wife's idea was that we should go play in regionals, and we would get hired if we won enough. So that's what we did. And we played teams, so that was fun. And teams is much more relaxing, as you know. Just basically, you're trying not to do anything wrong.
John McAllister: Yeah, so how much did you and Michael Rosenberg win when you won the Cavendish?
Matt Granovetter: How much what, did we win?
John McAllister: How money did you win on... Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: I don't remember. This was when it was held back in New York. Not that much. I think at Cavendish is where you have to put up money to win money. It's just other people bet on you, right?
John McAllister: Yeah, I think so. I've never played in it.
Matt Granovetter: The biggest amount of money I ever won in one day in bridge was with my wife, so you can bring this up. When we got married, and right after we got married, there was a bridge tournament in New Orleans, an American National, and before the tournament, there was a one-day professional pairs, and we won. First prize was $10,000, and we won the $10,000.
John McAllister: Did you actually get the car from Lancia? Sorry, I'm interrupting you.
Matt Granovetter: Oh, going back to Lancia?
John McAllister: Yeah.
Matt Granovetter: Yeah, we got the car. I sold the car and used the money... I sold the car in 1975, and I used the $5,000 that I got for the car, which was a lot of money in '75, to move into Manhattan and get my own apartment. So I never used it. The only guy who used it was Peter Weichsel. He was the only one who took the car. He just loved riding around in that car. You could see him, with his hippie hair, riding his Lancia. Nobody even knew what Lancias were. Anyway, my favorite tournament has to be the one where I won with my wife in one day in New Orleans, and that $10,000 went quickly to all-new furniture. I never saw that $10,000.
So I found out she was very good at spending money. She knew how to spend it very well, and she came home, all my clothes were gone, all my furniture was gone. I suspected it because one day I came home, we lived in a little place, our first apartment was on 61st street, between Park and Madison. And we lived above Madame Romaine's Pancake House. Do you know that? You remember that?
John McAllister: No, no.
Matt Granovetter: Okay. So we lived there, and it was a brownstone, a beautiful brownstone. And when I walked home one day from the bridge club, I saw a bum, one of my favorite bums on the street, and I knew, and he was wearing my jacket, or something that looked like it. I said, "This is very suspicious." So I had all-new clothes. Thank God, okay. I have a student at one o'clock, at two o'clock. What time is it now?
John McAllister: It's 12:36-
Matt Granovetter: [inaudible 01:46:44].
John McAllister: ... but I'm ready, I'm done with you, I'm over you.
Matt Granovetter: Okay, but I would say the best contribution to bridge I hope will be Method Bridge. I would like to put in an ad for that. That's the only book where I try to teach how to think when playing bridge. Not system, not anything else, not tricky stuff, just how to think. And I believe that if you can memorize the top five, or six, or seven shapes in bridge, like 4-4-3-2, you don't have to count. And if you don't have to count, and you could just remember those numbers, you have so much more brain power to be able to create strategies in place. You and I played a lot of rubber bridge. We didn't need to memorize them. They were drilled into us as we play bridge, right, as you play? Because in rubber bridge, you play thousands of hands, and then eventually, you know all these shapes by heart, without even thinking about memorizing them.
But the people who take up bridge today, who I met and I love, these are the people who I met during the COVID era, who are older people, and they took up bridge in their 60s and later, and they didn't have this background of rubber bridge, and they don't have the people screaming at them that they had played the wrong card. All right, so they need a method to catch up, and for them to catch up, they have to take all these shapes and memorize them in their spare time, so that they come to the bridge table, they're prepared, and they don't have to count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, which I hear my students doing sometimes. And it's very frustrating, because it's very hard to play bridge when you're counting all the time.
John McAllister: Right, yeah, sure.
Matt Granovetter: Right, right.
John McAllister: Sure.
Matt Granovetter: All right, I'll talk to you again.
John McAllister: All right, Matt, thank you so much. It's been fun, I've enjoyed that.
Matt Granovetter: Thank you, John.
John McAllister: We've covered a wide range of subjects.
Matt Granovetter: A wide range of subjects. Yeah, all right, safe travels. I'll talk to you.
John McAllister: Thank you.