

Billionaires bank on bridge to trump poker By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY Poker may be all the rage with junior high school kids, but the two richest men in the country are betting a million dollars they have a better card game to offer young people: bridge. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, left, and investor Warren Buffett play in a bridge tournament. By Nati Harnik, AP That's contract bridge, the four-player card game whose popularity peaked a half-century ago and is now played largely by senior citizens, country clubbers, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett. The two billionaires are passionate bridge players who compete in tournaments and online under the names "Chalengr" for Gates and "T-Bone" for Buffett. Now they want to fund a program to teach bridge in schools. Pastimes of the 1950s are already being revived among kids: Poker is popular, and schools have turned to ballroom dancing to teach teamwork. Now Gates and Buffett have hired Buffett's bridge partner, Sharon Osberg, to start a program to teach contract bridge in junior high schools. They've anted up $1 million to fund it. "Bill Gates and I kind of cooked it up together," says Buffett, who thinks bridge would teach kids math skills, logical thinking and how to work with others. "We hope we could get a school program someplace, where the kids were taught the game and ... develop a lot of competition between schools." In bridge, two pairs of partners take turns bidding how many tricks, or rounds of cards, they think they will win. Partners signal to each other what kind of cards they hold and which suit of cards they want to be "trump," or winner over all other suits. Gates learned bridge from his parents but took it up seriously when he began playing with Buffett 10 years ago. "Bridge is a game where you can keep improving and feel great about it without ever hitting the limit of what can be done," he said in an e-mail. The idea to teach bridge in school is modeled on inner-city programs teaching chess and dancing. Chess-in-the-Schools, a New York program started in 1986 by philanthropist Lewis Cullman, teaches chess in elementary and junior high schools. A 10-year-old program in the city teaches ballroom dancing, and a similar dance program began in Chicago this fall. The billionaires' bridge program has yet to get a bid, says Osberg, a two-time world-champion bridge player and bank executive who has played bridge with Buffett for 15 years. The first school district she approached, San Francisco, said no deal. Buffett was surprised. "You'd think that even if a proposal came in from Bill Gates that they didn't want to do, they'd follow through because they'd think, 'We'll sell him something else,' " he says. Marley Kaplan, president of Chess-in-the-Schools, says she has pitched the idea of bridge to New York schools but found little enthusiasm among principals. "They said, 'We're not playing cards in class.' " But at lunchtime, those budding Kasparovs are dealing Texas Hold 'Em anyway, she says. "In the cafeteria, the cards come right out." Kids who are crazy about poker should love bridge, says Buffett, who spends nearly every evening playing online — 4,800 hands last year, he figures. "There's intellectual development involved and working as partners with people," he says. "If a lot of kids are exposed to bridge, a number of them are going to benefit in a very significant way." Most bridge players have been out of school about as long as Buffett, 75. The average age of American Contract Bridge League members is 67. The league is also trying to appeal to kids: Last year, nearly 4,500 students learned the game in classes taught at schools by league members. In September, the league launched a website, www.bridgeiscool.com. "The problem is, all the action takes place inside your head," Osberg says. "It doesn't translate well to television." And unlike poker, there's no money involved. "We play only for glory," says Linda Granell, marketing director for the bridge league. What bridge has over chess and poker is that it requires players to learn to work with someone else, Buffett says. "You have to learn to understand your partner, to be tolerant, sympathetic, encouraging," he says. "Those are skills that are not bad to have in life." If a program gets going, Buffett and Gates have promised to take on the winners of a school tournament. "We'd go down and play the best team," Buffett says. "It would be fun for me and Bill to play the champions. And it might spur them on some."