Bridge Ace Makes His Bid With a Computer Version

It is 9 a.m. in the living room of a sparsely furnished townhouse, the makeshift laboratory where bridge player extraordinaire Grant Baze has come to test his latest venture, Tel-A-Bridge, an interactive computer bridge game.

Baze, who recently moved to Costa Mesa from the Bay Area, is seated at a sterile-looking computer workstation, deep in thought, but it is obvious he is having a good time. Playing bridge happens to be his whole life. It is what he does best, what he loves, and even though his opponents today are not fellow bridge experts but computer scientists attempting to work out bugs in his program, Baze still gets a charge out of the sheer competition, locating a missing queen, winning an extra trick.

If you knew him, you probably would not be surprised to see that he has come dressed up in his Sunday best to play the computer. He appears particularly natty today, wearing a newly pressed suit and colorful tie. “I always wear a jacket and tie when I play bridge,” says Baze with sincerity. He’s not kidding.

This is one way he shows respect for his clients, in this case a dozen or so die-hard members of the American Contract Bridge League, an organization that just completed a 22,000-table national tournament in Orlando, Fla.

The clients effectively pay Baze to be what amounts to a ringer, but he is also their instructor, friend and confidant. A wealthy subset of serious bridge players pay partners in order to have a better chance of winning bridge tournaments, something Baze himself has done a whole lot of. Since 1983, the year he became a paid partner, he has won enough tournaments and Master Points (the non-redeemable object of all tournament bridge players) to place him 7th on the ACBL’s all-time list of Master Point winners, and he is fast closing in on 6th.

If none of this means much to you, consider this. More than 17 million people play contract bridge, a game that became popular in the early part of this century. Contract bridge may still be the most popular card game in the country, if casual forms of poker are excluded.

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What does it take to become a crack bridge player? Baze says the key element is intense bursts of concentration and mental flexibility. Bridge also requires serious study, four players, a deck of 52 cards, and the ability to be a sort of mathematical detective. Baze is hoping that his new computer version will make it more accessible to the younger generation, which up to now has turned its back on the game in favor of Nintendo games and such. With the advent of Tel-A-Bridge, maybe that will change.

Now, it will be possible to play with friends in say, Seattle, San Francisco or anywhere with a telephone hookup, really, through a complex computer network linking all the players. Hands will be randomly dealt by the computer, bids and plays will be submitted on line, the responses will be almost instantaneous from a central computer and the results will be available to all users.

It will even be possible to kibitz world-class games being played elsewhere on the system, and to obtain a printout of their specific lines of play on your home printer. This should be an invaluable teaching tool, something to take the place of expensive bridge books typically sold at tournament sites.

Baze became a bridge addict because the game presents “an endless succession of complex problems,” the majority of which he manages to solve. He is not alone. Most people play the game informally with friends, but the ACBL, comprising serious devotees who traipse around the country on the Master Point trail, currently has almost 200,000 members. He is hoping to sell Tel-A-Bridge to the entire 200,000, and to anyone else who dabbles in computer games.

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Baze, 49, came to both professional bridge and Costa Mesa in a roundabout fashion. As the oldest son of Marine Col. G.S. Baze (now retired and living in San Diego), Baze had a disciplined and highly structured upbringing, which included regular bridge games with his mother.

He attended Stanford in the early ‘60s, where most of his time and energy were absorbed mastering the intricacies of campus bridge. But soon the game became too easy for him, and when he learned he could actually make money playing it--at a San Francisco card club where the game was played for table stakes--he dropped out and began doing just that, to the extreme displeasure of his more conventional father.

This he did until 1979, making a middle-class living and supporting a family. Then, he burned out on the game and returned to Stanford, where he finished his undergraduate degree after an 18-year hiatus. After that, he worked for a couple of years at Lockheed as a computer programmer, where he was basically miserable.

What fueled his displeasure at Lockheed was the basic idea that the rewards of corporate life are not commensurate with the effort necessary for advancement. Baze said he is a person whose participation has to be at the highest level, or he finds it problematic to maintain a level of interest. So, on Dec. 31, 1982, he quit Lockheed and began playing tournament bridge for a living. He has never looked back.

In 1984, Baze set a record that still stands, winning a whopping 3,270 ACBL Master Points and the league’s top prize, the McKenney trophy, awarded to the year’s leading player. He has won the award twice since.

Based on this phenomenal debut, he became a hot item on the tournament circuit, and many clients clamored to play with him. Baze is lucky in this aspect. Most professional bridge players have to solicit business, something which runs counter to the nature of a good number of top players. Baze has never had to do this, largely because of his strait-laced, dependable demeanor and unimpeachable reputation. “I’m not a Fuller Brush man,” he says with disdain.

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It’s sort of a fluke that he has ended up in Orange County. Six years back, he married his wife, Shaleen, a fellow bridge enthusiast he actually met fifteen years ago at, of course, a bridge tournament. The two were involved in other relationships at that time.

Shaleen was living in Atlanta then, and Baze spent the first three years of their marriage there. But later, to reciprocate, she agreed to spend three years in Baze’s hometown of San Francisco, a city she was not to enjoy. (Cold weather, clannish bridge crowd.) So Baze agreed to move, although he did not know where. His one stipulation was that it had to be somewhere in California. She agreed.

One day, his wife came home and told him: “We’re moving to Costa Mesa.”

“Where the hell is that?” Baze asked.

She then explained that the city was warm, near a beach, that there were duplicate bridge clubs sprinkled throughout adjacent cities and that the people were great, really friendly.

“The people here have been great,” she said. “The day we moved in, an entire group of local bridge players came to help us set up our apartment. In San Francisco, that never happens to anybody.”

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So now Orange County has gained one of America’s most prominent bridge experts, and you may even run into him at a local club game, when he is not trotting around the country playing in big bridge tournaments. He still has worlds to conquer, though, so who knows how long the man is going to hang around. He has yet to win a world championship (though he has played in two--Venice in 1988 and Geneva in 1990) and has yet to find that perfect partner, someone with whom he can further scale the heights of the bridge world.

Baze expects Tel-A-Bridge to be on the market soon, and says that it will require at least a 386 processor, Windows software, a mouse and a telephone. The on-line user fee is expected to be between three and five cents a minute.

For those who wish to play bridge locally, games are played daily at the Bridge Center of North Orange County in Anaheim. For more information, call (714) 220-1714. On Thursday nights, games are played at the Coast Mesa Women’s Club, 610 W. 18th St. For information, call Chris Larsen at (714) 957-0560. Plan on playing a million or so hands before you expect to beat Baze at his game.