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Bill Bailey has an unusual bridge history. He discovered bridge in book form in his early 20s. He’d heard it was the “chess of card games” and so decided to buy an Intro to Bridge book. This started a 30-year habit of reading bridge books while nary touching a card. He was fascinated by declarer play problems in particular. His 3rd book was Bridge With the Blue Team. Then he started reading all of Kelsey’s works.
He spent 30 years in Silicon Valley as a software engineer, did well, and was able to retire in his early 50s from the intense high-tech rat race. Finally he was able to devote time to actually playing bridge. All the books provided a foundation but playing at the table is an entirely different experience. He recalls it was hard for him to track opponents’ cards at first, as that is something one obviously doesn’t have to do when reading books.
Over time he experimented working with various pros and now fields a top-tier team. He won his first National title in the Jacoby Swiss in St. Louis. Somewhat hilariously, his life partner Arti Bhargava also won a National title in St. Louis on the same day in a different event. He hopes to do well with his team at the transnationals in Poland this August.
And one last side-bar: in the middle of that 30 year career in high-tech, he took a couple years off and wrote Deep Finesse in the late 1990s. Deep Finesse is software that does perfect double-dummy analysis of bridge hands. Eventually he worked with the ACBL to incorporate the Deep Finesse analysis engine inside their hand record generator to include the double-dummy results that are now ubiquitously part of any hand record.
