ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

A player studies her cards at the Brambleton Center. "There's a lesson in each hand," says Peggy Davis, 73, of Fincastle.

ERIC BRADY The Roanoke Times

Above: Bridge fans play at Roanoke County's Brambleton Center. Top: Betty Murphy checks her hand during a game at the Blacksburg Community Center.

Several years ago, Ann Dillon was playing bridge in a tournament in Gatlinburg, Tenn., when an announcement warned that a bomb threat had been received and that the players had to evacuate the building.

"Nobody moved," Dillon remembered. "Everybody kept playing. The second time they told us to get out, we got out."

Reluctantly, she added.

What kind of person would risk being blown to Pigeon Forge in order to keep playing a card game? The same kind of person who joins a bridge club and plays four hours a day. A person who knows a four-spade contract from a two-club overcall. A person who reads the "Goren Bridge" column in The Roanoke Times and actually understands what the heck it means.

And when the newspaper decides to cancel that column, the kind of person who will not hesitate to contact the paper's editors and let them know his or her extreme displeasure.

Apparently, there are a lot of people in the Roanoke and New River valleys like that.

On June 1, the newspaper discontinued the bridge column, that staple of the Extra section that tells you how to play the hand you're dealt. The column had not tested well, as we say in the news biz, during a survey of readers. The Extra section replaced "Goren Bridge" with a new puzzle called "Kakuro."

According to a May 31 article announcing the decision, "We tested the bridge column in a reader panel a few months ago, and it received very low scores (not many of the few hundred panelists read it)."

Well, a few hundred bridge players who did read the column called the paper's bluff and demanded the return of the "Goren Bridge" column. Yes, many agreed that the column probably appealed to an older audience, but as Blacksburg bridge player John Perry wrote in an e-mail:

"I realize not many young people play bridge, but not many young people are subscribing to your newspaper!"

Ouch.

Within a week, nearly 400 perturbed bridge players trumped the paper's decision. The column returned on June 15, albeit tucked away in the classifieds section. Most bridge players were just glad to have it back. Some wanted it returned to Extra.

"I'd ditch that 'Kakuro' puzzle," said Ed Abel, who plays regularly at the Blacksburg Community Center. "'Sudoku' is enough. Put 'Kakuro' in the classifieds and let people hunt for it."

Bridge players. What is the deal with these people?

Bridge for the brainy

Lorraine Holub, who runs one of the bridge clubs in Blacksburg, suspected turnout might be low for the Friday afternoon game. It was a holiday week, after all, and many folks would probably sneak out of town during the three-day July 4 weekend. Yet, 26 players packed the comfy room at the community center and settled in for nearly four hours of intense competition.

Sage and Lenore Bassett drove nearly an hour from Botetourt County to play in Blacksburg. The couple actually met at a bridge club in Long Island, N.Y., more than 25 years ago. They even credit bridge with bringing them to the Roanoke Valley.

"We met someone from Roanoke at a tournament and they told us all about the place," said Lenore Bassett. "They told us, 'If you ever leave Long Island, come see Roanoke.' We did and we stayed."

City officials might want to take note of the possibility of bridge being a real population driver.

Granted, the Blacksburg group would never be confused for the audience of a Jonas Brothers concert. Most players were retired and had passed the age for Social Security benefits years ago.

Still, Holub, whose 91-year-old mother, Betty Murphy, is still an active player, sees a bridge to the future.

She was pleased to see some younger players competing during a large tournament in Blacksburg in June. Earlier that month, Radford University played host to a two-day bridge camp that attracted 44 people. Young people should be encouraged to learn the game, bridge players say.

A case could made that bridge players are the smartest people in the world. The game is almost impossible to follow for non-playing observers (this is probably true of all games, from hopscotch to football, but figuring out bridge is far more complicated than, say, solving a Cover 2 defensive football scheme). The Blacksburg bunch could have been making up rules as it went along, and a neophyte would not have known the difference.

Hemingway wrote short stories with fewer pages than the bridge rulebook has. Simply put, bridge is a type of "trick taking" card game, in which teams of two place bids that predict how many tricks they can win from their hand. Several clubs in Roanoke and Blacksburg favor "duplicate bridge," a form where different teams play the same pre-dealt hands. In this game, teams not only compete against the opponents at their table, but against the teams that have played the same hands.

That rudimentary explanation is all you'll get here, otherwise we won't have room for the wedding announcements.

The Bridge World magazine lists more than 1,000 bridge-related terms in its glossary, from "ABA" (acronym for American Bridge Association) to "zilch" (just what you'd think, a hand with zero potential). The game is a language unto itself.

Holub, the Blacksburg club leader, tried to explain the strategy of one hand by saying "it's all based on percentages ... if even cards are out, you have an even split ... if odd numbers ... you play the percentages ..." or something to that effect. To a clueless observer, the whole conversation played out like "The Far Side" classic comic about "What dogs hear."

"... Blah blah blah PERCENTAGES blah blah blah SPLIT ..."

Regardless, bridge clearly requires intellect, skill and strategy -- and it's good for your brain. A group of doctors announced in 2003 that playing games such as bridge significantly lowers the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia.

"Between bridge and fish oil, you're on your way," said George Zolovick, 68, a retired chemical engineer from Pembroke who has played card games since his youth and has been reading bridge columns for 45 years.

Column like you see 'em

"You know, no one plays Goren," Rachael Garrity of Fairlawn said during a break at the Blacksburg game. "People play other styles."

Turns out that even after all the hullaballoo over the bridge column, most bridge players these days don't even follow Goren's instructions. The man's been dead for almost 20 years, but his column has managed to outlive him. Which brings to mind -- what is the bridge column, anyway? And who was Goren?

Charles Goren was perhaps America's best-known bridge player and the man responsible for popularizing and even revolutionizing the game from the 1930s until his death in 1991 at age 90. He wrote books about the game, changed bidding strategies, was a world champion player and, in addition to writing columns, he even hosted a TV show about bridge, "Championship Bridge with Charles Goren."

His most famous playing partners were Helen Sobel and the actor Omar Sharif, who co-wrote some of the columns. Today, "Goren Bridge" is written by former Goren associate Tannah Hirsch and is distributed to more than 200 newspapers by Tribune Media Services.

In addition to being loved by bridge fans, the column often boasts some of the purplest prose in the newspaper. For instance, three of the following four quotations are from recent bridge columns, the other is from Shakespeare. Can you tell which is which?

a.) "The gods of chance have not been kind to me lately"

b.) "There are days when an expert's life is not a happy one"

c.) "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"

d.) "It is amazing what havoc a touch of greed can wreak ..."

(The correct answer is c. The line is from "Macbeth." The other three appeared in "Goren Bridge" in the last month.)

The column, essentially, provides a game situation and describes the way a hand should be played. Readers can compare the author's strategy with their own. It's like if the sports section published a baseball column that allowed readers to play manager and decide what they'd do with men on first and third, one out, eighth-place batter at the plate. (That sounds like a cool idea for a column, actually.)

"There's a lesson in each hand," said Peggy Davis, 73, of Fincastle, who learned to play bridge sitting in her father's lap when she was 3. "A lot of us don't agree with what they propose, but the people who write it are experts."

Davis is one of the hundreds of people who wrote a letter to the newspaper. She, like most of the 28 Roanoke Valley players who gathered for the duplicate bridge game at the Brambleton Center, are glad the column is back, whether they agree with the proposed strategies or not.

In fact, they'd like to see even more coverage of bridge in the local paper.

"In Fayetteville, North Carolina, they used to run the bridge winners in the newspaper," said Ann Garst of Roanoke.

"They used to do that here," replied Dillon, the woman who played through a bomb threat, "when we had more bridge players."