Bridge players gathered in Haines last weekend for three days of officially sanctioned bridge tournament play.
The event, held at the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, drew competitors from neighboring bridge communities in Juneau and Whitehorse.
Not all competitors sat for the full slate of six sessions, which were 3-and-a-half hours each. For those who did, it was a test of skill, and also endurance. Saturday, with three of the sessions, was described by competitors as “a challenge.”
And during those rounds, players had to maintain a consistent level of focus.
“You win by not making mistakes,” said competitor Fred Shields.
Even during the thick of those Saturday rounds, as top players went head-to-head across ten tables, if an outsider had walked in blindfolded they would have thought they were alone in the room.
It wasn’t a competition made for TV, or radio for that matter, with a thick silence filling the room for the duration of the rounds. But beneath the silence there was an underlying intensity, more clear to those fluent in the language of bridge – a game where players compete in pairs, but are prohibited from ordinary communication with each other. Instead, they communicate with teammates through complex signals in the gameplay.
That tends to attract a certain type of player, said some of the competitors. And from those quiet rounds comes a pretty tight bond.
“When we all get together, you’re all the same kind of nerdy, you have the same love of this game,” said regional bridge board member Toni Jo Dalman. “There’s lots of respect between competitors.”
The top finishers on the weekend were Canadian pair Jordan Patchett and Irene Szabla. A number of Haines teams put in strong performances, including Roger Schnabel and Fred Shields, Gregg Bigsby and Marilyn Kamm, and Stan Jones and James Wilson.