The Magic of Bridge with Brian Reynolds

The Magic of Bridge with Brian Reynolds

Join hosts David Lowry and Don Drew on Peaceful Life Radio as they chat with Bridge Expert Brian Reynolds. Discover how playing Bridge weekly can significantly reduce the incidence of Alzheimer’s and dementia, while also fostering social connections. Learn the basics of Bridge, its cognitive benefits, and how structured games can enhance your mental agility and social life. Brian, along with his wife Samantha, offers insights into their work at BridgeTeachers.com, making this intricate game accessible to everyone. Whether you're a seasoned player or a complete novice, this episode has something for you!

00:00 Introducing Brian Reynolds
00:24 Introduction to the Show and Hosts
01:00 Meet Brian Reynolds: Bridge Expert
01:39 What is Bridge? A Brief Overview
02:20 The Social and Cognitive Skills in Bridge
04:39 Brian's Personal Journey with Bridge
07:16 How to Start a Bridge Night
10:20 Building Connections Through Bridge
18:24 The Rise of Online Bridge
20:03 Balancing Competition and Fun
24:16 Conclusion and How to Learn More

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Transcript

Brian Reynolds: 0:29

There's been several pretty heavily vetted studies, one from the Harvard School of Medicine and a couple outta Scotland where if you play Bridge at least once a week, regularly have 75% less incident of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. Bridge is an amazing way to keep your mind sharp in the same way that going to the gym and picking up a barbell and doing some curls keeps your biceps healthy.

David Lowry: 0:54

That was Brian Reynolds, our guest today on Peaceful Life Radio. And you're going to learn all kinds of things about Bridge today, but more about that in a moment. I'm David Lowry, and with me today is my good friend Don Drew. Don, how are you?

Don Drew: 1:09

I am doing great today. David. We got a really interesting program.

David Lowry: 1:12

I know, and it's something I think our guests who are in the second half of life are really gonna appreciate because we all wanna be social, don't we? I wanna have fun in my life and not just, mow my lawn do all the chores and call it a day. So, we're gonna have some fun today. Don, why don't you introduce Brian, and tell us more about him.

Don Drew: 1:30

Brian Reynolds is a teacher and co-owner with his wife of Bridge Teachers.com, a business which offers hundreds of video courses on all things Bridge. Brian learned Bridge in college and has been an avid game player his whole life. His good friend Morgan McDouglas says that from his digital Bridge community to his engaging teaching practices, Brian brings a fresh look at how structured games can foster deep and personal connections between players. Today we'll be talking with Brian about his experience with Bridge and how interactions through games of all kinds can provide social and cognitive benefits to those in the second half of life. Brian, welcome to Peaceful Life Radio.

Brian Reynolds: 2:07

Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Don Drew: 2:09

Brian, not all our listeners are gonna really know what Bridge is. Can you give us a brief intro into what Bridge is?

Brian Reynolds: 2:16

Sure Bridge is probably the best version of a trick taking game. So in other words, four people two partners, two partnerships, and somebody leads a card and everyone has to play a card. Highest card wins. So if you've ever played war, my grandmother always played war with me. It's that. It's just extended out to four people, and cards are only played once, so 13 tricks. And then Bridge has two distinct phases. The first phase is the auction, which sets some parameters for the second phase, which is the play, and that's Bridge.

David Lowry: 2:50

Brian, tell us what about Bridge is so enjoyable to you and when you have people over what they seem to enjoy as well.

Brian Reynolds: 2:58

Well, the first thing I'll say is it's a partnership game. So I grew up playing games with my grandmother and with my family, and I actually got into chess at a very young age, and I was good for my age. I was never setting the world on fire. But chess is a very one-on-one type of experience, whereas Bridge, you're working with a partner. So there's a social aspect baked into the game. You need to be successful at handling relationships in order to be successful at the game. And then I love how many different skill sets are required for Bridge. You need to learn a language. So then when you're bidding, you're communicating the resources that you're looking at in your cards. And you and your partner are trying to decide your combined resources and what that means for where you should go. Then when you get to the play, there's the strategic element, which I would liken it to chess where you're making moves to try to maximize the number of tricks you take. So just right there, there's two very distinct skill sets that interact with each other. If you're a very good bidder, the play becomes much easier. If you're a very good player, you can get away with some bids that are say, less than optimal. Probably the most important thing is Bridge is the game of mistakes. You're constantly dealing with, okay, I did something that was not optimal. I messed up. Or a lot of times you have imperfect information, so you made the best decision you could, but now you realize you need to make a new decision. And to me that's much more analogous to the human experience. We don't live a life of perfection. We don't live a life where you're not gonna make mistakes. I mean, we all make mistakes every day. Bridge is phenomenal in that standpoint and it actually trains you in a lot of ways to handle life better because the skills that apply to Bridge apply to life. And then the social aspects. So Bridge to me has a bunch of different skills that you need to have.

Don Drew: 4:58

That's really a great way of putting it. Now your friend Morgan that I mentioned earlier, talked how, in particular, you have built what he called deep and purposeful connections. Can you talk about that? You started when you were in college so you've been doing this a while.

Brian Reynolds: 5:13

Yeah, I started teaching later, but I was working at the Student Union across from her dorm, and I met Samantha and we'd been friends for a while. And I was madly, deeply in love with her and I finally gathered the courage to ask her out for more than friends. And she said sure I'll go out with you, but first you have to learn to play Bridge. Her parents had taught her right before she left for college, and she didn't have anyone to play with. And it's a partnership game. It's not solitary. You can't do it on your own. And I'm so glad I didn't say this out loud, but in my head I thought how hard could that be? And the answer was extremely hard. Not because Bridge is difficult to learn. Samantha has a video. It's on our YouTube channel. Learn to play Bridge in nine minutes and nine seconds. She even has another video that's two minutes and 22 seconds or something like that. So learning the rules of Bridge and even starting to get some basic foundational strategy and concepts to it, I don't actually feel are challenging. But when Samantha and I met. This was before the internet. I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have email. If I wanted to learn something, I had to go to the library and check out a book. And at that time, Bridge was just coming out of its heyday where everybody in the world played Bridge. In the seventies it was the most popular game in the world. Not just the most popular card game, but the most popular game in the world. Everybody played Bridge, so the course material that was available, books and things like that was predicated on the idea that you already knew how to play. So if you're coming to it from zero, the information just wasn't there. So when you talk about building connections and you talk about building community, Samantha and I, when we first started teaching, we really wanted to prevent anyone from having the same experience we did, which is we struggled for years. We'd play around our kitchen table with friends that we had, shanghaied into learning this game and did not know what we were doing and had no way to progress. And so we really, from the beginning and ever since have focused on people who are new to the game. Our favorite student is someone who's never touched a deck of cards before. If you've never played a card game before we want you to understand that this world is accessible to you. So that's to us is the biggest thing about how we wanna serve the Bridge community. We want to make the entry point into Bridge as painless and as fun as we possibly can.

David Lowry: 7:45

I love that. Let's say people wanna have a group over, have a Bridge night or something like that. And maybe they're all rather new to it or don't know much about it. How many people would you invite? And just describe the fundamentals it would take to get started.

Brian Reynolds: 8:00

Sure. What I would say is if you're gonna have a Bridge night, you want groups of four, you can get away with groups of five where every hand somebody rotates in. But that's okay. But four, eight, something like that, if you have a lot of friends, 12. And then I would say just have everybody watch our video, how to learn Bridge in nine minutes and nine seconds before they come so you get a sense of the rules. You get, at least get a sense of what you're legally allowed to do. Whenever I have a new student, even if they maybe even have a little bit of Bridge experience, I always tell them the first thing we're going to do is get the rules ingrained. It's gonna be instinctive. Okay, it's my turn to bid, it's my turn to play a card. This is what I can legally do. I can't do this'cause that's against the rules. People are smart. People are intelligent and a lot of times if you just show them the rules, they will start figuring out strategy without me having to say anything. So have everyone watch the video and then get there. And my big thing, it's so funny'cause oftentimes I get accused of being fake about this, we always say our number one rule of Bridge is have fun. And people think, oh we're being, salespeople or whatever. But my point is, if you're not having fun, why are you doing it? And then the second thing is, our brains actually assimilate information better when we're having fun. So have fun. Don't worry about making mistakes. Don't worry about being right. Bridge is not a good game if you're obsessed with being right all the time. Bridge will probably crush you pretty fast. You gotta let go of that really fast. But yeah, and then just have a lot of fun. Now to the second question, which is a question I frequently get, which is, okay I know how the rules are. But how do I get good at Bridge? A lot of times I have students who are like, how do I get better than my friends? Which is a laudable goal, right? I'm gonna show up at Bridge night and I'm gonna be better than everyone else. And I would say, you're looking to develop the three skills I mentioned, right? Which is number one, partnership maintenance. Because you're playing with a partner. Number two, learning bidding, which is like learning a language. So you start learning the language of bidding. And then number three is learning play techniques. So this is like the chess moves that we talked about. And on our website we have, I think Samantha has something like over 450 videos at this point. Starting from zero, nothing. And now she's recording every month. So now she's moving into more intermediate, advanced concepts and we're constantly growing our library. So you can start from zero on our website and. If you reach the end of all of the videos that Samantha has filmed, definitely reach out to us and let us know what you'd like to see next.

Don Drew: 10:50

Well, true confessions, Brian neither David nor I are Bridge players, but we came from Texas and we grew up there. And there Texas 42 is the game, right? It's trick based game, played with dominoes and generally it's four people. And I remember going to sleep listening to my parents and my aunt and uncle playing Dominoes and hearing the clicking of the dominoes and they were just laughing and having such a great time. And when I got to be, I don't know, probably about 13, 14 years old. They let me play and I learned how to play and it was a big deal. I was now at the adult table and it was fantastic. And I realized pretty early on just how valuable games can be to bringing people to together. Well, where I'm going with this is you and Samantha have been doing this quite some time now, and you bound to have had many, many partners, been teaching many people. Can you talk personally a little bit about how that has helped your life be better? In terms of you personally, Brian.

Brian Reynolds: 11:48

Yeah. I always tell people Bridge made me a better husband. And they think I'm being hyperbolic. I promise you I'm not. We could do a whole podcast. We could do several podcasts on all the marriage lessons I learned from being a husband. But I'll just give you one of my favorites, which is, Bridge is a game of mistakes. You're gonna make a mistake, right? And you are in a high pressure situation. I don't know anybody who likes to lose. I don't know anybody. You can say you're non-competitive, which is great, very healthy. But if you have a choice of winning and losing, you're a human being. You're gonna choose winning, right? So you're in a high pressure situation. You're trying to win. You're in a competitive situation. You're trying to work with this person, and they mess up. Let's say they do something mind-numbingly stupid. Well, now the question becomes how are you going to treat this person in this moment of adversity? I promise you, there's no point in yelling at them. They already feel way worse than you can ever make them feel. There's nothing you can say or do that's gonna make them feel worse than what they're already telling themselves inside their head. So then the question becomes, what is the most effective method for dealing with situation? And again, I don't know anybody who doesn't respond positively to, Hey, that's okay. No big deal. We'll get'em next time. Don't worry about it. I don't know anybody who doesn't respond to their partner looking across the table at them and saying, I don't care. All I care about is that you feel better.

David Lowry: 13:19

I've always said that if you want to get to know a person beyond a surface level, you should play a game with them. And card games are especially good ways of getting to know people. Sometimes you have a friend who really enjoys sticking it to the next person, setting them up or sometimes you find a person who talks smack. I've always enjoyed getting to know a person when they could be themselves in a moment of fun and excitement without having to pay too much attention to social details and niceties.

Brian Reynolds: 13:52

Yeah. Samantha and I have always said if people were required to play Bridge together for six months before they were allowed to get a marriage license, the divorce rate in the US would drop by 90%. Bridge strips away a lot of things, right? It lays the soul bare. And I think that whether you're developing a professional relationship, a personal one, I think getting to see someone without all those layers that we build up out of necessity to interact with society is a really great thing.

David Lowry: 14:21

Is there a midpoint in the game where you could pause for a moment, have dessert, coffee or some sort of treat and just get to know each other before you go back towards the end of the game or something like that?

Brian Reynolds: 14:33

Sure. A Bridge hand lasts about seven and a half to 10 minutes, depending on the levels of the people. More beginners tend to play a little bit slower. Basically you have an opportunity to take a break every seven and a half to 10 minutes. And the other thing is there's always a dummy on every hand. So the dummy has no responsibilities. Their partner's actually playing their hand and their own hand. So when I'm dummy, especially if it's a tournament or something like that, I just head off to the restroom. I'm like, I'll see you in four minutes, or whatever. I actually got really, really good at sleeping sitting up. For long Bridge days, I'm like, oh, I'm dummy. Cool. Three minute nap. Let's go. Let's get it done. Play this one slowly partner, I need some cat nap. And the other thing I'll say is I highly recommend playing with bidding boxes. So when it comes to the auction, you can speak your bids aloud, or there are these bidding boxes and now instead of saying things out loud, you place a card up to show what your bid would be. So basically everything about Bridge becomes silent. And now we have friends who are professional players who come in from out of town. We literally play Bridge for six hours and we'll just talk the entire time. We're catching up, finding out their kids are getting into college and things like that. And meanwhile, Bridge is happening, but we're getting to spend social time with friends at the same time. So it's awesome.

Don Drew: 16:01

Brian, we talked about structured games earlier. Bridge of course, is a structured game. What are some of your other favorite games that you play? I'm I know that's what you do professionally, but what do you do for fun when you're, when it's not Bridge?

Brian Reynolds: 16:14

We do play a lot of Bridge for fun. The joke I always make is having a Bridge partner is so important, I married mine. But yeah, I don't know why she married me, but, everyone makes mistakes, Bridges, game of mistakes. We love video games. Both Samantha and I love video games. She's an incredible game player of her own right, which is one of the ways that we connected before we were ever dating was we both love games. So we play video games together when we have time. And then we love escape rooms. I don't know if you've ever been to an escape room. Those are super fun. I think we're approaching our 300th escape room. I played escape rooms on four different continents. Those are super fun. And that's pretty much all we have time for. Occasionally, someone will send us a board game or a card game and say, oh, you should try this out. And we have a lot of fun with it.

Don Drew: 17:04

According to the American Contract Bridge League, they're saying that 80% of their 145,000 members are aged 60 or older.

Brian Reynolds: 17:13

Both the percentage sounds low and the age sounds low. The last credible thing I heard was the average Bridge player age is 74 or 73 or something like that. It's a very old demographic. And they're trying to change that in a lot of ways. I think they're playing catch up because they just didn't see the writing on the wall in terms of how fractured our ability to spend our free time would become. Samantha and I are a good example. I mean, we play Bridge for fun, but there's probably like 10 video games that came out last year that we would be interested in playing if we have time, but we don't have time. I remember vividly when the last episode of MASH aired. And like how many millions of people gathered around their TV sets, back when TVs were boxes rather than flat panels. Now how many channels are there of television? So Bridge is trying to catch up and get exposure. It's my experience that if I get a hundred people to try Bridge, 25% of them it's not gonna be for them. Okay, cool. So 25% of those people it's not gonna be for them. And about 50% of people are gonna be somewhere on the bell curve of they like it once a week. They like it once a month, you know this. And then you're gonna get 25% of the people and are like, oh, I love this game. I wanna play online. I wanna play in tournaments. So to me it's just a numbers game, right? I want everyone in the world to try Bridge because it's a really phenomenal game and if you haven't tried it and it is for you, you're really missing out on something cool.

Don Drew: 18:54

I understand that the post pandemic era there has been some growth in online play. Is that true?

Brian Reynolds: 19:02

Oh yeah. Exploded for sure. Samantha and I were able to teach online as early as, say, 2015. The technology was there, things like Zoom, Bridge base.com, which we are not affiliated with, but we highly recommend you can go there. You can create an account for free. You can play for free 24 7 BASE. So Bridge base.com. You can make an account right now. If you don't know how to make an account, we have a video on our YouTube channel, how to make an account. You can literally play for free anytime day or night. But the pandemic forced people to find online communities. A good example is, a lot of my actor and filmmaker friends, when the pandemic hit, they had nothing to do. They were sitting in their apartments and they couldn't do anything. So we did online readings of scripts. We just, okay, it's your turn, we're gonna read one of your scripts. We did that once a week to keep that community and that connection. And that's carried over. I love teaching online for so many reasons. The technology allows me to really dial in on terms of the student and what they're working on, what they need to work on. Playing online with a teacher is a phenomenal way to learn'cause you're learning by doing, and then you can immediately get feedback on what you did. So yes, the online Bridge community is stronger than it's ever been. And I think we're gonna see that start translating into people who play online, also play in person tournaments, which are awesome. They're the most fun to me for sure.

David Lowry: 20:33

Brian as a professional teacher and Bridge player you probably have learned something that a lot of us need to learn, and that's how we balance being competitive with being friendly and not getting too intense in our play. How do we balance all of this?

Brian Reynolds: 20:48

Well, I would say the first thing is never personal. It's never personal. I'm like you I like a little bit of smack talk. I like a little bit of, teasing each other. I've, Samantha and I have played against each other a lot. Pre pre pandemic I'd be playing with one student at a club. And she'd be playing with a different student at the same club. So we came up against each other in a competitive environment, not as partners a lot. And man, we loved to talk a little bit of trash to each other. We'd usually wait till the students were outta earshot because, we didn't want to distract them. But I'd say it's never personal. If I sit down at the Bridge table and. I'm up against you in a match, my goal is to beat you. Yeah, but not because I don't like you, not because I hate you, not because I think you're a bad person, but I am going to crush you if I can'cause I want to give a good score. And then the other thing is Samantha, I played against the world champions and gotten crushed. And it wasn't personal for them either, right? It was just, okay, you're the obstacle in front of me. I'm gonna crush you. And we were the crush-ees that day. I saw a really amazing video of Roger Federer and he was talking about how many percentage of his points he had won in his career, and it was 54%. He'd only won slightly more than half of the tennis points he ever played in his career. And he was probably the greatest tennis player of all time, maybe. He's in the conversation. And he'd really talked about how it's the next ball. It's the only thing that matters is the next point, the next ball. Nothing else matters. The past doesn't matter. And I think that understanding that is so important. I've won really exciting matches. I've lost Samantha and I missed making the second day of a national championship event on the 17th tiebreaker. That was gut wrenching. 17th ugh, like just everything was tied, all at 16 places down. It was horrible. I've done brilliant things to win matches and I've done horribly inane, idiotic things to lose matches. But I love the game and it's not personal, it's just fun.

Don Drew: 22:56

It's fun and it's social and I think one of the issues that people in the second half of life can fall into is social isolation. We retire from jobs or we move in some cases and so on. I know my father fell into this trap at one point in his life. And this game seems like it's a really good opportunity to push through that and find other ways to connect with people maybe not in the traditional way that we do it.

Brian Reynolds: 23:20

I'd love to start by dovetailing off what you guys just said, and I'd like to point out that, there's been several pretty heavily vetted studies one from the Harvard School of Medicine and a couple outta Scotland where if you play Bridge at least once a week, regularly have 75% less incident of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. We no longer view the brain as, you get a certain amount of brain cells and they're gonna die, and, oh, well. You really can keep neuroplasticity and you can literally grow your brain. Like you can literally grow mass in your brain. And Bridge is an amazing way to keep your mind sharp in the same way that going to the gym and picking up a barbell and doing some curls keeps your biceps healthy. So not only does it have a social element of you're getting outta your house even if you're online, you're still interacting with people online, right? You're interacting with a community, but also you're taking care of your brain. Me personally, the idea of losing my mental faculties is the scariest thing I can think of. I'd much rather lose the use of my limbs than my brain. So Bridge is an amazing activity from the standpoint of mental health, especially long-term mental health.

David Lowry: 24:38

Absolutely. It keeps your mind sharp, keeps you social, gives you something to do. There's so many wonderful things to recommend about that. Brian, as we come close to the end of our program today, tell us how we can learn more about this? Tell us what you guys are working on, your website, the videos you make, anything you think we need to know.

Brian Reynolds: 24:56

There's our website, which is the Bridge teachers.com. The Bridge teacher is all about giving you access to information so that you can grow your game at your own pace, at your own speed, and really in what way is gonna be most effective for you. We have an ever-growing library of video lessons on all aspects of Bridge from zero to intermediate. We're getting into advanced topics now. And then we do, of course, teach privately through Zoom and Bridge Base, or we play with students online or in-person tournaments. And yeah, so that's what the Bridge teacher is all about.

Don Drew: 25:33

Brian Reynolds, teacher and co-owner with his wife Samantha of the Bridge teachers.com. Brian, thank you for teaching us how Bridge can help us build our brains and our relationships. Thank you for being on Peaceful Life Radio.

Brian Reynolds: 25:47

I thank you guys so much. This has been an absolute pleasure.