My Story

I started playing bridge in 1968 while in college at the University of North Dakota. We could play a hand of bridge in the student union any time of the day, and we did. My friend Rod and I played against our mothers many evenings while home for the summer.

For fun, I started writing some code in Fortran to generate bridge hands. It involved bringing a stack of cards to the IBM mainframe computer center, submitting them, and getting a printout the next day.

I completed my internal medicine residency from 1979 to 1982. In 1980, for one year, I did a post-doctoral fellowship in computer applications in medicine at UCSF.

By the late 1980s, I had a fully functional bridge playing program written in C, on an Amiga computer.

By the 1990s, I had developed a bridge program that was using the logic of the prolog language on a windows computer, and decided to sell that using the then new fangled internet. It was a good selling program of the mid and late 90s.

World computer bridge championships were held from the mid-90s. I started competing in those and won in 2000 at Maastricht in the Netherlands. For each contest, I have traveled with my friend David Walker. He has been a great help with testing and better than good travel partner. I then retired from computer bridge.

In 2016, I retired from my internal medicine practice to the north woods of Minnesota with my wife Pam.

I began tinkering with Meadowlark Bridge once again. I re-entered the computer bridge championships in 2018 (Florida), and 2019 (San Francisco). Now, I have resurrected the windows program and I will be offering it for download in late 2000. I have also developed a library for bidding and generating bridge hands that can be used on multiple platforms. It is the engine for the “Tricky Bridge” program that is being released by Scott Hoffer for the IPhone in October 2020.