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Georgia Tech Bridge Club scores major wins
A group of bridge-playing Georgia Tech students is bringing the classic card game to a new generation while also earning some national attention.
ATLANTA - You might only think of bridge as a game your parents or your grandparents play, but a group of local college students is working on bringing the game to a younger crowd. The Georgia Tech Bridge Club is also winning on a national level.
Vincent Zhu is the president of the Bridge Club.
"Summer of fourth grade, my mom signed me up for a camp at the local library to get my brother and me out of the house. None of us knew what bridge was, and none of us expected I would still be playing ten years later," he told Good Day's Lindsay Tuman.
Vincent Zhu
His teammates, Bo Han Zhu, Alan Yu, and Weilong Shen, all picked the game up as kids as well. They each continued to play when they joined the group at Georgia Tech.
"I didn't do much in high school besides play bridge, so one of the things I told Georgia Tech when I applied was, 'I will come here and win a collegiate bridge bowl with you,' and that turned out to happen, so I'm very happy," Bo Han Zhu said.
These four players recently put their skills to the test at the Collegiate Bridge Bowl in Chicago and earned first place in the teams tournament. Bo Han and Vincent Zhu also won in the pairs tournament.
"We're just trying to play and improve ourselves and figure out each board as well as we can," Shen said. "I feel as though our trainings worked out and our philosophies worked out."
"I was pretty nervous for it, so winning was more of like a relief for me. For bridge especially as a team game, one mistake can be really costly." Yu said.
Their goal is to grow the game and get more young people involved.
"That's one of the things I'm trying to do at Tech during my last year is get more Tech students to learn how to play bridge, but it's always difficult to entice people to play bridge when their only impression of this is old ladies play this game." Vincent Zhu said.
They also want to show the skills it takes to be a strong bridge player can also make you stronger outside of the game.
"The one thing you have to do, I play with a lot of different partners for different events, so one thing you have to do is you have to talk to them and know how they play. Because you have to adjust your play based on how they play, and you have to know each other." Bo Han Zhu said.
The America Contract Bridge League's next tournament will be held in Atlanta in November.