Fred Gitelman : I was born in 1965 in Toronto, Canada and I lived in that city until 2002 (when I moved to Las Vegas). I am married to Sheri Winestock who has also been by business partner since Bridge Base Inc. was formed in 1990. We do not have any children, but we have a dog named Magic (a cross between a German shepherd and a Labrador retriever).

I studied computer science at the University of Toronto for 4 years, but I became interested in bridge around the same time and that made it hard for me to concentrate on school. I did not graduate and decided that, instead of going back to complete my degree, I would try working for a living.

I spent 3 years working as programmer for a software company in Toronto and learned that I liked working a lot more than I liked being a student. I met Sheri during this time and she convinced me that we should start a bridge software company. Although our company struggled during the first few years, Sheri and I really enjoyed the work we were doing as well as being in control of our own destinies. More and more people were buying computers during this time and my success as player also started to have an impact on our sales. Although I doubt that we will ever get really wealthy from our business, we make a very comfortable living right now and I am hopeful that this will continue!

I consider myself very fortunate to be able to do exactly the work I want to do and to be able to make a good living from it. In addition to that I have a wonderful wife, love living in Las Vegas, and I am able to play in major bridge tournaments all over the world.

All in all, life is very good!

RL : You are well-known to be a North American (or Canadian ?) bridge champion and we would like to know about it a little more on your course. Tell us how you discovered bridge ?

RL : Why and how did you decide to build your career around the bridge ? How do you exercise your job of bridge player  ? For you, is bridge a job or a game  ?

FG : The concept of making my living from bridge has always been appealing since I enjoy the game so much. However, I was never inclined to become a full time professional player (because I did not think I would enjoy this) or an author (too difficult to make a good living).

Until I met Sheri it appeared that bridge would not be my profession, but she saw the potential of combining my talents for bridge and software and suggested that we form our own business.

Before this time bridge was all about pleasure for me, but nowadays it is both my business and my pleasure. I sometimes play professionally now, but only in major tournaments (such as the ACBL Nationals). This is attractive because I am able to play with my regular partner, Brad Moss, on strong teams and earn a lot of money at the same time.

RL : You created Bridge Base Inc. in 2001 to develop your educational softwares, there. Could you tell us more about this activity ?

FG : Actually Bridge Base Inc. was formed in 1990. Our original goal was to develop a strong bridge-playing program, but after a couple of years of trying I learned that this goal was a long way away. We therefore turned our attention to created educational software for bridge. This type of software is much easier to develop and, at the time, nobody else was doing any work in this area.

Our first educational product, Bridge Master, was released in 1992 as a DOS program. It was a big success and new versions of that program have sold well ever since. Bridge Master has been translated into over a dozen languages (including French - it is available through Le Bridgeur).

Since Bridge Master we have created about 25 other educational CDs for bridge. Most of these are based on material created by famous authors like Larry Cohen, Eddie Kantar, and Mike Lawrence.

I started working on BBO in late 2001 and have spent most of my time since then working on that program. As a result, our rate of CD-ROM creation has dropped in recent years. However, our existing CD-ROMs continue to sell well and we have a partner in The Netherlands who has done an excellent job of creating new CDs based on our software without much help from us.

RL : You finalized an exceptional software : Bridge Master 2000 : 180 prepared deals with 5 levels of difficulty. I find it genial, because when we wish to play again one difficult deal,  frequently,  few cards have moved to different places. How had you this idea of this fonctionality, which does not exist in others softwares ?

FG : The idea came from an old article in The Bridge World magazine. It was a humorous story about a person playing bridge against a computer that would move the defenders cards around in order to frustrate any effort by the person to make his contract.

I thought it would be fun and interesting to create such a program. At the time I did not realize the tremendous educational potential of such a program.

One of the beauties of Bridge Master is that the only way to make your contract is through perfect play - any mistake you make will be "punished" by the program defeating your contract.

Real bridge is not like this. You have often get away with mistakes due to poor defense or a lucky lie of the cards. As such, people often do not learn from the mistakes they make.

This is not the case in the world of Bridge Master. This program basically forces you to learn. It also happens to be a fun program to use and this, as well as its effectiveness as a learning tool, has helped to make it a very successful commercial product.

RL : Then, you created Bridge Base Online, after OkBridge and others sites. What differentiates you (technically speaking) from other online games ? Itemize us BBO concept and how do you envisage its evolution ?

FG : The original purpose of BBO was to create a facility whereby people could purchase our educational software by download over the Internet. I had no intention of creating an online bridge game!

This concept became the "Bridge Library" part of BBO (which is a relatively minor part of our site that allows the user to download free articles about bridge). However, once I realized how easy it was to write a program that was able to send and receive messages over the Internet, a whole new world opened up for me. Since I had already developed a nice user interface for bridge, it took me only a couple of weeks to create much of what is now BBO (the Main Bridge Club, Vugraph Theatre, Partnership Bidding, Chat Rooms, Lecture Hall, Bridge Library, and Double Dummy area).

Of course there is a lot more to BBO now and my partner Uday Ivatury has played a major role in the subsequent development of our site.

RL : Of course , an essentiel difference with other sites is that we play freely on BBO. But, how do you do make money for your company ? In others words, do the sales of educational softwares give you sufficient incomes ?

FG : The concept of making a high-quality free bridge service was very appealing to me as I thought that such a service would have great potential to increase the popularity of our game.

For much of BBO's history we did not generate any revenue from this service.

The income that Sheri and I make from selling educational CDs (and from my playing bridge professionally in major tournaments) was more than enough for us to live comfortably and the expenses we incurred in keeping BBO up and running were not very high.

Nowadays BBO itself generates significant income from us. Most of this comes from the $1 tournaments that are run one our site, but we also make money by selling software through BBO, by selling advertising, and occasionally by doing custom programming work for the WBF and various National Bridge Federations.

It may seem strange given that our site is free, but it is not at all unlikely that Sheri, Uday, and I are all going to make a lot of money through BBO in the next few years. Our membership keeps on growing and the more people who play on our site, the more people there will be who are willing to play to play in our $1 tournaments. In addition to that, we plan to start various other initiatives that will generate revenue.

I can promise, however, that BBO will remain a free site. Furthermore, even if we do make enough money from this project such that we do not have to work anymore, I love the work I do and expect to continue working on bridge software for the rest of my life.

RL : You know that I developed on BBO, thanks to your help (Do you remember ?) a private club , the Cyberclub Webridge France, which consists of more than 6 000 french-speaking members today. I pointed that my players were interested  by their classification. That's why I put two instruments of measure : The «  progressiometre »  to measure your own progress and the «  classometre » to rank in comparison with other players. Why are you against all forms of ranking of players on BBO ?  

FG : I saw on OKBridge how their Lehman rating system resulted in players being rude and mean to each other. "I won't play with you because you will hurt my rating!", "How could you go down in 3NT - I just lost .002 from my rating at a result!" were the sort of things you heard a lot on that site. Furthermore, for some players an automated rating system is a reason to consider cheating - Lehmans are such an important part of the social fabric of OKBridge that some players would do anything to increase their ratings (and thereby boost their social status).

Cheating and rude behavior will unfortunately always be a part of online bridge, but I thought that I could help reduce these problems by keeping BBO free of automated rating systems.

You might be interested in knowing that I receive a lot of e-mail on this subject. Some of this e-mail comes from people who ask me to include a rating system on BBO, but I get far more e-mail along the lines of "I used to play on OKBridge and I am so happy that BBO does NOT have ratings - please NEVER introduce these on your site!".

Of course I remember you and CWF from the earliest days of BBO. I have always been impressed with your efforts and your success and I have no doubt that many of our members are grateful for the work you do.

RL : In Main bridge club, we play mainly SAYC american system, close to French system. In the course of your numerous international competitions (in which you were successful), you met other systems (polish, english, italian, norwegian, …), could you tell us if you consider a better system than other one, and so yes whicht and why ?

FG : I prefer to play a natural system myself. I do not have any strong feelings as to which system is best and I think it would be very hard to make a convincing argument in this area.

Much more important is making sensible agreements with your partner. It does not matter if these agreements are "best". As long as your system is not ridiculous and as long as you can avoid misunderstanding and stupid mistakes you will do very well at this game.

The choice between "natural" and "artificial" is really a personal matter. Natural is appealing to me because I like the idea of being able to bid 4H and having it mean nothing more than "I would like to try to win 10 tricks with hearts as trump". I find that I tend to play better when I have this freedom and I also find that keeping the opponents in the dark about the exact nature of your hand makes it harder for them to defend accurately.

Many players who I respect greatly would disagree with this assessment. I suspect that the battle between the naturalists and the scientists will never be resolved, but in my opinion it would help increase the popularity of our game if the naturalist were to gain ground. The more artificial bids there are, the harder it is for people to learn the game.

RL : And, generally,what are, in your mind, the best international teams ? Why ? Thanks to men ? Or their sponsors ? Or their federation ? Or their bid system ?

FG : At this particular moment in time, Italy and the USA are the two most dominant countries in world bridge. There are several other countries (notably Poland, China, Sweden, and The Netherlands) that are capable of winning a Bermuda Bowl or Olympiad.

The USA has more world class players than any other country, but they have few partnerships as strong as Italy's 3 great pairs. Italy has a further advantage in that the USA teams invariably contain a sponsor.

The fact that players in both Italy and the USA are able to earn a good living by playing professionally is important in my view. To stay at the top you need to spend a lot of time playing bridge and being paid well to play makes this easier to achieve. Team and partnership harmony are also important and the leading teams from both Italy and the USA excel in this area.

RL : The masculine French team were not bright tgese last years years. You know our champions ; what  are the reasons which explain this decline ? The players ? The French bidding system ? The stength of other teams ? Another reason ?

I am not sure what has happened since then. Perhaps part of the problem is that France's best players are getting older and, as a result, their skills are not what they once were and their hunger for success has diminished. Perhaps the French style of bidding (which I happen to like very much) is not effective against the style of light openings that has become popular in much of the world. Perhaps there have been personal problems between some of the leading French players that have made it difficult for the best teams to form and for the teams to play up to their potential.

In any case, your country has a lot of great and experienced players as well as many young players with a lot of potential. The 21st century has not been good for the French Open Team so far, but it would not surprise me in the least if this were to change soon.

RL : On the contrary, the feminine French team were bright at Estoril, by winning the Venice Cup against Germany. You know our champions ; what are the reasons which explain this success ? The players ? The French bidding system ? The weakness of other teams ? Another reason ?

Not to take anything away from the other French woman (who are all wonderful players), but Catherine D'Ovidio is really something special. I had the pleasure of playing in a team with her in Tenerife and I have seen her playing a lot of hands on BBO vugraph. There are few (if any) women in the world who play as well as Catherine and having a superstar on your team obviously greatly increases your chances of winning.