fred gitelman - twórca bbo

Canadian bridge player chuffed by world-champ title

PATRICK WHITE

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

Published Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2010 8:59PM EDT

He considers Warren Buffett and Bill Gates friends. He runs a cash cow of a website devoted to his sport. He’s considered a guru of his game and lives in Vegas.

Could the life of a professional bridge player get any more glamorous?

For Fred Gitelman, it just did. Last week, his team outlasted 150 competitors to win the World Bridge Championship, the apex of an intriguing career that began when he first started cutting classes at the University of Toronto to play cards.

It was the first time any Canadian has won the prestigious tournament, run every four years. And it was a double whammy: One of Mr. Gitelman’s five teammates, Canadian Geoff Hampson, also grew up in Toronto, where the two made a formidable team.

“I remember playing them 20 or 25 years ago when they were juniors, and you could see even then that they had enormous potential,” said Ray Lee, bridge columnist and owner of Master Point Press, the world’s biggest publisher of bridge books. “Geoff is the natural. Everything seemed to come easy for him. Fred is the intellectual. His game is more perspiration than inspiration and he’s worked very hard to get where he is.”

Much of that work involved persuading friends and family that bridge was a viable career. As a junior player, Mr. Gitelman, now 45, abandoned math and computer science studies at U of T to pursue the sport full-time.

In his spare time, he learned computer programming, developing sufficient expertise to design a line of instructional software for bridge that hooked one very influential client.

“My wife and I just started the CD-ROM business and we received a call from a guy who was very interested,” Mr. Gitelman recalled. “When I took his name and address, it was Warren Buffett.”

The two went on to exchange bridge tips for business advice. Mr. Buffett even said he would recommend the disks to his friends. Soon thereafter came a second fateful call: Bill Gates wanted to know if Mr. Gitelman would join Mr. Buffett and him for a running game on a chartered train trip. “Of course I went,” Mr. Gitelman said. “We’ve become friends since then. We get together at Bill’s house now and then. You never imagine playing cards with two such historic figures.”

Since that 1998 train trip, Mr. Gitelman moved to Las Vegas and hatched another business idea. Bridge Base Online, the web’s first free bridge site, has become the most popular bridge game online, with around 100,000 users playing every day. He and his wife, Sheri Winestock, employ a dozen full-time workers and the fees they charge for online tournaments yield “a lot of money,” Mr. Gitelman admits. “Playing online is much more appealing than going to the YMCA and playing with a bunch of old ladies,” he said.

Still, none of the fame and fortune outshines a world championship. He and his partner on the team, American Brad Moss, spent 12 years preparing for the moment.

“This has been a goal in my life for a long time,” Mr. Gitelman said. “We’re a young team and we were probably ranked fifth or sixth going in. So you could call it a bit of a Cinderella story.”