Alan Sontag

[Front dust jacket flap] THE BRIDGE BUM
My Life and Play by Alan Sontag
Introduction by Alfred Sheinwold

Alan Sontag is one of the greatest bridge players in the world, and here he tells his story of a game he considers "the most intellectually demanding and rewarding on earth ... one of the most complex and devilish games the human race has devised."

Though he is only thirty-one, Alan Sontag has won more than fifty sectional and regional championships. He has captured four national championships, including the Vanderbilt, Reisinger, and Life Masters Men's pairs. He was on the team that defeated the World Championship Italians (plus Omar Sharif). He and his regular partner, Peter Weichsel, won the richest bridge tournament ever played, the Cavendish Calcutta. Most impressive, he was the first American ever to win the prestigious (continued on back flap) (continued from front flap) London Sunday Times Invitational, considered by most bridge champions to be the most important pairs tournament in the world. He won this event in 1973, and then in 1975 he became the first player from any country to win it a second time.

The New York Times has called his play "brilliant," "sparkling," and "world-class." Alan Sontag's ambition is to better at bridge than anyone who has ever played the game.

His book has everything: history; stories about the great masters, past and present; Sontag's own most fascinating hands; the cheating, and hustling, and gambling; the glamorous life; instruction; and most of all the game itself, which Alan Sontag describes with sufficient vigor and eloquence to make one feel why he loves it so much that he wants to go on playing it forever.… (mehr)