Bridge: the Gathering 

“The best characteristic in a partner is a good sense of humor,” declares Liz Heron. “Why? Because sometimes you do absolutely idiotic things and you make idiotic bids. You don’t want a partner who’s going to scream and yell at you. You want the partner that’s going to be supportive and helpful and constructive.” 

Yes…nicely stated, Liz. But idiotic bids? What is this, MFT for married Sotheby’s addicts? Maybe her next outburst will clarify.

“Once they’re in, we’ll show them what an amazing game Bridge is!”

Ah. Bridge! Why didn’t you say so? Bridge is the “card game” (devotees surely bridle at that undercooked misnomer) whose European origin story dates to 16^th century pub throwdowns, and later appropriation by 1) a frenzied aristocracy obsessed with the dynamic puzzle-solving nature of the game, and finally 2) the teeming masses, whose Bridge fever and regularized devotional gatherings to play can seem positively monastic (potluck charcuterie notwithstanding).

Here is the buried lede: Liz Heron, having worked with a very successful flagship program in Seattle, is coordinating a one-week intro to Bridge for Santa Barbara’s card-carrying teens. Bridge Camp for Youth (BCFY) takes place June 15-19, from 5-8 pm at the Santa Barbara Bridge Center, 2255 Las Positas Road. 

The weeklong camp is designed for Junior High and High School-aged fans of cardistry and, well, pizza. Bridge is a game so fervently taught by its players, what was conceived as a $100 camp is now FREE to the first 24 registrants ([email protected]). This is a ringing example of how excited Santa Barbara’s Bridge-playing ambassadors are about spreading the joy. 

To be clear: this is not a rambling “camp” in the usual sense, where periodically a harried Counselor in Training (CIT) hollers with cracking voice to summon the far-flung campers from their surreptitious game-playing. This a week of full-frontal game-playing. Did we mention the pizza? 

“I worked at the camp up in Seattle and we had 50 kids,” Liz says. She moved here to SB eight months ago with a Bridge enthusiast’s missionary devotion. “In Seattle we did a beginner track and a more intermediate advanced track, so some of the kids knew some of the skills from the previous year at the camp. In fact, one of the kids had placed in the Junior Nationals and was a very, very good player.”

Bridge presently counts tens of millions of feverish adherents all over the world, and efforts are globally afoot to draw a new generation to its pleasures. Bridge players both love and live the game, and some proselytize it with abandon. 

“The best testament to that success was the young people who came back every year to the camp in Seattle,” Liz says. “We got like an 80% return rate.”

Significantly, young folk have already been avidly absorbed in a revered strategy card game since 1993, one that – like Bridge – boasts its own competitive international tournament circuit. To see it in action, some pleasant Friday evening during your walk downtown, glance through the broad shopfront window of Santa Barbara’s Metro Entertainment during their weekly Friday Night Magic confab. What’ll you see? Throngs of kids hunkered – with Bridge-like fervor – over their own card game du millénaire, a phenomenon called Magic: The Gathering. (More on the two games’ parallels later in this treatise).

Which is to say, deeply strategic card-playing is already catnip to many young adults. And Seattle? Seattle is of course the once and future epicenter of Grunge – an art form less given to bidding, trick-taking and collaborative puzzle-solving than to mosh pits alive with flailing, sweat-throwing, flannel-shirted slam-dancers – oh; and a 200dB polka combo called Nirvana. Seattle teens flocking to learn Bridge, that says something. And Seattle’s youth took to Bridge like fish to water. Even the small fry.

“At that beginner’s camp in Seattle, we had a seven-year-old who wanted to learn to play Bridge. That was too young, really,” Liz says with a tone of mild regret. “You know, because of attention span.” 

Bridge and the Batcave 

The Santa Barbara Bridge Center (SBBC), like the Batcave just outside Gotham City, hides in plain sight – and is as central to our own town’s self-possession and civic heartbeat. No costumed superheroes in satin capes and tights emerge from the SBBC to do moonlit battle with ne’er-do-wells (that we know of), but the odd little building set almost surreptitiously into the corner of the Las Positas Center parking lot near Modoc has – since 1976! – been the warm, welcoming core of Santa Barbara’s energetic and familial Bridge community. 

Yes, the Santa Barbara Bridge Center celebrates its 50^th anniversary this very month (May, 2026). Over five SB decades, some 18,000 lamplit evenings have played out there, a constant and convivial parade of pals immersed in the friendship and cozily telepathic pursuit of this ~ 140-year-old mind sharing exercise called Bridge. And as Liz Heron points out, Santa Barbara’s unitary Bridge community is its own reward.

“Seattle is a big city with many Bridge clubs, yes. So there’s a women’s club, there’s North Seattle Bridge Club, there’s a Bellevue Club. You don’t quite get the sense of community that you do in Santa Barbara, where we have only one bridge club.” And as a measure of American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) table activity, Santa Barbara punches into the upper tier of U.S. bridge clubs by table count. This would seem to promise fertile cultural ground here for waving young people in. 

That – and the endorsement of the like-minded. Zach Grossack – the ACBL’s youngest Grand Life Master at 22 years old – speaks to his cohort in a short video wherein he touts his love for Bridge. He makes a good case. “It takes a couple hours to learn and then you have a game for a lifetime. Bridge is the most fun, complex game in the world and people don’t know about it! I see people playing chess or (Settlers of) Catan, or Dungeons and Dragons, and I want to tell them ‘play Bridge!’ It’s so much more interesting!” 

“We’re bringing one of the teachers down from Seattle and he is fantastic with kids,” Liz says. “That’s part of the dynamic, right? He’s fun, he’s exciting – he’s just somebody that they’re going to want to listen to and get excited about.” 

Bridging the Gap

The Junior High and High Schoolset have long been primed for Bridge but can’t have imagined a game whose essence both precedes and expands on what they cherish most in the Magic: The Gathering card game they all know and love. 

Bridge is quite like playing Magic but with no deckbuilding, and lots more hidden information. As in Magic, the attentive player can ferret out this hidden information through sly observation. What truly adds another dimension of immersive complexity is this: in Bridge you are collaborating with a partner with whom you must strategically sync using a shared language. This communication between you and your partner is about silently signaling how to use the resources at hand (and in hand) – and evaluating how powerful your partnered resources can be. Coded collaboration is key. 

Bridge Camp organizer Liz Heron caught the Bridge bug early. The fun is in the process. 

“None of it is about luck,” she says. “It’s all about how well you play. You can’t say, ‘oh, they got better cards than we did.’” When she morphed from casual Bridge player to next phase Bridge athlete, bells rang. “There was a time I’d never been to a tournament. So I started doing all that and just… the more I learned, the more excited I got about everything! And I was like, ‘Wow, this is really fun!’” 

Bridge, like any avocation worth truly pursuing, is a many-faceted world unto itself – a competitive milieu, a community; in some ways a smallish country in its own right with its own weather system, its own dialects. “Bridge” is an apt name for something so happily transporting. In this context, people cross for all kinds of reasons and sometimes discover themselves on arrival. Dear Montecito (and Santa Barbara) Teens; it could happen to you. Whaddya got to lose? 

“There’s this great movie, a documentary, called Dirty Tricks,” Liz says. “A guy decides to sign up for his first bridge class at 11 years old, mostly because there’s a cute girl in the class. Well, the teacher’s watching the kid’s game play during the first session and asks him ‘…what’s that you’re doing, moving your fingers like that?’ The kid kept touching his fingers, and he tells the bridge teacher, ‘I’m counting how many tricks I can take.’ The teacher says, ‘If you stay after class, I want to talk to you.’ It’s a true story,” Liz says with delight. “And that kid ended up becoming the best bridge player in the world.”  

What: Bridge Camp for Youth
When: June 15-19, from 5-8PM
Where: Santa Barbara Bridge Center,
2255 Las Positas Rd.
Cost: ZIPPO
More Info or to Sign-Up:
[email protected]
What Else: pizza …