The Randolph Method for Pissing Off Boomers
I was born in 1955. Maybe. Possibly. I’m not sure. I say I’m not sure because I think I’m becoming a boomer.
How so? you ask, knowing I’m only 43. Well, in many, many ways. I gripe about teenagers. I eat expired hamburger buns because they’re actually still fine. I like to use electric power tools for jobs that don’t require them. I’m annoyed by insects. My limbs are always sore. I drive poorly. Everything I know is outdated. I own library cards for three different library systems. I was alive for the moon landing and still think it was faked. I don’t know how to use computers. I text in grammatically correct sentences. I don’t recycle. I go to bed earlier than ever. And I play endless games of bridge.
Ah, bridge. No, not the things that you drive over rivers on. Bridge, for those of you who are still young, is one of the world’s most popular card games. It mixes many elements of other card games, including bidding, trick-taking, partner play, signaling, point counting, complex scoring, trump suits, major suits, minor suits, and high aces, into one overly complicated and vastly confusing array. Trying to learn bridge is like trying to learn six card games at once and then realizing that you’re bad at all of them. And perhaps most importantly for our purposes here, people who like bridge are, by and large, rather advanced in years. Boomers, seniors, old-timers, AARP members—whatever you want to call them, bridge is the game for the 65+ crowd.
And I fucking love it.
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The name bridge, first of all. According to my sources (Wikipedia and my grandmother), “the word bridge is the English pronunciation of the game called ‘biritch.’ It followed on from whist, which initially was the dominant trick-playing game and enjoyed a loyal following for centuries.” Bullshit. I don’t believe that, and since I’m a boomer, I’m entitled to share my opinion on social media with zero factual evidence to support me. My own theory of how bridge got its name is that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were playing cards while driving over the Golden Gate Bridge on their way to Anaheim to film the moon landing on a soundstage at Universal Studios, so they called the game they were playing bridge. This theory is obviously correct, since I posted it on Facebook in the form of a Despicable Me minion meme.
My own bridge-playing days began only recently, after I retired from my previous career as a film director specializing in moon landing fakes. My esteemed associates—W. Robert Gizel, M. H. Herz, and Brock T. Calamari—and I were discussing how to fill our fall Saturdays this year without Husker football. As avid card players, with experience in hearts, euchre, poker, and others, we decided to ascend to boomer superstardom by attempting to learn the grandfather of all card games: bridge. After several weeks of online training and playing against demented over-bidding robots, we felt ready to play bridge for real and see how it went.
And so it came to pass that we sat down around the dining room table on a fall Saturday morning and dealt our first game of bridge. As we progressed, we decided to worry less about long-held bridge conventions—the ones boomers use—and simply play, to see if we could work through any problems that arose on our own. Bridge is an endlessly complex and fascinating game, and the more you play the more subtleties you find. Over the course of several weekends the four of us organically developed a set of tactics, strategies, and agendas that we felt could rival even the most jaded of boomer players. We termed our bridge schematic the Randolph Method (for reasons I won’t explain, since it exists as a Facebook meme).
Key tenets of the Randolph Method:
Take tricks early and often.
Control the lead while you can. If you have aces, use them while they’re still good.
Play aggressive. The goal of bridge is to take tricks, and the more cautious you are initially the more dicey it gets later.
Use common sense to bid. If you have a good hand, have confidence in your gameplay and bid accordingly. If your hand is shit, try to determine what your partner has.
Most importantly: don’t worry about the Boomer Rules of “scoring your hand” and false bids to communicate. It complicates things unnecessarily and is no guarantee to win.
None of this is written down anywhere but these Gonzo Papers. It’s pretty much classified, just like the eight million false documents NASA created to throw off the press after the moon landing aired on TV. When the Method was formed, we discussed the possibility of playing others to see if we were truly onto a new and valid strategy or whether we were completely off track and would get fucked over by experienced players. So when my mother called and asked us to play bridge against my experienced older cousins (who had learned from my grandmother, a bridge player for over half a century), we decided to put our game to the Boomer Test.
W. Robert Gizel and I arrived at the bridge game with my cousins like the Apollo 11 crew showing up to the soundstage in their lunar module costumes: slightly nervous, but highly interested to see if we could pull off the greatest con of all time. Bridge is a partner game for four people, and we would switch partners after every game. Thus, for the first two games Mr. Gizel and I were paired with my cousins, against one another.
By the time he and I were partners, we had succeeded in royally pissing off the boomers.
How? Because Mr. Gizel and I played using the Randolph Method. We took tricks early, played our strong cards advantageously, and were more aggressive than was necessary. My cousins, by contrast, used traditional sound strategies and became (understandably) frustrated when we, as their partners, didn’t seem to know or utilize those strategies.
The Boomer Test. No, you don’t get to see what anyone but me looks like. I’m like NASA, baby: everything is classified. In this picture I have the face of a man holding all the aces.
And then it was over. Gizel and I had taken first and second by several hundred points using the Randolph Method.
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Does this validate our strategies? Maybe. We’re still not sure if the Randolph Method would hold up in bridge court, so to speak, but it passed its first test. The big leagues of the Lincoln Bridge Club await, chock-full of boomers eager to dust the floor with us upstart newcomers (that’s an exaggeration—almost everyone in the bridge community is very willing and happy to teach the game to new players). Regardless of how far the Randolph Method takes us, my colleagues and I have continued to grow and learn the game by playing every weekend, always with some accompanying cinnamon rolls baked by Mr. Gizel. The game has changed and grown us. Herz has “Professional Bridge Player” in his Twitter bio, and I think he’s earned that claim. As he recently said, “I’m undefeated in the month of October.” Like Lavar Ball, he never loses. And like Lavar Ball, Stanley Kubrick went undefeated in July 1969 when he convinced four billion people his moon landing movie was real.
But unlike Herz, Kubrick wasn’t a founder of the Randolph Method. Who’s the real winner?
