Top-mind experts face odds in bridge

PALEMBANG, Indonesia – At one row of the Singapore Airlines flight bound for Palembang, three men in their 40s and 50s were making bids with their hearts and clubs. The game, of course, was theoretical – from memory – because they were not holding cards.

At the other side was a group of women – two in their late 20s and three in their 60s or 70s – reading quietly the inflight magazine of Singapore Airlines.

These are the members of the Philippine bridge team, a bunch of young and old men and women who have the same passion for the unknown, possessing diverse talents that brought them here to Palembang for the first ever bridge competitions of the Southeast Asian Games.

Certainly, they are not gamblers. Far from it. In fact, bridge is not a game of chance, it is a game of skills and talent, the ability to solve the X factor from infinite variables. You don’t use your hindsight or your hunch to win, or depend on sign language – as they do in mahjong – to beat the enemy.

The International Olympic Committee considers bridge and chess as the only mind sports. The University of the Philippines now includes bridge in its PE curriculum for college students, first because it is a good form of brain exercise.

A member nearing her 80s swore mental exercise from bridge soothes the nerves. It’s a therapy.

“It keeps you young,” she said.

The Philippine team is a natural mixture of logicians, who rely on reasoning and inference, and mathematicians who are schooled in the laws of probability. Together they hope to make the right tandem in the nine events of the sport for men’s pairs, women’s pairs and mixed pairs.

Romulo Virola, who was UP professor when he was barely 19 years old, two years after he studied bridge, holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of Michigan and is currently secretary general, with rank of cabinet secretary, of the National Statistical Coordinating Board.

Rosemarie Araneta Unson, who recalls her love for books – reading one book a day for five years at one point in her younger days –  became hooked on bridge the last 50 years long after she retired from teaching.

Mylene Encontro and Ana de Guzman are both math graduates of UP, while Victoria Egan is a business graduate who managed several enterprises, among them as landlord of the Shangri-La EDSA Hotel.

Sylvia Lopez Alejandro, a lawyer, who was once director of the Philippine Airlines and sat on the Philippine panel for the air pact negotiations between the US and the Philippines, learned bridge after the war from her parents while they were on their way to the US.