Charlie Wilkins is a bridge enthusiast who retired in 2021 after a long career in commercial real estate. Since mid-2017, he has been collecting deals from actual play, where non-experts made technically correct bids and plays that gained lots of matchpoints. He calls these deals “Real World Bridge” to distinguish them from deals that occur in all-expert games, deals that require expert skills, and deals that were invented by authors. Since COVID, most of these deals have occurred in large online Open Pairs games with 50+ tables. For more information, see https://realworldbridge.com/

“I’ve been working on Leveling Up for almost eight years now, and it’s led to big improvements in my game. I’ve read hundreds of bridge books and studied bridge for over sixty years (yikes), but my game really started to improve when I started getting coaching from Marty Bergen, Dennis Dawson (from 2017 until he died in 2022), and Val Kovachev (starting in 2020), not only about technical skills but about how to play my best bridge consistently.”