Leveling Up

John Ramos was born and raised in New York City. He learned the rules of bridge at a very young age from his father and grandmother. After graduating from Princeton University in 1992, he returned to NYC and pursued tournament bridge, being mentored by some of the best players the city had to offer.

Following careers in options trading and film, the latter of which took him across the country to Los Angeles, in 2016 he transitioned to teaching and playing bridge full-time. Since he decided to make bridge his vocation, John has established himself as one of Los Angeles’s premier teachers, holding regular classes at both public and private clubs all over the city and building up a devoted client base. In addition, he’s a top tournament player, having placed in the top 5 in Open US National events on four occasions. He is also a partner in Bridge And Beyond, a bridge education and luxury travel company he formed with fellow pros Giorgia Botta and Christopher Rivera.

Phil Clayton became a Life Master at age 22 and is currently an Emerald Life Master. He is a USBF junior mentor and coach and was the Non-Playing Captain of the USA2 Seniors team at the world championships in Herning, DK. He is a member of the ACBL Advisory Council and the Online Ethical Oversight Committee. He is a good friend of mine and a frequent teammate.

Marc Smith was a member of the Great Britain team that won the Junior Teams at the European Union Championships in 1985. Marc has won most of England’s national events at some point in the past 40+ years, most recently picking up the Premier Grand Masters Pairs title in 2025.

However, it is as a bridge writer that he best known. Marc is the co-author, along with Barbara Seagram, of the best-selling bridge book since Culbertson, “25 Conventions You Should Know.” He collaborated with David Bird on two award-winning series of books: “Bridge Technique” and “Bridge Cardplay: An Easy Guide.” He has also co-written books with Jeff Meckstroth, Martin Hoffman, Julian Pottage, and Tim Bourke. Marc now has more than 50 titles to his name, including the “World Class” series and the “Enterprising Tales” books (bridge stories set in the “Star Trek” universe). These days, Marc conducts the world’s most popular bidding competition, hosted on the RealBridge website, and he also writes a regular cardplay column in the ACBL Bulletin. Marc also teaches numerous weekly online classes. For more details of both his classes and his books, visit Marc’s website at www.bridge-teacher.com.

Rob Barrington is a professional player, teacher, and one of the more recognizable personalities in the modern bridge world. His online content reaches a global audience where just his YouTube channel has over 6 million views! Based in South Florida Rob continues to teach, create content and travel the world for Bridge. 

John Kranyak is a professional bridge player and world champion originally from Cleveland, Ohio, currently living in Tucson, Arizona. He is married to fellow bridge player, Dr. Allison Kranyak. Together they have a baby girl Lyla. In his spare time John enjoys golf, pickleball, running and hiking.

John won his first national event in 2005 playing with his mom, Laurie. He was on the winning team in the 2001, 2005, and 2006 world youth team championships. His team won the 2024 world transnational teams and the 2021 Soloway.

Maya attended her first NABC in 2022, and the next year took 2nd place in GNT Cs, won the 20-50 Mini-McKenney, and started teaching beginners with a novel strategy aimed at youngish working professionals. Since then, she's made Day 2 of a bunch of NABC+ events, captained a team to the Bronze Medal of the inaugural Bridge Brawl, and is just off a first place finish in GNT Bs at the Minneapolis NABC.

Rajath Shourie was introduced to bridge as a child by his family, but didn't really play until he had retired from his career in distressed debt investing. He took up the game during Covid, learning online, and went to his first in-person duplicate at the Austin NABC in late 2021.
Since then he has had a number of successful finishes, including wins in the world transnational teams in Argentina, the Soloway Knockout in San Francisco, and most recently the US Team Trials.
He lives in Pacific Palisades, California, with his wife Moira, and their two sets of twin boys.

The year is 1990. A teenage Danny Miles is introduced to bridge by his grandmother, Frances — proving once again that grandmothers are the game’s most effective recruiters.

The hobby stuck. Danny went on to win four Canadian Open Championships and one Mixed title, along with representing Canada internationally.

In addition to playing, he has dabbled in bridge administration — serving on his local unit board and helping organize the 2024 Toronto NABC — confirming he’s now fully immersed on all sides of the game.

For a stretch, career and family limited his tournament schedule, but with semi-retirement and two daughters (9 and 7) getting older, a return to more frequent appearances seems likely. Perhaps, following the Wolperts and De Wijs’s, with kids in tow?

He also mentors Canadian juniors, some as young as 12 — doing his part to ensure the next generation has someone to blame when they fall in love with the game.

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Bill Bailey has an unusual bridge history. He discovered bridge in book form in his early 20s. He’d heard it was the “chess of card games” and so decided to buy an Intro to Bridge book. This started a 30-year habit of reading bridge books while nary touching a card. He was fascinated by declarer play problems in particular. His 3rd book was Bridge With the Blue Team. Then he started reading all of Kelsey’s works.

He spent 30 years in Silicon Valley as a software engineer, did well, and was able to retire in his early 50s from the intense high-tech rat race. Finally he was able to devote time to actually playing bridge. All the books provided a foundation but playing at the table is an entirely different experience. He recalls it was hard for him to track opponents’ cards at first, as that is something one obviously doesn’t have to do when reading books.

Over time he experimented working with various pros and now fields a top-tier team. He won his first National title in the Jacoby Swiss in St. Louis. Somewhat hilariously, his life partner Arti Bhargava also won a National title in St. Louis on the same day in a different event. He hopes to do well with his team at the transnationals in Poland this August.

And one last side-bar: in the middle of that 30 year career in high-tech, he took a couple years off and wrote Deep Finesse in the late 1990s. Deep Finesse is software that does perfect double-dummy analysis of bridge hands. Eventually he worked with the ACBL to incorporate the Deep Finesse analysis engine inside their hand record generator to include the double-dummy results that are now ubiquitously part of any hand record.