Hurray for bridge!

In general, the 26th South East Asian Games was a disaster for Filipino athletes, but for a small contingent of players, it was a rousing success. The team brought home two gold medals, two silver medals, and one bronze medal. Ironically, the team members had to pay their own expenses to go to the games, because Philippine sports authorities (as well as media) did not give them and still have not given them the attention they deserve.

I am speaking about the Philippine Bridge Team.

Here are excerpts from the official list of winners:

Women’s Team’s: Gold Medal – Indonesia; Silver Medal – Singapore; Bronze Medal – Philippines (Gemma Mariano Tan, Mylene Encontro, Mary Cristy Ann De Guzman, Victoria Egan, Rosemarie Unson, Sylvia Alejandro).

Men’s Butler Pairs: Gold Medal – Philippines (Francisco Alquiros, George Soo); Silver Medal – Indonesia; Bronze Medal – Thailand.

Mixed Team’s: Gold Medal – Thailand; Silver Medal – Philippines (Francisco Alquiros, Gemma Mariano Tan, George Soo, Mylene Encontro, Victoria Egan, Allen Tan); Bronze Medal – Singapore.

Mixed Butler Pairs: Gold Medal – Philippines (Francisco Alquiros, Gemma Mariano Tan); Silver Medal – Philippines (George Soo, Mylene Encontro); Bronze Medal – Singapore.

One of our bronze medalists, Unson, 77 years old, was the oldest player in the whole event. She is older than medalist Jane Choo, 76, of Singapore. Whoever said that you cannot be an athlete in your seventies? (They were, of course, the exceptions. The other bridge players were younger.)

In his Facebook page, Soo (who is a psychiatrist by profession) posted this after the games: “Bridge has been a great part of my life for most of the last 34 years. It is a game of logic, strategy, patience and planning. For me, it has taught me valuable lessons, because it also involves getting along with and communicating with your partner. It has given me many hours of pleasure and companionship. Many of my partners and bridgemates are also my lifelong friends, people I can count on, on and off the table. I am grateful not only to the game, but to what it represents, the friendship and love that can only come from knowledge and acceptance of your fellowman, their limitations and their strengths. I expect to play this game for much longer, hopefully as long as my friend Margaret Yu who played until last year when she turned 103. I know that I was happy playing even when my knowledge of the game was so limited in my third year at college and the happiness does not diminish as one learns. Yet I cannot say I have mastered this game either. Therein lies the charm. I have been learning, and that learning makes me grow.”

For those that have not heard of the game that Singapore is pushing as a national mind sport (together with chess, Xiangqi, and Weiqi), let me tell you why bridge is taught in schools in the US.

Here is a 2006 summary from schoolbridgeleague. org of a study of bridge as a way of raising the achievement scores of students:

“Do children who play bridge perform better on standardized tests than their nonplaying counterparts? Dr. Christopher Shaw, a researcher from Carlinville IL, recently completed a study that shows the answer to that question is a definite ‘yes.’ Many bridge players have long believed that teaching kids bridge improves their critical thinking skills, but the evidence that it helped with school performance has been largely anecdotal. Shaw decided to take a more serious look at the impact that bridge has on test performance by school-age children. In a 2005 study, Shaw examined six groups of fifth graders from the Carlinville Public Schools who were similar in academic ability. One group learned to play bridge as part of its math instruction, but the other five did not.

“All of the students took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITSB) in Sept. 2001 (before bridge instruction began) and then again in May 2003 (sixth grade) and in May 2004 (seventh grade). The 15 students who learned to play bridge as fifth graders were mixed with the other students in the sixth and seventh grades.

“Performance on the ITSB increases as students get older: sixth graders, as a group, outperform fifth graders, for example. What Shaw discovered, however, was that the students who learned to play bridge had a greater average increase in their ITSB scores than their non-playing classmates.

“Shaw examined each group’s results on the ITSB over a three–year period. The first two tests were given 20 months apart; 32 months elapsed between the first and last test.

“The 2001 bridge students had higher test scores than the 2002 students at the end of 20 months and 32 months in four of the five subject areas. The language gain was less than the 2002 non-bridge students.

“The 2003 bridge students out-gained the 2002 class in four of the five subject areas after 20 months (science scores were lower than the 2002 group), but exceeded the 2002 group in all areas after 32 months.”

As writer Gemma Tan put it on Facebook, “in Europe and in the US, children who went to bridge classes and schools with bridge in the middle school curriculum ranked higher in math and reading scores.”

In Australia (abf.com.au), “many schools are now recognising the social and intellectual value of introducing bridge to their students.” (To be continued)