ABOUT DANNY

If the wild conjectures of science fantary writers were true, somewhere in a parallel universe Danny Kleinman would be living in a small college town, working away on a paper in Yis Theory, an obscure branch of mathematics understood by only six people in the world. His wife of 48 years would be rubbing his neck and reminding him of the lecture on Cantor’s Diagonal Methods he was scheduled to deliver an hour and a half hence, while three doting daughters would be alternately sharpening his pencils, laying fresh pieces of scrap paper on his desk, and bringing him bowls of chocolate ice cream.

Regrettably, there is only one real world, the one in which Danny grew up and still resides, a world filled with stress and strife, and he works not with mathematics but largely with games. His earliest recollection of games is of his mother scolding him, “Don’t play checkers! Checkers is not your game. Chess is your game.”

His mother was wrong, as two Unrestricted World Checker Champions, Millard Hopper in 1950 and Tom Wiswell in 1958, discovered when they lost to Danny in exhibitions. But at the age of 7, gullible little Danny believed his mother. Unfortunately, there was nobody around at the time to teach chess to Danny. However, there was one lover of contract bridge in his family, his only living grandfather, whom Danny was to meet for the first time that year on a visit to Louisville. In preparation for that visit, Danny’s father taught him bridge. 7 is a wonderful bridge number, the maximum level to which a bridge player can bid, as is 13, the number of cards in each hand and the number of tricks to be taken during each deal.

Though only permitted to play in the adults’ bridge game for an hour or so, in the magical connection that sometimes occurs between grandfathers and grandsons, Danny absorbed Grandpa Tabakerki’s enthusiasm for the game. Soon after, when Danny’s parents returned to the Bronx, disaster struck. Some pervert invented a card game called canasta. From then on, when family game night rolled around, Danny’s democratically-minded father put the choice of games to a vote. Danny’s mother, father and sister invariably voted for canasta, leaving Danny in a position that was to become very familiar to him, a minority of one. Undeterred, Danny stole a Culbertson primer from his parents’ bookshelf, and learned the Culbertson System on his own.

A typical rainy or snowy afternoon would find Danny sitting on the floor of the small bedroom he shared with his sister, dealing, bidding all four hands by himself, in an effort to discover more about the game he loved. Within a year, Danny became dissatisfied with Culbertson’s Honor Count. Why should a stray jack count for naught, when it was clearly more valuable than a deuce? An affinitity for numbers led Danny to invent (or so he thought at the time) a “point-count” that valued a jack as 1, a queen as 2, a king as 3 and an ace as 4. Perhaps coincidentally, the strongest bridge hand, one with four aces, kings and queens and a lone jack, came to 37, the year of Danny’s birth.

Now Danny had two ways to evaluate a bridge hand: Culbertson’s, and his own. An empiricist by nature, Danny would bid hands both ways, and compare the contracts reached by each. He was shocked and disappointed to find that Culbertson’s Honor Count led to better contracts than his own Point Count.

Danny’s bridge career, such as it was, came to a temporary end soon after World War Two ended. His mother took him along on a shopping trip downtown. In a bin at a Russian War Relief store, Danny spotted a cardboard chess set, with round discs showing diagrams instead of actual pieces. His mother invested 15 cents, and Danny learned chess from the brief instructions that came with the set. Following his mother’s plan for him, Danny neglected other games for chess … until his mother began to scold, “Don’t become a chess bum!”

For a while, Danny was interested in physical sports. He fancied himself the next Ferris Fain, but he threw like a girl and his batting skill was limited by an extraordinary lack of coordination, so all he could master were the strategies of the game. Strangely, despite a skinny frame, Danny acquired a knack for football, where he billed himself alternately as “Tank Tabakerki” and “the 107-pound Bronco Nagurski” as a Marion Motley-like fullback for the Tryon Avenue Troglodytes. Then teenage arrived, and all the boys who had been Danny’s playmates disappeared from the streets and parks of the north Bronx.

Danny kept up with bridge only by reading Florence Osborn’s columns in the New York Herald Tribune that his father brought home every weekday night. In 1950, he entered the Bronx High School of Science, hoping to play first board on the school’s chess team, and he succeeded in beating every other member of the school’s chess club.

If you follow 21st-century politics, you may have heard of Tony Rudy, an aide to Tom DeLay who was implicated in the scandals surrounding Congressman DeLay. Well, half a century earlier, Tony’s father Aben was President of the Bronx Science Chess Club, and as corrupt as his son later proved to be. Aben refused to let Danny play on the team … until one day in February of 1952, when the two boys happened to be assigned to the same lunchroom. As Danny walked by Aben’s table, Aben called out to him, “Do you play bridge? We need a fourth.” Whereupon Danny negotiated a place on the Chess Team: fourth board for the one match left to play that year, first board for the next year when the erstwhile first board will have graduated.

After high school, Danny found few peers and elders interested in chess but many who played bridge. His first regular duplicate partner, N. Gore, insisted on playing the Goren System. Danny, who was working in Manhattan as a shipping clerk in the fur district, bought a Goren bidding manual during his lunch hour, and read it during the subway trip to the Barclay Bridge Club in Queens early that evening. There was almost nothing new to learn. The Goren System was nothing other than the familiar Culberton System, translated from Honor Tricks to the Point-Count that Danny had developed eight years earlier, with some minor adjustments to the 4-3-2-1 count, the enhancement of high-card points by points for distribution, and a recalibration of the requirements for opening bids, responses and other actions.

Failing in an attempt to organize a Chess Club while at Oberlin College, Danny turned again to bridge, and partnered by Dick Recht, he managed to win the National Intercollegiate Bridge Championship (a “par contest”) in 1957. Later that year, as an impoverished graduate student at Cornell, Danny revived his chess career briefly, hustling other students for $5 a game, but he soon ran out of takers, even at rook and sometimes queen odds. His mother’s worries that he would become a “chess bum” were over.

During most of the two decades following Danny’s departure from Cornell, he worked as a computer programmer, first back in New York City, then in Los Angeles. For reasons that are still a mystery to him, Danny had great difficulty getting and keeping jobs. While looking for work during one six-month period of unemployment, Danny tried hustling games at one of the handful of rubber bridge clubs that dotted West Hollywood. He netted (winnings less card fees) about as much as he did from the meager unemployment checks he received, but he ceased to enjoy playing, and developed a distaste for being a predator, rather than a playmate, of others. When he found employment again, he resolved never again to play “for the money,” though he continued to play rubber bridge for money stakes.

In the mid-1970s, Danny lost what turned out to be the last full-time programming job of his career, though he continued to obtain occasional freelance jobs. He wondered, how can employers not want to hire Stakhanovite computer programmers?

Meanwhile, things had been changing in Los Angeles rubber-bridge circles. Clubs had folded and consolidated until only two remained. Danny spent most of his time at the more prominent of the two, the Cavendish West, a club that had opened in 1971. The custom at local rubber bridge clubs had been for players to play in low-stake O’Hell games during the usual dinner hour, and O’Hell flourished during the first two years of the Cavendish. Then, suddenly, low-stake backgammon games took the place of O’Hell.

Bright young games players took quickly to backgammon. The stakes for which they played escalated as they became experienced. The quarters for which they had played initially became dollars and then “nickels”---no, not the familiar metal coins, but $5 per point. Danny, who was only a few years older than most of the others who had become quite good, did not soon become expert. The age at which he learned backgammon, 36, was a wonderful backgammon number (there being 36 permutations of the numbers on the two dice) but not the best age for learning the game. His contemporary, Billy Eisenberg, had become proficient years earlier in New York City, before moving to Los Angeles, and was good enough by the age of 37 or 38 to win a world backgammon championship.

Danny first played backgammon for $2 per point at the behest of the late Stella Rebner, a great bridge player who loved to be Danny’s partner but hated to be his opponent at rubber bridge. Seeing one of her favorite “pigeons” waiting for a bridge game, and not wanting Danny to share in the plucking, she pointed to a backgammon game where Patti Medford, the club’s hostess, was playing, and whispered, “Danny, do you play that silly game?”

“Yes, but not well,” replied Danny, who was not given to false modesty.

“I don’t believe you,” said Stella. “Everything you do, you do well. Here, take Patti’s place in the backgammon game so she can start a bridge game for me. I’ll pay your losses and let you keep half your winnings.”

The arrangement was good for both, but only briefly … until Danny found he could do better on his own. By the time 1975 was rolling towards an end, Stella had retired from bridge and Danny was playing low-stakes backgammon regularly, though not expertly.

As if losing his last full-time programming job in 1975 weren’t disaster enough, disaster struck again … in the form of a fraudulent offer to finance the development of a backgammon-playing machine. Once Danny embarked on the project, and even after the promise of financing was rescinded, Danny became obsessed, and Jack Gammon (as Danny whimsically called the machine he designed and programmed) made his first public appearance at the Cavendish West in September of 1976.

Jack was an artistic and intellectual success, but a financial failure. Meanwhile, Danny had come (finally!) to understand backgammon. One thing led to another … to teaching backgammon, and then to writing, putting to paper the knowledge of backgammon that Danny had acquired and the new insights he was developing about the game. At the time, backgammon literature was scanty, consisting mainly of a few primers and one excellent textbook, so there was a niche for Danny to fill.

However, Danny did not turn fully to writing until disaster struck again: not him, this time, but the American Contract Bridge League; two of its leading lights, former world champions and ACBL Presidents Lew Mathe and Don Oakie; and the pair of Los Angeles bridge players they had accused of cheating, Dick Katz and Larry Cohen, who had sued for readmission to the league and huge monetary damages. Through a series of coincidences, Danny was commissioned (indirectly, by the ACBL) to investigate the accusation and write a report. Swayed from his initial belief in the truth of the accusation by the evidence in the hand records, he offered his research (and his conclusion of the pair’s innocence) first to the ACBL, then to Alfred Sheinwold (bridge reporter for the Los Angeles Times), and then to Bridge World co-editor Jeff Rubens, only to meet with brisk and sometimes brusque rejection everywhere.

Danny felt that the story of the Katz-Cohen accusation had to be written by somebody, but nobody else would write it. With the words of Hillel (“If not I, then who?”) somehow embedded in his brain (perhaps mystically planted there in his infancy by his other grandfather, an Orthodox Rabbi who died in Danny’s second year), Danny took it upon himself to be that somebody.

Thus began a writing career that has spanned three decades. Danny seeks not to repeat the insights and opinions of others who have written on the topics he addresses, but to discover insights and express ideas that are not to be found elsewhere, regardless of their popularity or accordance with widely-accepted doctrines. In doing so, Danny has offended many. His affirmation of the innocence of Katz and Cohen offended many bridge players who thought the pair guilty of cheating; his scorn for popular conventions (particularly the nearly universally beloved Blackwood convention) has offended many others. Those he has offended by his backgammon books include cheaters who have threatened, harassed and even assaulted Danny in an attempt to kill him.

Indeed, Danny did not expect to live long after exposing the ring of cheaters that infested backgammon in Los Angeles and elsewhere during the early 1980s. However, even overt death threats did not stop him, not because Danny is particularly courageous, but because he has a sense of being driven by his ideas and his ideals (to quote Martin Luther, “Here I stand; I can do no other”). After being threatened with death, Danny redoubled his investigation of the techniques and activities of the cheaters, culminating in his obtaining and reproducing in a book photos of the magnetized table used by the would-be assassin.

A sense of impending death consumed Danny from 1984 to 1986, when the threatened murderous attack finally came. Thinking that his days were numbered, Danny asked himself what he had in him to create before his death, and answered, songs. Having dabbled in songwriting decades earlier, Danny went on a frenzy of setting poems he liked to music. Some of his tunes are hauntingly beautiful. His listeners do not always react with the applause they shower upon most performers; often they react with silent awe.

During the early 1990s, The Bridge World began accepting and publishing Danny’s submissions. Since then, his articles have been more numerous than those of any other contributor. For the last few years, Danny has served on the magazine’s staff. In January 2001, Danny directed the magazine’s Master Solvers’ Club; since 2005, Danny has directed the MSC regularly, in June and December of each year.

Of all his achievements, Danny considers these as most important: his work to exonerate Katz and Cohen of the mistaken cheating accusation against them; his work to expose backgammon cheaters; dozens of the songs he has written; and his book on election systems, One Man, One Vote: A Ballot for Americans, which introduces and explains voting systems of his own design.

Currently, besides writing, and the editing and proofreading of others’ work for which he is occasionally hired, Danny plays bridge professionally and offers to his clients the same kind of detailed analyses of the deals on which they go wrong as appear in 365 Winning Bridge Tips (the latest of his books published by Master Point Press).