About Luise Lee

I have been exposed to bridge in various forms all my life, but only started seriously studying the game in the fall of 2008.  This blog is dedicated to recording my journey as I grow and develop my skills as a bridge player.

My first exposure to bridge came from my parents playing “kitchen bridge”.  My father tried to teach me the game, but all I remember is loud arguments and screaming late at night while I was trying to sleep — I was having none of that and was not at all even remotely interestred in joining in on the fighting and bickering.

The first time I encountered card games with my peers was at High-School.  Being somewhat of a loner, I hung out with a few friends in the lunch room and played card games (mostly euchre) during free period.

Later, in university, I grew fond of hanging out in the card-playing “comfy lounge” of the Math building at Waterloo, where I met my future husband, Colin Lee.  I still wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to play bridge, but I have always had a generic love of card games.  Colin and I both gratuated in ’99 with a Bachelor of Math degree, majoring in Combinatorics and Optimization.

When University was finished, after my first role as a project manager turned out to be a total and complete failure, my boyfriend’s dad, Ray Lee, took pity on me and gave me a job working for him on some computer projects.  My first project was in transforming Eddie Kantar’s books, Modern Bridge Defense and Advanced Bridge Defense, into a CD-ROM using Fred Gitelman’s bridge software.  In the process of working on those two books, I’m sure much of the BRIDGE rubbed off on me.

Colin Lee and I were married on September 9, 2001 and I officially became a member of the “Lee” family.  I spent many a night listening to the other three Lee’s at the dinner table yabbering on about this hand or that hand.  I couldn’t help, over the years, to absorb some of the nonesense that they were blabbering about, and over time, bit by bit, the huge wall that I had built up to protect myself from this emotional game started to crumble and fall away.

I finally give in.  The wall has come down and, inspite of all efforts to prevent it from happening, I *AM* becoming a “BRIDGE PLAYER”.  I might as well go willingly and cross over to the dark side.