Santa Barbara’s Bridge Master

At age 27, Danning Lu can now call himself a bridge master. The UCSB PhD student accumulated enough masterpoints in March to attain the rank from the American Contract Bridge League, an organization of over 165,000 players, after winning a tournament with his partner Andrew Rowberg.

Lu, a Shanghai native, started playing the card game at age nine but didn’t reach the competitive level until recently. In 2017, Lu came to UCSB to study Mathematics at a propitious moment ― Rowberg, a Materials Science grad student, was in the process of forming a bridge club that came to be known as Overbidders Anonymous. Three years after the group convened and in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Overbidders played their way to the finals of the 2020 Online Collegiate Bridge Championships. A year later, they won the title.

In bridge, each partnership must coordinate their hands to outbid their opponents in a series of rounds known as tricks. Most verbal communication and all physical signaling is forbidden; the only permitted language is expressed by specific terminology and by the cards they play in the initial round of contract-setting. “Different bids and plays have different meanings,” Lu said. “Even if the language is quite standard, you and your partner have a lot of freedom to design the round.”