Leveling Up – Details, episodes & analysis

Fred Gitelman is best known as one of the creators of Bridge Base Online and its predecessor, Bridge Base Inc., which produced some of the best and most important educational software of the 90s. Fred retired from top-level tournament bridge in 2019, but during his heyday he and Brad Moss were one of the top pairs in the world, winning the 2010 Rosenblum world championship and several national titles. Fred is a deep thinker about the game, and has been tremendously influential to modern bridge.

Brian Platnick, of Evanston, IL is a graduate of Virginia Tech (BS & MS in engineering) and William & Mary School of Law.  He has worked for the past 30 years trading stock options.  He is a founding member, and current President of The EDGAR Association.  Brian served as a member of both the Ethical and Online Oversight Committees of the ACBL and has worked on numerous cheating investigations. 

As a bridge player, Brian has won 6 NABC+ events and attained the rank of World Grand Master after winning the 1991 World Junior Teams and 2010 Rosenblum.  

Amber Lin is the 2025 ACBL Honorary Member of the Year, a former Queen of Bridge, and co-coordinator of the USBF’s Online Junior Training Program. Amber won the gold medal in the Mixed Teams at the 2023 World Championships and the silver medal the year before. Her energy and enthusiasm for junior bridge have changed the lives of many young US players. Outside of bridge, she works full time in clean energy.

Charlie Wilkins is a bridge enthusiast who retired in 2021 after a long career in commercial real estate. Since mid-2017, he has been collecting deals from actual play, where non-experts made technically correct bids and plays that gained lots of matchpoints. He calls these deals “Real World Bridge” to distinguish them from deals that occur in all-expert games, deals that require expert skills, and deals that were invented by authors. Since COVID, most of these deals have occurred in large online Open Pairs games with 50+ tables. For more information, see https://realworldbridge.com/

“I’ve been working on Leveling Up for almost eight years now, and it’s led to big improvements in my game. I’ve read hundreds of bridge books and studied bridge for over sixty years (yikes), but my game really started to improve when I started getting coaching from Marty Bergen, Dennis Dawson (from 2017 until he died in 2022), and Val Kovachev (starting in 2020), not only about technical skills but about how to play my best bridge consistently.”

Ribs LaMothe is a retired training consultant, specializing in sales and communication skills. His background includes instructional design, focusing on helping people learn. He has also used his skills teaching the game of bridge in the Dallas, Texas area.

Larry Cohen is a 25-time national champion, American Contract Bridge League Hall of Famer, former ACBL Player of the Year, and is one of the ACBL’s "Top 10 Living Most Influential Bridge Personalities."

Boye Brogeland is one of the top players in the world. And an awful lot of fun to talk to! For over 25 years he has been a mainstay on the Norwegian national team as they put up a string of impressive results, the highlight being the Bermuda Bowl championship in 2007 and the European championships in 2008, 2018,
and 2024. I highly recommend his book, Bridge at the Edge. And, of course, he earned the nickname “The Sherriff” for his leadership eradicating cheating from the game in 2015.

James Holzhauer is a Diamond Life Master. In 2019 he won 32 consecutive games on Jeopardy and recorded the 12 highest single-game scores in the show's history. He has also starred as one of the resident trivia experts on the ABC show The Chase. He lives in Las Vegas.

Norman Beck is a gambler. He has worked for Bob Hamman at SCA Promotions for 33 years. Before that, he was a police officer, an insurance adjuster, a security guard, a bartender, a bouncer, a writer, a “psychic,” and a magician. Norman learned bridge in 1977 and was playing duplicate within 2 weeks. He used to hitchhike to tournaments and do a magic show to make money for food. He has played with some of the legends of the game, including Hamman, Meckstroth, Rodwell, Sontag, Goldman, Bramley.

I was introduced to Norman by Ribs LaMothe, who spoke highly of him as a teacher and mentor. After talking with him for a couple of minutes at the NABC in Memphis, I knew he would make for a great interview for the podcast.

I encourage you to watch Norman’s Ted Talk. It’s the best one I’ve seen.

David Weiss is an emeritus psychology professor specializing in judgment and decision making who has published two books and over 70 academic articles. His most recent research is about objectively assessing expertise when there is no scoreboard. David has written extensively about bridge, publishing two books and over 60 articles in The Bridge World.
Good professor that he is, David brought some slides with him, so I encourage you to watch this one rather than listen if you can.