About My Bridge Journey

Hi, I'm Eli Jolley. Like you, I love Bridge! I found it at age 15 and was hooked. I’d always been drawn to probabilistic games like Backgammon and Poker, but Bridge was a wonderful, fascinating mystery. After a few months of online play, I went to the local duplicate game in Auburn, Alabama (my hometown), and quickly learned how little I knew. Since then, I’ve been on a journey to figure out this game. A new friend loaned me several bridge books which I quickly devoured (and, my fiancé points out, this addiction continues today). For the next couple of years I trained in Bridge religiously, and soon my hard work payed off: My partner and I won the 2008 Youth National Bridge Championship.

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My love for Bridge has not waned. My deeper understanding of the game really took off when I began to teach it. Prior to Bridge coaching, my playing relied a fair bit on my talent and determination. But through my students, I understood for the first time how differently each person may see a hand… and that to teach them, I would need to come up with a universal approach.

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Which leads us to my other love: Theatre. I obtained an MFA from the University of Iowa, and sometime between reciting Oscar Wilde in the cornfields and playing for UIowa's Bridge Team, it occurred to me that my Theatre training could help Bridge students! How? Well, I think that we're drawn to theater (and movies, television, radio, news, history, ancestry, anecdotes, etc etc) because humans make stories. They help us to engage, to see patterns and to discern, to learn and largely to make sense of the world. I realized that I could view Bridge through the same intuitive, human lens and in that way, truly elevate my game. Every Hand Tells A Story.