Charles Henry Goren (March 4, 1901 – April 3, 1991)[1][2] was an American bridge player and writer who significantly developed and popularized the game. He was the leading American bridge personality in the 1950s and 1960s and widely known as "Mr. Bridge".[1][a]
Goren was born in what is now Khotyn, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His parents were Jacob and Rebecca Goron. His father emigrated in 1903 with the family possibly coming later.[3] He earned a law degree at McGill University in Montreal in 1923. While he was attending McGill, a girlfriend (or "a young hostess")[1] laughed at his ineptness at the game of bridge, thus motivating him to immerse himself in a study of existing bridge materials.[4]
After graduation, he practiced law for 13 years in Philadelphia.[1] The growing fame of contract bridge player Ely Culbertson, however, prompted Goren to abandon his original career choice to pursue bridge competitions, where he attracted the attention of Milton Work, an American authority on many card games including contract bridge. Work was impressed by Goren's knowledge of the game and hired Goren to help him write his bridge articles and columns.[1]
Work was one of many strong bridge players based in Philadelphia around the 1920s. By 1928 he had popularized the 4–3–2–1 point count system for evaluating balanced hands (now sometimes called the Work count). His chief assistant Olive Peterson and young Goren established a partnership as players.[5]
As a player Goren's "breakthrough" was the 1937 Board-a-Match Teams championship (now called The Reisinger National Bridge Championship) which he won with three other Philadelphia players: John Crawford, Charles Solomon, and Sally Young.[1]
Goren dominated the competitive bridge circuit ultimately becoming world champion at the Bermuda Bowl in 1950 and remained a competitive player until about 1962 after which he focused on writing and teaching bridge.
After Milton Work died in 1934, Goren began his own bridge writing career and published the first of his many books on playing bridge, Winning Bridge Made Easy, in 1936.[5] Drawing on his experience with Work's system, Goren quickly became popular as an instructor and lecturer.
Goren's books have sold millions of copies (especially Winning Bridge Made Easy and Contract Bridge Complete); by 1958 his daily bridge column was appearing in 194 American newspapers. He also had a monthly column in McCall's and a weekly column in Sports Illustrated.
His television program, Championship Bridge with Charles Goren, was broadcast from 1959 to 1964 on the ABC network. It featured numerous appearances by top players and segments with celebrity guests such as Chico Marx, Alfred Drake, and Forest Evashevski, among others.[6]
Goren's longest partnership was with Helen Sobel, but he also famously partnered actor Omar Sharif. Sharif also wrote introductions to or co-authored several of Goren's bridge books, and was also co-author of Goren's newspaper column, eventually taking it over in collaboration with Tannah Hirsch.
As he continued writing, Goren began to develop his point count system, based on the Milton Work point count, as an improvement over the existing system of counting "honor tricks". Goren, with assistance, formulated a method of combining the Work count, which was based entirely on high cards, and various distributional features. This may well have improved the bidding of intermediate players and beginners almost immediately.
Goren also worked to continue the practice of opening four-card suits, with an occasional three-card club suit when the only four-card suit was a weak major. In this, he was following the practice established by Ely Culbertson in the early 1930s. Later on, he continued this practice, resisting the well-known five-card majors approach that has become a major feature of modern Standard American bidding.
Opening a four-card suit can improve the chances of the partnership identifying a four-four trump fit, and the four-card approach is still used by experts today, notably by most Acol players. It is claimed that the drawback of the four-card approach is that the Law of Total Tricks is more difficult to apply in cases where it is used. However, the five-card majors approach became popular before the Law of Total Tricks was propounded.
In addition to his pioneering work in bringing simple and effective bridge to everyday players, Goren also worked to popularize the Precision bidding method, which is one of many so-called big club or strong club systems (which use an opening bid of one club to indicate a strong hand).
Tribune Content Agency distributes the daily column Goren Bridge, written by Bob Jones, using the Goren method.[7]
Goren died on April 3, 1991, in Encino, California, at the age of 90. He had lived with his nephew Marvin Goren for 19 years.[1] While few players "play Goren" exactly today, the point-count approach he popularized remains the foundation for most bidding systems.[a]
During the month of Goren's death, Truscott followed his obituary with a bridge column entitled, "Goren leaves behind many fans and a column with an international flavor". His business interests had been "managed by others" since his retirement "a quarter of a century ago", according to Truscott. "The Goren syndicated column now has an international flavor: It carries the bylines of the movie star Omar Sharif, an Egyptian who lives in Paris, and an entrepreneur, Tannah Hirsch, a South African who came to the United States via Israel."[8]
Goren appeared on the Groucho Marx radio and television game show You Bet Your Life in March 1958.
Goren appeared on the television game show What’s My Line in December 1961.
