Bob Hamman has played the odds and come out on top

ROBERT HAMMAN HAS one of the more exotic jobs you’ve never heard of. When a big company plans a sweepstakes or promotion offering big prizes, his SCA promotions calculates the cost and hedges the risk.

Hamman’s complex analyses don’t stop when he gets off his day job. For 20 years, he was the World Bridge Federation’s top-ranked player, the Tiger Woods of the game. In the fall of 2004, he was displaced by Lorenzo Lauria of Italy and is now placed eighth in the Grandmaster rankings. Hamman is the winner of 11 World Championships and over 40 National championships.

He prides himself on his mental toughness and his ability to stay focused. It doesn’t matter who his partner is: Hamman won eight ACBL tournaments with eight different partners. Gifted with an analytical mind and a keen understanding of odds and probabilities, he is renowned for his high ethical standards. Today, if 3NT is the most common contract, it is attributed to “Hamman’s Law,” which says: “If you have a choice of reasonable bids and one of them is 3NT, then bid it.”

Back in the 1960s, the World Championships were dominated by the Blue Team from Italy, which included players like Pietro Forquet, Benito Garrozzo, Giorgio Belladonna and Walter Avarelli. To wrest away the world title, Dallas financier Ira Corn formed a team called the Aces. The team members varied over the years, but started with Bobby Wolff, Mike Lawrence, Bobby Goldman, Jim Jacoby and Billy Eisenberg, with Bob Hamman the one constant. The training was intense: 60 hours a week were spent discussing and analyzing computer-generated hands, perfecting bidding systems, and in practice sessions with other experts. The effort paid off. The Aces brought the World Championship to the US in 1970 and successfully defended the title in 1971. For the next decade, the Aces competed with the Blue Team for dominance in international bridge, emerging victorious again in 1976, ‘77 and ‘79.

The seed for another of Hamman’s careers, promoting bridge, may have been planted when the Aces played in exhibition matches, like the one with the Omar Sharif Bridge Circus, a group of top-ranking bridge professionals that toured Europe and North America challenging other teams.
Hamman has faith in the game. “Bridge is, without question, the best, most challenging mind game in existence,” he says, “and we are excited to do our part to get the word out and build new awareness for the game.”

Hamman is not only acting on his convictions, but also betting on them. His World Bridge Productions manages two exciting events, the invitation-only Cavendish Invitational and the Warren Buffett Bridge Cup.

The Cavendish Invitational, held in Las Vegas, is a two-day tournament that invites over 100 world-class players to compete for prize pools as high as US$1.5 million. Each pair is auctioned and the auction money is pooled and paid out to the owners of the top finishers. Levin and Weinstein, the 2007 winners, were auctioned for $65,000, while Norway’s leading pair Helness and Helgemo (currently ranked 10 and 11) were the highest at $74,000. The pair that won the Cavendish in 2008, Geoff Hampson and Eric Rodwell were auctioned for just $50,000.

The Buffett Bridge Cup is sponsored by billionaire financier Warren Buffett, who has a passion for the game. (He was once reported to have said, “I wouldn’t mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge.”) The Buffett Bridge Cup is modeled after golf’s Ryder Cup and is held every two years to coincide with that prestigious tournament. An American team plays a European team, but the players can only use simple bidding systems to make the game easily understood for spectators. The inaugural match, in Dublin in 2006, was won convincingly by the US team. Last September, the Europeans got their revenge. The US team, which has dubbed itself the “Gods of Odds,” was headed by Hamman.

These tournaments, and countless others, are broadcast on BridgeBase Online, or BBO, which is a website, supported by Hamman, where you can play, learn or watch bridge.

When asked about his success, Hamman ascribed it to luck, which is strange for someone who has spent a career analyzing odds. Here is a man who has a talent for luck and the luck of having talent.