Up for auction "Contract Bridge Legend" Ely Culbertson Hand Signed Album Page.
ES-7243E
Elie
Almon Culbertson (July
22, 1891 – December 27, 1955), known as Ely Culbertson, was an
American contract bridge entrepreneur and personality dominant
during the 1930s. He played a major role in the popularization of the new game
and was widely regarded as "the man who made contract bridge". He was
a great showman who became rich, was highly extravagant, and lost and gained
fortunes several times over. Culbertson was born in Poiana Vărbilău in Romania to an
American mining engineer, Almon Culbertson, and his Russian wife, Xenya
Rogoznaya. He attended the École des sciences économiques et politiques at
the Sorbonne in Paris, and the University of Geneva. His
facility for languages was extraordinary: he spoke Russian, English, French,
German, Czech and Spanish fluently, with a reading knowledge of five others,
and a knowledge of Latin and classical Greek. In spite of his education, his
erudition was largely self-acquired: he was a born autodidact.
After the Russian Revolution (1917),
Culbertson lived for four years in Paris and other European cities by
exploiting his skill as a card player. In 1921 he moved to the United States,
earning his living from winnings at auction bridge and poker. In 1923 he
married Mrs. Josephine Murphy Dillon, a successful teacher of auction bridge
and a leading woman player, in Manhattan. They were successful as both players and
teachers, and later as publishers. Josephine Culbertson retained
the surname after their divorce in 1938; indeed, a revised edition of Culbertson's
Contract Bridge in Ten Minutes was published under her name in 1951. Gradually
the new game of contract bridge began to replace auction bridge, and Culbertson
saw his opportunity to overtake the leaders of auction bridge. Culbertson
planned a far-reaching and successful campaign to promote himself as the leader
of the new game. As player, organizer, bidding theorist, magazine editor, and
team leader, he was a key figure in the growth of contract bridge in its great
boom years of the 1930s. Culbertson
was a brilliant publicist; he played several famous challenge matches and won
them all. Two were played in the U.S., against pairs led
by Sidney Lenz in 1931–32 (the so-called "Bridge Battle of the
Century") and by P. Hal Sims in 1935, the latter between the married
couples Culbertson and Sims. Four teams-of-four matches
were played in England, against Walter Buller's team in
1930, against "Pops" Beasley's
team in 1930 and 1933, and against Col. George Walshe's team in 1934. These
matches were typically accompanied by noteworthy publicity in newspapers, on
radio and on cinema newsreels, and the hands became the subject of intense
discussion on bidding methods. Later,
a match did not materialize against the leading American team of the mid-1930s,
the "Four Aces".
Culbertson was finally beaten in Budapest, June 1937, in the final match of the first world
championship teams tournament, by the 6-man Austria team led by Dr. Paul Stern. It was his last appearance in a tournament or
match.
Culbertson founded and edited The Bridge World magazine, which is still published
today, and wrote many newspaper articles and books on bridge. He owned the
first firm of playing card manufacturers to develop plastic cards, Kem Cards,
and developed and owned a chain of bridge schools with teachers qualified in
the Culbertson bidding system. He continued to play high-stakes rubber bridge
for many years, but gave up tournament and match competition in 1938 to write
and to work for world peace.[ Total Peace (1943)
and Must We Fight Russia? (1947) were his most important
books.