Leveling Up

Rajath Shourie was introduced to bridge as a child by his family, but didn't really play until he had retired from his career in distressed debt investing. He took up the game during Covid, learning online, and went to his first in-person duplicate at the Austin NABC in late 2021.
Since then he has had a number of successful finishes, including wins in the world transnational teams in Argentina, the Soloway Knockout in San Francisco, and most recently the US Team Trials.
He lives in Pacific Palisades, California, with his wife Moira, and their two sets of twin boys.

The year is 1990. A teenage Danny Miles is introduced to bridge by his grandmother, Frances — proving once again that grandmothers are the game’s most effective recruiters.
The hobby stuck. Danny went on to win four Canadian Open Championships and one Mixed title, along with representing Canada internationally.
In addition to playing, he has dabbled in bridge administration — serving on his local unit board and helping organize the 2024 Toronto NABC — confirming he’s now fully immersed on all sides of the game.
For a stretch, career and family limited his tournament schedule, but with semi-retirement and two daughters (9 and 7) getting older, a return to more frequent appearances seems likely. Perhaps, following the Wolperts and De Wijs’s, with kids in tow?
He also mentors Canadian juniors, some as young as 12 — doing his part to ensure the next generation has someone to blame when they fall in love with the game.

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Bill Bailey has an unusual bridge history. He discovered bridge in book form in his early 20s. He’d heard it was the “chess of card games” and so decided to buy an Intro to Bridge book. This started a 30-year habit of reading bridge books while nary touching a card. He was fascinated by declarer play problems in particular. His 3rd book was Bridge With the Blue Team. Then he started reading all of Kelsey’s works.
He spent 30 years in Silicon Valley as a software engineer, did well, and was able to retire in his early 50s from the intense high-tech rat race. Finally he was able to devote time to actually playing bridge. All the books provided a foundation but playing at the table is an entirely different experience. He recalls it was hard for him to track opponents’ cards at first, as that is something one obviously doesn’t have to do when reading books.
Over time he experimented working with various pros and now fields a top-tier team. He won his first National title in the Jacoby Swiss in St. Louis. Somewhat hilariously, his life partner Arti Bhargava also won a National title in St. Louis on the same day in a different event. He hopes to do well with his team at the transnationals in Poland this August.
And one last side-bar: in the middle of that 30 year career in high-tech, he took a couple years off and wrote Deep Finesse in the late 1990s. Deep Finesse is software that does perfect double-dummy analysis of bridge hands. Eventually he worked with the ACBL to incorporate the Deep Finesse analysis engine inside their hand record generator to include the double-dummy results that are now ubiquitously part of any hand record.

Owen Lien grew up in Hickory, NC, and now live in Oak Park, MI. He started playing bridge at 9 and now has over 20,000 masterpoints. He was a member of the US Junior Bridge Team from 2006 - 2014, winning the World Junior Championship in 2013. He worked in Real Estate Appraising from 2011 - 2015; now he works as a full-time bridge pro.