The Stanford Bridge Team is headed this summer to Nashville, Tenn., where it will compete at the 2007 National Collegiate Bridge Championships.

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Alvin Chow

Stanford Bridge Team members Belinda Gu, Eric Mayefsky and Jonathan Pines practice last night in Tresidder Union. The four-person squad has earned an invitation to this summer’s National Championships in Nashville, Tenn.

The team earned an invitation to the tournament after winning all five of its qualifying matches in the regional competition, including two particularly fierce matches against teams from Harvard and Yale. At nationals, Stanford will face teams from Princeton and UCLA, among other top competitors.

Stanford’s bridge team has historically enjoyed great success at the national championships. In three of the last four years, it has placed among the nation’s top three bridge teams.

Team captain Eric Mayefsky, a graduate student in economics, attributed Stanford’s stellar record over the last few years to the team’s depth of talented players.

“Stanford has maintained a critical mass of high quality bridge players for a long time,” he said.

Mayefsky, however, expressed surprise at the team’s outstanding qualifying round performance.

“This was by all indications a much weaker team than we have fielded in the last five years,” he said. “That’s part of why our success in the qualifier was wonderful and unexpected.”

Competing along with Mayefsky on the four-member team are Belinda Gu ‘07, Jonathan Pines ‘07 and Elena Grewal, a research assistant in the School of Education. For most of the team members, bridge was purely recreational before they were introduced to the collegiate competition.

“Most of us were relatively new to competitive bridge” Gu said. “For us, the competition was more about the experience.”

Bridge is a card-game in which teams of two strive to win a strategic number of tricks. The game — which necessitates both luck and a high degree of skill — has attracted quite a following in the United States, counting billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet among its avid enthusiasts.

Team members explained why they enjoy the game.

“It’s just fun to relax after a long day of classes and meet other young people who play bridge” Gu said. “I don’t know how to explain why I like bridge. In some sense you’re just sitting in a room for eight hours staring at a bunch of cards, [but] each hand is like a different puzzle. It’s thrilling that only one percent of the time I actually manage to figure it out.”

“You can always keep learning more” Grewal said. “We are a really supportive team and we definitely learn from each other.”

The team team practices every Tuesday night from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m at Tresidder Union. All students are welcome to participate and there are no tryouts to join.

The squad plans to continue practicing each Tuesday in preparation for the summer tournament.

“UCLA is probably our main competition,” Grewal said. “Our chances [of winning] are good, seeing as we did so well in the qualifier.”