Danny Kleinman is a polymath of games and ideas — an iconoclastic thinker with many accomplishments in checkers, chess, bridge, and backgammon as well as creative forays into songwriting and the mathematics of democracy (psephology).
"At age 7, I was very good and might have become a world champion had my mother not scolded me for playing: “Checkers is not your game. Chess is your game.” Need I say that neither of my parents, nor any of their 15 siblings, played chess and could teach me? But I resumed playing checkers in Junior High School, when I made a friend who played well enough to give me a tussle, and at age 13 I beat the then World’s Unrestricted Checker Champion Millard Hopper. Seven and a half years passed before I played my next game of checkers … and won again, beating Hopper’s successor, Tom Wiswell, who was kind enough to reward me with one of the books he had written. Until then, I didn’t know that checkers was worth writing books about."
"Three months before my ninth birthday, my mother bought me for 15 cents the first of the three best presents she ever gave me: a cardboard cut-out chess set with instructions on the back. I taught the few friends I had, but none could give me a tussle.
"For my ninth birthday, my mother gave me the second of her three best presents: a year’s “Junior Membership” in the Marshall Chess Club. Except for being five or six years younger than the reigning US Junior Champion, Larry Evans, who beat me easily, I did not distinguish myself. No older person “took me under his wing” or taught me anything (“The Queen’s Gambit” did not jibe with my own experiences in 1946), my elders wanted only to beat me. Still I enjoyed playing against my peers every Saturday afternoon.
"On my tenth birthday, I begged my mother to renew my Marshall Club membership for another $12.50, but she said, “An eight-year-old boy is too young to ride by himself on the D-Train from the end-of-the-line to and from Greenwich Village.” I think I had made a mistake in arithmetic— or was it economics? — the cost for a year was actually $17.50, taking into account the nickels I paid for the subway rides.
"Nonetheless, at age 13, by studying the game and reading books (Aron Nimzovich’s book was my favorite) I was good enough to beat the then New York State Chess Champion James Sherwin. By a stroke of luck, when I then entered The Bronx High School of Science, Mayor William O’Dwyer canceled extra-curricular activities for a year. I found other things to do, especially in the wonderful Jewish Young Folksingers chorus. so my mother’s scoldings “Don’t become a chess bum!” became superfluous.
"Still, chess helped me for a few months seven years later when I supplemented my fellowship stipend in the game room at Cornell’s Student Union by playing for $5 per game, first at rook odds and then at queen odds, adopting a swashbuckling style, until my pigeons flew the coop. My last serious chess came in 1965 when Lina Grumette, who then captained the chess team of the Herman Steiner Chess Club (which I had never visited) called me to fill in for an ailing member to play against Jet Propulsion Labs in the cafeteria of Cal Tech in Pasadena … where “security officers” had us sign in and wear badges. I signed in as “Tigran Petrosian” and won handily.
"Grandpa Kleinman lived 800 miles away in Louisville, and I had never met him in my first seven years. Unbeknownst to me, he loved bridge, a game of which I’d never heard until my seventh birthday. Grandpa lived on a little hill called Mount Holly surrounded by five of his nine children; 13 of my cousins lived there and all grew up hating bridge because they’d been forced to play it with Grandpa.
"On my seventh birthday, my father announced that my mother, my sister Nora, and I would soon be moving to Louisville. So my sister and I “would have something to do with Grandpa,” he taught us to play bridge just before left the Bronx. In those few hours, I came to love the game. We lived in Louisville nearly six months. On two Sunday afternoons, Grandpa let me watch while he played rubber bridge with his friends on his sunny front porch; he even let me cut in for an hour or so each time. I grew up resenting Grandpa’s not taking me under his wing and teaching me everything he knew about bridge.
"Upon our return to the Bronx, my parents, sister and I played games every Saturday night. The first Saturday night we played bridge. The second Saturday night my parents taught Canasta, which they had just learned to play, to Nora and me. Every Saturday night thereafter, my democratically-minded father held a vote. “How many for Canasta?” — three hands shot up. “How many for Bridge?” — only my hand shot up. My first experience of what would be happening for the rest of my life — being a minority of one. But every weekday evening, before even turning to the sports pages, I would read Florence Osborn’s bridge column in the New York Herald Tribune that my father brought home after reading it during his long commute downtown on the D Train.
"One afternoon after school in the autumn of 1944, I looked in my parents’ small bookcase and spied a paperback bridge book by some woman whose name I have long forgotten. Many years later, I surmised that it had been written in 1936. I snatched it from the shelf, read it quickly, learned the Culbertson System with two conventions and a summary of the rules. Can you guess which conventions? Did you guess Blackwood? Right! Did you guess Fishbein? Nah, you couldn’t have. I didn’t like Fishbein. Over an opposing 
"So I invented my first bridge convention: the Kleinman Insufficient Bid. Why not have both? To replace Fishbein’s penalty double, start with a one-bid in your best unbid suit. When required to replace it and thus bar your partner, double — the rules will require him to pass. Yes, even by then the rules forbade replacement by a double — but that was not specified in the little book I’d read.
My next “invention” stemmed from dissatisfaction with Culbertson’s “Honor Tricks” — I had not yet come to love fractions and I thought that surely jacks were worth more than spot-cards. So — ignorant of Bryant McCampbell’s invention of a 4-3-2-1 point-count 30 years earlier — I reinvented it, but failed to translate Culbertson’s System into Point-Count nearly as skillfully as Goren was to do several years later. Countless conventions, including a superior point-count, followed from the 1960s on."
"I learned backgammon at age 36 and didn’t play well for the next three years. Then, when my backgammon consultant left town while I was creating Jack Gammon, the first backgammon-playing machine, I had to learn backgammon tactics and strategy on my own. Because I got into it “on the ground floor,” preceded only by Barclay Cooke and Paul Magriel, I soon advanced backgammon theory and wrote many backgammon books while co-authoring a few others. I became good but not great — as at-the-table play depends more on one’s fingers reaching for the right move than on the whirring of the little gray cells. Nonetheless, the American Backgammon Hall of Fame is the only one of the four Halls of Fame into which I’ve been inducted."
© Jeff Tang. All Rights Reserved.