Edgar Kaplan

Edgar Kaplan (April 18, 1925 – September 7, 1997) was an American bridge player and one of the principal contributors to the game. His career spanned six decades and covered every aspect of bridge. He was a teacher, author, editor, administrator, champion player, theorist, expert Vugraph commentator, coach/captain and authority on the laws of the game. He was the editor and publisher of The Bridge World magazine for more than 30 years (1967–1997). With Alfred Sheinwold he developed the Kaplan–Sheinwold bidding system. He was from New York City.

As a player, Kaplan won 25 North American Bridge Championships (NABC) and was a Grand Life Master; at his death, he had accumulated 13,974 ACBL masterpoints. In 1957, Kaplan won the McKenney Trophy (now called the Barry Crane Top 500) for most masterpoints won during the year. He was twice runner-up in the world championships: the Bermuda Bowl (1967) and the World Team Olympiad (1968). Both final session losses were to the Italian Blue Team.

His partnership with Norman Kay was one of the strongest and longest-lasting expert pairings ever.

As an author, during the 1950s and 1960s, Kaplan contributed a variety of influential articles to The Bridge World (TBW). Their topics focused largely on tournament play and on the proprieties of the game. The section of the laws of bridge titled Proprieties describes the kinds of behavior that are encouraged, and those that are deprecated. In particular, communication between partners should occur only through their bids and plays, and not by the manner in which the bids and plays are made. Kaplan wrote extensively on these issues.

Kaplan also developed a new style of reporting on bridge tournaments. Prior to Kaplan’s work, reports focused on the brilliancies of the players involved. If the players' mistakes were discussed at all, the report either declined to identify the perpetrator, or stressed how unusual it was for such a revered player to make any error, let alone an unwise play or call.

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