June 24, 2026 · 4 min read · bridge · strategy · famous players

Why Buffett and Gates Are Obsessed With Bridge

Warren Buffett runs a half-trillion-dollar company and still carves out roughly eight hours a week for a card game. He plays online under the handle T-Bone — a nod to his favorite steak — and his regular partner, Sharon Osberg, is a two-time world champion who once ran online banking for Wells Fargo.

Bill Gates logs in as Chalengr and plays with the same circle. When two of the most successful decision-makers alive keep choosing the same game for decades, it is worth asking what they see in it. The short answer: bridge is the closest a card game gets to investing. The longer answer is below — including the part that matters for you, which is that the core skill is completely trainable.

Eight hours a week, under an alias

Buffett's devotion is well documented. He began playing competitively with Osberg in the early 1990s and still meets her online several times a week; he has put his total table time at around eight hours weekly. Osberg is no casual hobbyist — she won the Venice Cup, the world women's team championship, in 1991 and 1993, and she also partnered Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham before becoming the bridge tutor to two billionaires.

Buffett's most famous line about the game — that he would not mind going to jail if his three cellmates were decent bridge players — shows up in slightly different wordings depending on who is retelling it, so treat the phrasing loosely. The sentiment, though, is his, repeated for years: he has called bridge the best intellectual exercise there is, because the situation changes every few minutes and you are recalculating constantly.

Gates is the quieter half of the pair but the commitment is the same: regular online sessions, appearances at North American championships, and a standing partnership with Osberg and Buffett's group.

They put a million dollars behind it

This is not just a hobby they enjoy — it is a game they think builds better thinkers. In 2005 Buffett and Gates pledged one million dollars to seed a program teaching bridge to junior high school students, launched as the School Bridge League, with the American Contract Bridge League community backing youth bridge efforts around it.

The program itself has since wound down, but the signal stands: two people who could endow anything chose to endow a card game for twelve-year-olds. Buffett also founded the Buffett Cup in 2006, a Ryder Cup-style event pitting top American players against Europe's best.

What the game actually rewards

Bridge is a game of incomplete information. You are dealt 13 of the 52 cards and must reason about the other 39 from evidence. Every bid your opponents make — and every bid they choose not to make — narrows what they can hold. Every card played narrows it further. By the middle of a well-played hand, a strong player has reconstructed most of the unseen cards without ever peeking.

That is why the game keeps attracting people who make decisions for a living. The skills it drills are the ones their day jobs run on:

Inference under uncertainty: no bluff-catching or hunches — every conclusion traces back to a bid made, a card played, or a suit not led.
Communication under constraint: you and your partner share information using a vocabulary of a few dozen legal bids, in front of opponents reading every word.
Partnership over ego: you win as a pair. A brilliant play that your partner cannot read is a losing play.
Long-run thinking: duplicate scoring compares you against everyone else holding the same cards, so a bad deal is not bad luck — only a worse decision than the field's.

Closer to investing than to gambling

Buffett has drawn the parallel himself many times: both bridge and investing come down to making sound decisions from partial information, weighing probabilities, and accepting that a correct decision can still lose a given hand. You do not judge the choice by one result — you judge it by what it earns across hundreds of repetitions.

That is the exact opposite of how casino games work, where the odds are fixed against you and no amount of skill changes them. In bridge, the cards are luck but the result is skill, because everyone eventually holds the same cards. It is the rare card game where the better thinker reliably wins — which is precisely the kind of game a value investor would fall in love with.

The trainable core: counting the hand

Strip away the bidding conventions and the etiquette, and the skill underneath bridge is counting. Start with high-card points: ace 4, king 3, queen 2, jack 1, for 40 points in the deck. When an opponent opens the bidding, they are announcing roughly 12 or more of them. Add your hand and dummy's, subtract from 40, and you know almost exactly what the fourth player has left. That one habit turns guesses into arithmetic.

Next comes distribution. Every suit has 13 cards. Count how many you can see in your hand and dummy, watch what falls, and you always know how many remain hidden. When an opponent shows out of a suit — a void — the entire remaining layout of that suit snaps into focus, and often the rest of their hand with it.

Finally, signals: the cards your partner chooses to play carry meaning, a high card encouraging and a low card discouraging in the standard scheme. Reading them is legal table talk, and it is the same muscle — extracting information from a single card. None of this needs a billionaire's brain. It needs the same thing Hi-Lo counting needs at a blackjack table: a simple system and enough reps that it runs on autopilot.

You do not need Osberg on speed dial to learn what Buffett trains eight hours a week — start where every strong player starts: counting the hand.

Count your first hand →

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