How Learning Bridge Led to Love, Film, and a Teaching Empire

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hi there! I’m Brian Reynolds, the co-founder of The Bridge Teachers—a website tailored to help beginners understand how to play bridge.

Aside from co-owning the site, I also play and teach the game a lot! When I’m not doing that, I’m acting, directing, writing… all that content-creative stuff! And I love working on productions and different fun projects.

What game do you like to play?

The easiest answer I’ll give is bridge, but the most recent modern game I’ve played is The Division 2. Samantha, my wife and co-founder of thebridgeteachers.com, plays together with me. It's interesting because the scaling on it isn't that great for four people, but perfect for two people. We get on headsets, go into our own separate rooms, and we really like the tactical nature of running the missions. We haven't played it a lot recently, as we played it pretty intensely for about two years and got really good. Our communications became very cursory because we always knew what the other would do, like, she's going to go to that cover spot or cover my line of fire here.

We really liked that game. I thought it was really in-depth and nuanced. It was fun running missions with your best friend who happens to be your wife, who's an amazing gamer by the way. She actually used to run the healing team for our raid group in World of Warcraft, which we did for years and years. Games are actually one of the first things we bonded over, and The Division 2 is what I would say was my favorite game. We're definitely looking for a new team game to play, as we love co-op. There are a lot of AAA titles right now that are coming out without co-op, or if they're a co-op, they're very PvP-focused which isn’t exactly our cup of tea. 

One of the reasons why we like bridge is because bridge is, at its core, a cooperative endeavor. You're definitely in competition with opponents, but you're playing with a partner. You know, I subscribe to so many YouTube channels that feature the best upcoming games. I'm like, “Does it have co-op? No? Okay, never mind.” Because if I'm going to spend a significant portion of my time playing a game, I want to play it with my wife. I want to feel like we're a team. I don't really care about running around ganking people, that doesn't really interest me that much. I much prefer the building of a team, the building of a system.

How did you get into playing bridge?

Yeah, so I knew my wife for about a year before we started dating. We were friends in the same friend group. And I was young, so my brain wasn't fully formed. It took me a while to figure out how smart she was. But we were just friends. And then she went away for the summer. She came back, and I was like, “Wow, I really actually want to date this person. I want to be more than friends.” And I just. I'm not good at subtext or anything, so I'm like, “Hey, do you want to go out?” And she's also very direct. She's like, “You mean, like on a date?” And I'm like, “Yeah, like a date. Like, just the two of us.” Then she's like, “Well, okay, but you have to learn to play bridge first.”

Her incentive was her parents had always played kitchen table bridge but had never taught her. And then during the summer before she went to college, they taught her the rules, and so she really wanted to play the game. But it's a partnership game. You have to have a partner. The joke I always make is that having a good bridge partner is so important that I actually just married mine just to make sure I'd have one.

But, you know, she did want to spend time with me, and she was interested in me romantically. But again, why not incentivize the situation and get something out of it? And my exact thought back then was, “I will remember this for the rest of my life. Well, how hard can that be?” And the answer was extremely hard. And the reason why was because there weren't the resources that we have now.

Here’s an example. For years, I wanted to learn how to solve a Rubik's Cube. Like, when I was a kid, Rubik's Cube became a huge thing. Everyone had a Rubik's Cube. And there were all these people who could solve it. People were on television solving Rubik's Cubes. I always wanted to learn, but I never could figure it out. And the books were very confusing. And now in the present, around five years ago, there was a Rubik's Cube that you could get that could be hooked up to your phone and it would teach you the patterns. So I learned to solve a Rubik's cube in under four minutes. 

So when Samantha and I were learning to play bridge, her parents taught us to the best of their ability. Her parents knew the rules, but they weren't tournament players or anything like that. It was exceptionally difficult because there wasn't really an avenue to learn. So we struggled. We really, really struggled to learn. And I stuck in not just because I wanted to date her, but I actually fell in love with the game pretty fast.

But, yeah, I would say we struggled for two, maybe three years simply because we didn't even know what books to buy or who to talk to. And nowadays it's like, oh, you really wanted to become an amazing chef? I got the perfect YouTube channel for you! Or a subreddit, or all kinds of different stuff. 

That was 32 years ago and we played a lot of bridge since then and had a lot of amazing times.

The difficulty of learning bridge

I would say in terms of complexity, it's on the level of chess. I think the average age of a regular bridge player in the U.S. is around 73 years old. So it's definitely an older game. There's sort of a feeling within the community that we want good bridge players. Personally, I don't care if you're good at bridge. The only thing I care about is, are you having fun? And I think if you look at really successful games, whether it's things like Candy Crush or Pokemon or anything like that… these games are where people really, really enjoy playing them. The game designer, the game company and the distributor don't care if you're good. Blizzard doesn't care if you're good at Hearthstone, they just want you to play.

And so they make the entry into that world of playing the game as easy as they possibly can. They want the app to be easy. They guide you through the rules. I mean, like, I can't remember the last time a video game shipped without a tutorial. I'm sure there are some examples now, but I just don't know of them. But it's like, how many times have you seen a flash-up on your screen: “Use WASD to move”? And it's like, we know! It's 2025. We know we're using WASD to move! But why did they do that? Because they don't want you, after five minutes with their game, to get frustrated and be like, “I don't want to play this anymore.” And then get review-bombed on Steam and all that other stuff. 

Especially because it's an older community that's been playing bridge for so long. Like, they watch a beginner make a mistake and they want to fix the mistake. Me? I don't care. Bridge is a game of mistakes. I mean, the greatest player to ever play the game, Bob Hamman, has been interviewed a bunch of times. He was in a documentary and all this stuff. He said in the documentary that the best bridge players in the world make mistakes on almost every hand.

The importance of accessible information

So if your focus is to get people to be good at bridge, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Let’s say you told me that you wanted to learn how to play bridge. I'd be like, “Awesome. Samantha has a video that's two minutes and two seconds long on the rules of bridge. Give me two minutes of your time.” Then she has a slightly longer that's 10 minutes. So give me 10 minutes of your time. You’ll understand the rules.

And usually what happens with my students is they don't just go off and play bridge with other people right away. Sure, they'll play bridge. They'll go online using Bridge Base Online. In there, you can play with robots. You can play with a random partner. You could take your own partner, whatever. Usually what happens is after about two or three months of that, people go, “Man, I kind of want to be better at this. Like, I don't really enjoy it right now. I feel like I'm getting my head beat in. I want to be a little bit better.”

Now they go looking for information, whether that's YouTube or books or whatever. And those people, they'll get better on their own. I don't have to incentivize someone or motivate someone to get good at bridge. Just like I don't have to incentivize a director of photography to research a new lens. They're already there.

Did the pandemic and daily game trends affect interest in bridge?

No. To a certain extent, Samantha and I have felt like there are other people who've worked really, really hard to try and get the game out there. You know, Samantha and I were in a documentary called The Kids Table about these four millennials learning to play bridge. It's on all different sorts of streaming platforms. It was an amazing experience, sort of like trying to give people an idea of what would it be like to just jump both feet into the tournament world, which is intense. I mean, you could pick something like Scrabble. Well, there's a whole world of tournament Scrabble. But there hasn't been anything like that for bridge.

And I think that's another issue with having not just a smaller community, but an older community. There isn't that person or group of people putting together an app that makes bridge feel more like a video game or gets you more connected to the community. That's definitely something we're trying to do in The Bridge Teachers, but we're super young for the bridge world. But we're a younger range of people, right? I mean, I've been with my wife for 32 years. You can do the math. So there needs to be a whole group of even younger people to play and grow the game.

The youngest bridge student I've ever taught was six years old. And they love the game. And so just like most schools have a chess club, I would love for most schools to have a bridge club. And I think that just like how chess develops some pretty important life skills, there are so many life skills that bridge develops as well. I think it makes people better in many different ways. Like, I tell people, bridge made me a better husband. Like, the better bridge player I became the better husband I was. And I think there's so much of life baked into bridge.

Why did you create thebridgeteachers.com?

We've been teaching for a long time. I think it's been around 22-25 years somewhere in that range. We've been teaching bridge for that amount of time. And our lessons have always been in person. They've always been at most five people if we ever had more than five. Because bridge is a game of four people. So if you have a group of five that wants to take a lesson, you just switch a person in and out every hand. And they were only sitting out for about seven to ten at a lesson.

But this whole time, Samantha's always been extremely passionate about getting more eyes, getting more awareness of this game. She has such a deep love for this game that she was like, “Well, how do we make it easier for people to play bridge?” And I was like, Well, let's put together a video lesson series of DVDs.” We started going in that direction. Then that really wasn't the avenue. And we kept looking and looking. And then YouTube came along, and we're like, “Okay, can we do like a video series?” And it was just something that was on our radar for a while, but it didn't really fit into everything else we had going on, as we had another business. 

And then two things happened simultaneously. Number one, the documentary happened. We were invited to be part of this documentary. And then a lot of the technology for having a lesson library that's accessible by subscribers, that technology came a long, long way. And then the pandemic happened. We had the technology to teach online for about five years before the pandemic. We could have, but none of our clients were interested. They were already comfortable. Especially for an older generation, getting on Zoom, solving any IT problems, that's another entry point that turns away people. Regardless, it's still something we try to make very easy for people. 

So people can either have lessons with us on Zoom or learn through our lesson library. When the pandemic happened, we were able to talk our client base through and show that this is how it looks virtually. This is how we can still teach you, even though we are not allowed to be in physical contact with you for who knows how long. And then Samantha and I put together a recording studio in our home, and we started filming videos for a while. I would literally move the cards physically. We'd have a camera pointed down at a bridge table, so she'd be talking and I'd be moving the cards around. So I got to hand act for a while. And that was just us going through iterations of what's going to work. And then she transitioned to purely virtual. So she'll have BBO up on her screen and she'll be giving a lesson on a particular part of bridge. 

So when we reached a point where we felt like we had a pretty robust library for a beginner, that's when we launched the website. And you can come in and you can literally see every video that she has. So far, I think she's currently got around nine in her editing queue on various topics. So the impetus was “How can we scale this upward?” Especially because, like I've said, my goal is to get teenagers to play this game. I'd love to find out someday that some school in Indiana purchased a subscription and all their kids watch our videos and the kids send us editing tips because they can do stuff faster in CapCut than we can. That would be the dream. 

The dream would be to be getting, you know, all these Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids saying, “You know, your videos could be a lot better.” I’d be like, “Cool! Keep it coming!” Like, you know, you giving me feedback on my video means you watched my video. I'm all about it.

Making the most of continuous learning

In my family, I'm the research guy, so I'm constantly trying new software or learning new skills or things like that. And I'm always the person on the Zoom with people, like, I was just on the Zoom this morning with someone. I'm like, “So here's the problem with your software.” And they're like, “Oh, tell us.” And I gave them my feature problems and requests and all this stuff I got done. And there was just this long, awkward silence. And I said, “Did you hang up on me?” Because I couldn't see his camera. He's like, “No, I'm just a little overwhelmed, but yeah, this is all great! We have a meeting with the engineering team tomorrow. I'll tell them all this.”

To me, it's all a game. I like your software, but your software could be better. Here's what I think could be better and I could be wrong. I'm not some genius, but if I'm a customer, and I'm not, that's the thing, right? It's like the bridge world thinks of themselves as, I don't even know, like some kingdom or something, I don't know. And what we are is we're selling a product. Bridge is a product. I want to sell you a product. I want to buy this moment of dopamine, this moment of problem-solving, learning, growing, evolving communication and social interaction, all seven minutes of it. I want you to buy that from me. Now, how do I monetize that? I monetize that through my website, which is subscription-based and through my private lessons. 

But I want you to buy the game of bridge because I want bridge to thrive. I want it to have a much bigger audience. I don't get paid. If you go on BBO and make an account and play bridge all day, I don't get paid. I don't care. I'm still selling you that product. I'm selling you the game of bridge. So that's how we need to think about it as a community. We're asking someone for their most precious resource, which is we're asking them for their time. You know, that's how we need to think about it.

Are you connected to Bridge Base Online in any kind of way?

I'm just a consumer. I have had very little interaction with them. Bridgebase.com is a website where you can go online and play bridge. They have several different ways to play bridge. Everything from American Contract Bridge League tournaments to simpler ones. So that's the ACBL tournaments that you can play in. You can play casually, socially, etc. So you can literally be like, “Take me to a table!” and it'll take you to a random table. Your partner will be random. You can tell the system whether you have a partner or not. It'll take you and your partner to a specific table. They do have some pretty cool teaching features, but it's primarily a playing platform, and basically the chess.com of bridge.

The competitive problem of bridge

One of the biggest problems facing bridge, in my opinion, is the rating system. Now, I don't know how familiar you are with the rating system in chess, but it's like, basically every time you win, lose, or draw in chess, you're assigned a certain number of points, either positive or negative, to your elo score. And it's a pretty good gauge of how good you are at chess, right? So if someone says to me, “Hey, Brian, how good are you at chess?” I would say, I'm probably a player around 1400 or 1500 right now. That's way lower than my top rating when I was a kid.

I think it's one of the reasons why chess is having this resurgence is because if I sit down to play chess and I know my rating is 1450, let's just say, hypothetically, who do I want to play against? I want to play against anyone from from 1350 to 1550. If I feel like I just want to win, I’ll beat up an 800. When I’m having a bad day, I want to take somebody's lunch money and I want to give them a wedgie and take their lunch money.

Just like there are top streamers who have a smurf account. You'll see these guys a lot. So if you're a 1450 player and you sit down to play and you're playing against someone with a 2000 rating, like 99% of the population, you are going to have a negative experience. And the same thing, if you sit down to play against 800, 99% of the time, you're gonna feel like it's a waste of effort. It’s good for getting a small kick or ego boost, but that’s it.

So the rating system in chess does something very important from a neurological standpoint, which is we feel our best and learn our best when we are in a peer group that is closely aligned with our own abilities. I'm a huge neurological geek. I love stuff about neuroscience, especially when it comes to learning. So what they've found is that for you to learn your optimal experience is to be in a group of people who are slightly better than you. Not way better, slightly better. That's the optimal learning experience.

Well, bridge has a problem, and the problem is called master points. So master points are given to you anytime you do well in an event. I don't know how many I have right now. I have like 1600. I think the person with the most right now has something like 45,000 or something like that. And there's all these different colors. If you play in a regular tournament, that’s black. If you play in a special tournament, they range from red, gold, platinum, etc. It's their way of trying to say that some events are tougher than others, which is fine.

But here's the thing. Master points never go away. Ever. And also, you just accrue them. You just get them. So it would be like saying, “Hey, Brian, your rating is 2200.” I'm like, “Why is my rating 2200?” then they’d be like, “Well, because when you played in the high school blitz championships back in 1989, that was your rating.” I'm like, but I haven't played chess in 30 years, what are you talking about? That’s 35 years! And we have a huge, huge problem with that.

Number one, let's say you decide you want to become a top-level bridge player today, then you come to me and say, “Brian, I want to be a top-level bridge player. I'm going to spend 40 hours a week learning bridge.” Well, you can win stuff. You're going to win, but you're not going to see a rating go up. Your rating is going to go up very, very, very slowly. You can play for five years and you'll still have fewer master points than someone who's been playing for 20 years.

Number two, it's very, very hard to put people in groups where they are experiencing bridge at a similar level to their opponents. Now there are plus sides to that, like getting to play against world champions, which is awesome. You know, like if you're a golfer, you don't get to go around golfing with Tiger Woods. And I've gotten to play against world champions multiple times, which is cool.

 And that's great for me, but I'm not sure it's great for other people. For the game of bridge, I think there needs to be a rating system that makes sense. I've talked to people about this. I think most notably I had a conversation with a guy named Greg Humphreys, who's a computer science guy, he's also a big bridge guy. He agreed that bridge needs a rating system a lot. Like League of Legends where you have a rating system and it's an individual rating, even though you're operating in groups that are teamed up on general skill level. So I'd love to see bridge get something like that. You can't scrap the master point system. You can't say, “Oh, guess what guys, the master point system's gone!” Because you've got people who have spent 70 years, literally 70 years collecting master points. You can't take it away from them. But I think you could add it to a revamped system.

How’s the monetization for your bridge work going?

So I would say that right now the monetization is upside down from where we want it to be. So most of our revenue is still coming from one-on-one lessons or group lessons where we're exchanging our time for money. And I would say that for lots of reasons, that's not our end goal. I mean, number one, it's not scalable at all. 

There was only one of me when I was coaching the UCLA bridge team for three years. And there was a young man who wanted to become a bridge teacher. And I was like, “Okay, you can shadow me for a week and decide if it's what you really want to do.” He quit after three days and he's like, “Well, how long would it take me to learn how to do what you do? Like to learn how to teach people?” And I'm like, “I don't know, man. If you went to every lesson I had for two years, maybe, I don't know.” I'm not duplicatable and I'm only the second-best bridge teacher in the world. Samantha's the best bridge teacher in the world. I'm second best, and it's not close. And there are a lot of really, really good bridge teachers out there. 

So right now, we get a little bit of money from YouTube, we got a channel, I think we're over a thousand subscribers now, which is super exciting. Samantha works so hard on that stuff. We've got plans to get more quick hits on TikTok to try and get more social media engagement. So a little tiny bit of that and then a small amount off the subscription site, which is obviously our end goal is for people to be on the subscription site for lots of reasons.

Number one, everything we teach is there. So Samantha and I aren't cheap. If you want a private lesson, we're not cheap. And there are people who are so incentivized to become good at bridge that they're willing to pay that price point. The number one thing we’d like to have is a student who comes to us and says, “Hey, I need you every day.” We want a broad subscriber base for monetization. It's the most scalable and it's the best way we have to serve our clientele. Most people won't want a private lesson. So how can we serve our client base in that situation? Well, for 10 bucks a month, you have access to our entire video library. And that video library grows every single week.

And we're big on subscriber interaction. If someone sends Samantha an email, she'll do a pickup video and put it up. Here's somebody who said, “This is confusing. I want to be able to do this. I don't understand.” She'll break it down another way. We've been doing this so long that we can probably break it down somewhere between five and seven ways, depending on how you think. Everyone has a different style of thinking, and we adapt to that.

How much support does your work here offer for your other endeavors?

Bridge funded my first feature film. We shot during COVID, and it was a crew of eight. I directed, Morgan produced, Samantha was the CFO and a lot of friend equity. We paid everybody. We were SAG signatory. We did it right. Everything post-prod was professional-graded. We had a AAA title composer do the music. He did over an hour of music and we got a huge friend discount. We actually met him through the bridge documentary, which was cool. Friend of a friend and luckily he loved thrillers.

I wrote a psych thriller called The Nanny. We currently have a sales agent who's trying to find us distribution and sell different markets, and bridge funded that. Now as the website currently stands, there's no way bridge can fund my second film because second film, we want to attach bigger talent to it. 

Regardless, bridge has been incredibly lucrative, and it has been sustaining. It's been the ultimate survival job for an actor, writer and director living in Los Angeles. I fell into it totally by accident. Moved out here to be the next big thing, be the next Matt Damon, whatever. And we were playing at a bridge club, and this woman said to me, “You know, I really like how you teach.” Because she would come up and ask me questions, right? She's like, “Hi, what should I do on this hand?” I'm like, “Oh, well, you know, you should think about this.” And she's like, “I really like that. Will you come teach me and my friends?” And I'm like, “Sure. I mean, I guess?” And she's like, “We'll pay you.” I'm like, “Then, yes!” And showed up at this lovely house and taught her friends. And then they told their friends, and within two years, I had a business, which was weird.

Back then Samantha was working this really horrible data entry job. Samantha's an amazing writer as well. We write scripts together and she also writes her own stuff. I said, “You're better at teaching than I am. Let me get you some clients.” And she's like, “I mean, I don't think you can do it, but okay.” Within two years, she was booked. So it's been an amazing survival job. Bridge has been an absolute plus. I love doing it. I not only love playing, I love teaching. I love that moment when I say something, then someone’s face goes like, “Oh. Oooh yeah!” Give me more of that. Just mainline that right into my veins. I love that moment!

What’s the average player count of bridge?

So the last number that I saw, which I can't vet this number, so, you know, take it with a massive grain of salt, but if I remember correctly, there are 37 million people in the U.S. that play bridge. There aren't nearly that many tournament players. So when I think about my demographic, I don't think about a tournament player. If you're playing at the bridge club, our website will help you. If you're playing in tournaments regularly, you will need to take a private lesson from me or Samantha or from another professional. 

There's a ton of professionals out there who give private lessons who are really, really great. And most of them, I'd say a lot of them are better players than I am. So if you're a pretty advanced player, I'm probably not the teacher for you. So. But in terms of our subscription base, the potential is massive. You know, as I mentioned earlier, it should be in schools. 100%. Bridge should be in schools. Not just because I would love a subscriber base that involved every single child in America, which I definitely would. And since, you know, it's a global community now, the world is so connected at a level that I've never seen in my lifetime before. Like, if you want to subscribe to us in Nova Scotia, log on anywhere you've got internet access. 

So I'd say we probably have two main demos. We have people who are either retiring or find themselves in a position where they have excess time and they want a game that they can really get to learning and be passionate about and have fun with. So that's typically older, let's say 55, around that ball park. And then you have younger because, you know, Samantha and I used to play a lot of tournament bridge. And it's a time commitment, right? It's like anything else. So if you've got already a life where you have a bunch of time commitments, you're probably not going to be able to dedicate a lot of time to bridge now.

At the same time, you know, I have friends who are married, have kids, and they still manage to get their League of Legends in once a week. So it's still something you can do for fun. And we're great for that. But yeah, I would say so I'll just share some internal numbers. You know, our goal is to have 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2025. If we hit that goal, I would consider us to have an incredibly successful year. Obviously, anything more than that would be amazing. Anything less than that would not be surprising simply because it's a newer site for an old game. It's a newer sort of awareness that we're trying to build with people. We had a lot of end-of-year discussions about where we've been as a company and where we're going. And that was the number we set, which was, you know, 5,000 by the end of June and 10,000 by the end of 2025. And I don't think that's unreasonable. I'm not a big fan of setting huge, unreasonable goals.

What are the benefits of playing bridge?

You know the thing about bridge and the thing that I really tell people is that playing bridge is like lifting weights for your brain. The old way of thinking of like you get a certain number of brain cells, you're done. That's gone. However, they've done so many studies that prove that you can actually grow parts of your brain, you can grow your memory.

What they found is that people who play bridge regularly have like 90% less Alzheimer's, senility, dementia and all this other stuff. So if you want to have a healthy brain, I hope you choose bridge because I think bridge is amazing. But crossword puzzles, games, all this kind of stuff actually keeps your brain healthier longer. I use my brain so much, and the idea of my brain not working anymore is terrifying to me. Alzheimer's is one of the most terrifying things I can think of, and bridge is one of the best ways to essentially nullify that

Where can we find you to learn more about you and your projects?

Thebridgeteachers.com and also our YouTube channel. Feel free to shoot us an email. We love to hear from people and if you have a specific question, whether it's about the game in general or how to get started, please reach out.