Romania is a small country that has rarely made the highlights of major Bridge championships. And yet at the World Team Championships in Wuhan this Cinderella team managed to reach the semifinals and eventually secured the bronze medal in the Mixed Teams Championship.

We interviewed team members and today we have the pleasure of introducing you Geta and Radu Mihai. You can say hi to them on BBO under the usernames star_68 and MRadu. Radu shares a few thoughts below.

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The first contact with bridge was during the last years of highschool, when a classmate came to school with Nicolescu’s famous green book. The game fascinated us enormously, we used to stay in the classroom after the classes ended, playing until the janitor chased us away.

The passion grew in college, we were a big group of friends playing day and night. It was truly addictive, some actually lost exams or dropped out of college because of bridge.

Bridge is seductive, in order to be good you need a combo of skills and knowledge: you need a lot of practice in bidding and in playing the cards, these have to become routine, you need to be able to calculate quickly (and accurately), you need flair and spontaneity at the table, in order to decide quickly which of the possible technical options is the best.

During the final years of college I met Geta. She was a successful chess player, national champion and master, winner of international competitions. She was seduced by bridge. She quit chess and dedicated herself to bridge, she learned from scratch. And it seems she made a good choice.

Self-taught, without magazines, books, no teachers, no access to competitions abroad but with a lot of passion and desire to improve we progressed fast and ended up winning regularly national competitions, the biggest festivals in the country and, later on, big international competitions.

This year we went to the European Championships in Lisbon supported by sponsors – we couldn’t have gone anywhere without sponsors. We wanted to see whether we can face this level of competition, if we can raise to the expectations of our friends and supporters back home. After flirting with the top places all the way (about 75% through we were 1st), a weaker finish dragged us back from finals candidates to 8th place. We were disappointed, but this 8th place secured for the first time the participation of a Romanian team to the World Championships.

Over the summer we went to the European Championships in Istanbul, where we won the bronze medal – the first bronze for Romania in this competition. Then we won the International Festival of Mamaia in Romania and we left to China right after that, in an optimistic state of mind.

We were confident, but cautious. We realized right away that we are adjusting just fine to the level of the competition, we felt we could beat anyone, our self confidence was on the rise. At first we were planning to go there, have a honorable performance, try to finish in top 8 in the knock-out phase. Once we achieved that goal, after defeating a very strong team (USA) during the quarterfinals we started thinking of medals and even the title. Nobody said it, but we were all thinking it. It was a huge disappointment to lose the semis to Russia, after leading the entire time. The score was tied after 96 boards (!!!) and Russia won based on its score in the KOs then went on to win the competition. We took our “revenge” with England in the small finals and won the bronze.

The competition was well organized and the award giving ceremony was very festive, we remained with unforgettable images and memories. Only then, while sharing the podium with famous world class players we realized that this was an outstanding result, that Romania has started to mean something in the world of bridge.