Michael Steven Lawrence (born May 28, 1940)[1] is an American
bridge player, teacher, theorist, and prolific writer.
Biography
Lawrence was born in
San Francisco.[1] He started playing bridge while he was a
chemistry student at the
University of California; as result of a self-inflicted hand injury, he had to postpone the final exams and started playing bridge as a pastime. Bridge became his major interest and he devoted his subsequent life to it.
Under Ira Corn's mentorship, Lawrence started teaching bridge and subsequently writing books. He has written more than thirty books. He received numerous book-of-the-year awards starting with his first book, How to Read Your Opponents' Cards. He contributed to the theory of 2/1 game forcing systems, and his "2/1 semi-forcing" approach competes with
Max Hardy's "unconditional forcing" approach. Together, they wrote the book Standard Bridge Bidding for the 21st Century in 2000. He also helped develop educational bridge software with
Fred Gitelman.
In addition to his world championships with the Aces, Lawrence has won another Bermuda Bowl in 1987 in partnership with
Hugh Ross along with teammates
Hamman,
Wolff,
Martel, and
Stansby.
^
ab"Mitchell BAM Winners"(PDF). American Contract Bridge League. 2013-12-01. p. 8. Archived from
the original(PDF) on 2014-10-21. Retrieved 2014-10-17.
Mike Lawrence at
Library of Congress, with 29 library catalog records – as of October 2014, the text fits another Mike Lawrence [compare LCCN below] whom "Browse this term" credits with the works of both