Matt Granovetter

Matthew "Matt" Granovetter (born 1950) is an American bridge player and writer. Granovetter is from Jersey City, New Jersey, and graduated from Hunter College. He subsequently moved to Netanya, Israel. After spending 1993 to 2005 in Israel,his wife Pamela and he returned to the US and now live in Cincinnati.

In pairs competition, Granovetter and Karen McCallum won the 11th quadrennial World Mixed Pairs Championship in 2006, finishing first in a field of 487.

In teams-of-four competition at the world level, Granovetter played on second-place teams in the 1974 Mixed Teams and the 2008 Seniors Teams. The latter, third in a quadrennial series played for the Senior International Cup, was a nonmedal event at the inaugural World Mind Sports Games. Granovetter played with Russ Ekeblad on a US team that won its 5-day preliminary round-robin field of 16 teams, with Japan second. After winning three long knockout matches each, over five more days, Japan defeated the US by merely 202 IMPs to 200 in the two-day final. Granovetter–Ekeblad scored very well in the 5-day preliminaries, third-best of about 100 pairs.

In 1981–2 and 1983, Granovetter took part in Grand Slam, two televised matches between teams representing the US and Britain, arranged by the BBC. The 1983 match was featured in a book that described him thusly:

He is a composer and lyricist and he plays bridge like an artist. One moment he is suffused with extrovert optimism, the next he is submerged in gloomy introspection, which leads to some unsound overbidding and some extreme conservatism. Very often, to achieve the artistically perfect result, he plays so slowly that the whole table seems frozen in some timeless still-life, but he demonstrated time and again that he was one of the best card players on either side.

His wife and he co-edit the magazine Bridge Today. He has written a number of bridge books, most of them collaborations with Pamela, as well as two musicals for children. He is the bridge editor of the Jerusalem Post.

The Granovetters have developed a bidding system known as the Granovetter Unified System.

Wins

• World Mixed Pairs Championship (1) 2006
• North American Bridge Championships (6)
  • Silodor Open Pairs (1) 1972
  • Senior Knockout Teams (1) 2008
  • Mitchell Board-a-Match Teams (2) 1975, 1982
  • Chicago Mixed Board-a-Match (1) 1999
  • Spingold (1) 2009

Runners-up

• North American Bridge Championships
  • Reisinger (2) 1976, 1977

Blue Ribbon Pairs 2017