[1] As a player, Kaplan won 25 North American Bridge Championships (NABC) and was a Grand Life Master;[2] at his death, he had accumulated 13,974 ACBL masterpoints.
His partnership with Norman Kay was one of the strongest and longest-lasting expert pairings ever.As an author, during the 1950s and 1960s, Kaplan contributed a variety of influential articles to The Bridge World (TBW).
Despite his accomplishments in other areas, he is remembered particularly for the careful prose style he brought to TBW, his gift for the bon mot, the tone he set.
As Jeff Rubens noted in his remembrance of Kaplan, “The foundation of Kaplan-Sheinwold is more a blending of ostensibly eclectic elements into a coherent whole than a sparkling new concept, but Edgar combined the ingredients cleverly and added some finishing touches of his own.”[4] As an administrator, in his capacity as the chairman of the protest committee of the Greater New York Bridge Association (GNYBA), Kaplan was able to steer between extreme views of the Proprieties.
Kaplan also served at national and international events as chief commentator, describing for the audience the bidding and play that was displayed on the Vu-Graph.
Kaplan's observations were the more illuminating for his extensive knowledge of bidding systems employed by contestants, and the more entertaining for the witty commentary into which he wove the play-by-play.
For example, although the magazine's focus is contract bridge, discussions of other topics such as the subjunctive mood and the Battle of Waterloo found their way into its pages under Kaplan's editorship.
Issues of grammar, including gender and punctuation, arose because readers, accustomed to viewing TBW as what one termed a “haven of careful prose,” would write to complain about what they perceived as some misuse of English.
(The topic of Waterloo arose in a lengthy, cogent and fascinating discussion of the difference between “subsequent” and “consequent,” as applied to results at the bridge table.)
The material in this article is based on information published in The Bridge World, particularly Jeff Rubens’ Edgar Kaplan Remembered.