Author, Businessman, Professional Gambler. Ely Culbertson received world-wide recognition for his accomplishments as a professional card player. Born Elie Almon Culbertson, he was the son of a Russian Cossack mother and an American mining engineer, who traveled around the world with his work. While studying in Russia as a teenager, he was captured while participating in the unsuccessful Russian Revolution of 1905, and while awaiting execution, he developed his card playing skills. Released from jail in 3 months, he used his gambling winnings to support his family, who were in exile in Paris, after his father's assets in Russia were seized by the government. As a young man, he was the organizer of the Ukrainian labor on railroad construction in Canadian Rockies, participated in a couple of revolutions in Spanish-speaking countries, and was in Paris during World War I. Although he never received a degree, he studied at several universities in Europe and the United States, developing expertise in political science, philosophy and psychology as well as mastering the languages of Russian, English, French, German, Italian, Czech and Spanish. As an American citizen, he settled in New York City in 1921 and in 1923 married a divorcee, Josephine Murphy Dillon, a tournament Auction Bridge player and instructor. Culbertson and his wife were a successful tournament team, and in the mid-1920s developed a new form of the game, Contract Bridge, which soon replaced Auction Bridge. Recognizing many commercial possibilities, in 1929 Culbertson founded a successful magazine, "The Bridge World", and also manufactured and distributed playing cards and supplies. One product, Kem cards, the first plastic playing cards, have been manufactured since 1934, and new designs are introduced each year. In the spring of 1930 in the first international bridge tournament, his team beat the English bridge team by 5,000 points, making Culbertson an international name associated with bridge. In 1933 and 1934 his teams received the Schwab Trophy. He became a syndicated Bridge a newspaper columnist. Showing the couple playing cards, he and his wife's oil-on-canvas portrait is exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Like many gamblers, his financial situation was erratic, going over and over again from what was considered rich to being in debt and penniless. Described in a 1954 edition of "Sport Illustrated" as "suave, quick-witted," he staged several "showdown" tournaments, using his flair for marketing to generate publicity that enhanced the popularity of Contract Bridge. From 1930 to 1950 while promoting card playing, Culbertson published more than 80 bestselling books and gave countless lectures on Bridge, Rummy and other card games. In June of 1937 in Budapest, he and his team failed in the final match of the first world championship tournament, and with his marriage becoming broken, this was the last time that he appeared at a tournament. After this, he published his 1940 693-page autobiography, "The Strange Lives of One Man." At the dawn of World War II, he left his card playing career and once again became political. He founded the non-profit organizations financed by donations, World Federation, Inc., and in 1946 the Citizens Committee for United Nations Reform, which advocated world peace by means of an international policing organization working with a budget of $100,000 of donations. He wrote "Total Peace" in 1943 and "Must We Fight Russia?" in 1946. To explain his position to the North Atlantic Treaty, in 1949 he was called to appear before the United State Senate's Committee of Foreign Relations. After a 1938 divorce, in January of 1947 he married Dorothy Renata Baehne and settled in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he died from the effects of emphysema at the age of 64. He had two children with each wife. When the Bridge Hall of Fame was created in 1964, Culbertson was its first inductee. His magazine "The Bridge World" is still published and is also available in an online edition.