Everyone knows there are some serious rivalries among Vero Beach’s private clubs for bragging rights:  Which club has the most challenging golf courses; which has the top tennis pros; which has the most talented chefs preparing the most scrumptious dishes? And last but not least, which club has the best bridge players?

In the area of bridge, that rivalry has, for the past two decades, been channeled into a friendly competition now known as the Treasure Coast Interclub league, in which nine local clubs field four-player teams to face each other once or twice a month on Saturdays during the season for three-hour matches, with a lunch break at the halfway mark.

The nine clubs – John’s Island, Oak Harbor, Grand Harbor, Riomar, the Vero Beach Country Club, The Moorings, Quail Valley, the Vero Beach Yacht Club and Bent Pine – are supposed to take turns hosting the Saturday event.

The players each pay $45 to play, $11 of which goes for the costs of a bridge director and use of bridge supplies like cards, boards, bidding boxes and the like, with the remaining $34 being the price of a nice lunch offered by the host club.

Lunch, usually a buffet in a clubhouse meeting room, is served for 37 people, for the 9 four-person teams from all participating clubs, plus the director.

At a recent inter-club event at the Vero Beach Country Club, lunch consisted of a choice of soups, a big salad, a charcuterie board with all imaginable cheeses and cold cuts, plus filet mignon and lobster sliders, as well as desserts.

But a serious fly in the ointment (or the soup, as the case may be) arose a couple of years ago when John’s Island decided it was no longer able to host the bridge luncheon at $34 a head. Lunch there would cost at least $50 per person. The other clubs could continue to charge $34 a head for lunch if they wanted, but the quality of the food served at John’s Island required a charging of at least $50, the club said.

That didn’t sit too well with the other clubs, and although John’s Island is still playing this 2023-2024 season that is coming to an end – just to round out the schedule because a 9th team was needed – it is not even listed in this year’s standings, and has effectively been kicked out of the league for next year.

The standings for this season so far have Grand Harbor and The Moorings bringing home the bacon and tying for first place, followed by Quail Valley, Bent Pine, the Yacht Club, Riomar, Oak Harbor and the Vero Beach Country Club.

The league is trying to recruit another club to take the place of John’s Island place for next season, possibly Orchid Island or Sea Oaks, which had previously entered a team into the competition.

The bridge competition is taken pretty seriously, and since the sudden death of league director Candace Fowler during the year-end holidays,  the contests are now being run by the Vero Beach Bridge Center. George Bleskachek, a seasonal snowbird winter resident from Wisconsin and a tournament director for the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), runs the competition on a Board-a-Match (BAM) format, in which boards in head-to-head contests are scored as a win, a tie or a loss, and margins of victory do not matter. Members of the teams finishing in the top three spots each Saturday earn MasterPoints from the ACBL that count toward their Life Master rankings.

At the end of the season, the top club in the standings gets to donate $1,000 to its favorite charity.

In the previous season, when John’s Island was still competing, the Vero Beach Yacht Club had offered to host twice, taking the turn of John’s Island,  but that arrangement has come to an end.

The John’s Island bridge players are known to have tried to convince their club’s management to relent on the minimum $50-a-head lunch price tag, but so far to no avail. Club management has proven to be a hard nut to crack. “We don’t understand it ourselves,” one John’s Island bridge player said.

When Bent Pine hosted recently, the luncheon consisted of another impressive succulent spread of fish and meat dishes.

“If we could do that for $34, anybody can,” said a captain of one of the other teams who asked not to be identified by name.

“All the food gets just too heavy after a while anyway,” the same captain added. “It’s so much, you want to take a nap afterward. All we would need for lunch is maybe a soup, a salad, a sandwich and some dessert. It’s ridiculous for John’s Island to say that $34 isn’t enough.”

The inter-club competition was started about 20 years ago by a group of members of the Vero Beach Bridge Center who wanted an additional venue to play bridge “with like-minded people,” meaning people from other private clubs. The atmosphere is relaxed, but competitive. No substitutes or ringers are allowed and players have to be members of the clubs they represent.

The event became so popular and drew so many players that none of the county’s three “open” bridge clubs  – the Vero Beach Bridge Club, the Community Center Bridge Club and the Sebastian Bridge Club  – now have regular Saturday games. The only other regularly scheduled Saturday duplicate bridge game is an invitational game at the Indian River Estates retirement community.