Bridge Ayn Rand style.

It is this heroic ideal that Wildavsky is trying to explain to Kumar at the Reading Terminal Market over sushi.

''One of Rand's basic premises is that man has free will,'' Wildavsky is saying, ''which is expressed primarily through a single choice: to think or not to think.''

''I know, I know,'' Kumar says. ''That is my problem. I think too much.''

''No!'' Wildavsky corrects him. You should always think, he says. Weak players, he says, follow ''bridge nursery rhymes'' -- and here he waggles his head, reciting, ''Second hand low, third hand high, fourth takes if he can'' -- instead of looking objectively at what the situation requires.

When discussing the advantage that his Objectivism brings him, Wildavsky often returns to the same motif: reason must trump emotion. This is more than an abstract motto. It is, as he plays, a constant, rigorous, exhausting inner struggle: to resist guesswork and gut reaction and ''spacing out,'' to analyze each hand in itself, each bid, play after play after play.