| A famous recruiting poster was entitled “Uncle Sam wants you!” Uncle Bryan is my e-mail address and was my former pen name, so if life may imitate art or at least advertising, let me say “Uncle Bryan wants you…to play bridge!” Bridge is a social game, and we are social animals. To be sure, it is also a card game, with some of the card playing mechanics in common with whist, hearts, or spades. What sets it apart is it’s bidding and scoring system. Books have been written about it, so you can’t learn everything about playing bridge in the time allotted for this speech, unless I talk really, really fast. Hopefully I will pique your interest, so I shall provide some resources where you will be able to continue your education. Bridge is a four-player game, with partners seated opposite each other. It is played with a normal 52-card deck. The jokers aren’t used, but sometimes you might think you have one as a partner. After the shuffle and cut, the cards are dealt face down, starting with the player on the dealer’s left. Everyone looks at and sorts his or her own cards, then the dealer begins the bidding. It is a bit of a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” type problem. To understand the purpose of the bidding, a basic knowledge of the card play that follows is necessary, so I will skip ahead briefly to that part of the game. The player to the left of the declarer (I’ll define that later) gets to lead, i.e. play any card from his hand to start the first trick. The player to his left, called the dummy, no matter how high his IQ, but it is only that deal, lays down all his cards face up. The declarer, the dummy’s partner, then chooses which of those cards to play. He must play a card from the same suit as lead if available. If not, then he may either: ruff, by playing a card from the trump suit that was determined by the bidding, or slough, by playing a card from one of the other two suits. The partner of the person who led then plays a card, following suit if possible. He does not lay down his hand; in fact, there are penalties for showing any cards other then the one being played in that trick. The declarer then plays a card, respecting the rule about following suit. If no cards from the trump suit were played in the trick, the highest card in the suit led wins the trick. If one or more trump cards were played, the highest trump card wins the trick. The winner of the trick leads to start the next trick. Since each player has 13 cards, there will be 13 tricks. At the end of the hand, the number of tricks won by the declarer and his partner are counted up to determine how to score that deal. The purpose of bidding is to determine how many tricks the winning bidder’s partnership will have to take, and what suit will be trump. Bidding assumes taking at least a majority, or seven tricks, but it is easier to start counting or bidding at one, so bidding one club means that that player thinks his partnership can take seven tricks (six plus one) with clubs as the trump suit. The four suits are ranked from low to high for bidding purposes: clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. Thus, another player could bid one diamond or one spade after someone bid one club, but you can’t bid one heart after someone bids one spade. You could bid two hearts, the number of tricks is more significant than suit for determining which bid is higher. If you want to try to make the contract without the benefit of a trump suit, then you can bid no-trump, and that ranks for bidding and scoring purposes above the four suits. If you don’t want to bid, you can pass. If everyone passes without anyone bidding, you shuffle and the deal passes to the left, but this doesn’t happen too often. Once someone has bid, if the next three people pass, then that bid becomes the contract. The member of that partnership that bid that suit first will play the hand, and is called the declarer. If you think your opponents have overreached themselves and bid too high, you can double, which will increase the point penalties for falling short, but raise the benefit of them making the contract. If they think that your doubts are unfounded they can redouble, raising the potential scoring swing even more. However, their partner might not be comfortable playing in that doubled contract, so he might try to escape by bidding a different suit. Unless your hand is extremely powerful by itself, you will probably depend on a combination of cards between you and your partner’s hands to win the tricks needed to make a contract. Thus easy to learn systems have established whereby early, low level bids describe the general strength of your hand. Your partner will add that to strength of his hand and either make a bid to try to place you in an appropriate contract, or provide you with a description of his hand with an indication that you should probably bid a bit higher. The reference sheet has links to pages describing popular bidding systems. Most are based on how many cards you have in each suit and the number of high card points in your hand, where aces are worth 4, kings 3, queens 2 and jacks 1. The scoring challenges you to get the most possible out of each hand. Most social bridge is played in rubbers, which are neither shoe coverings nor condoms. A rubber bonus is awarded to the partnership that completes two games first. A game consists of 100 points below the line. Penalties, for keeping your opponents from making their contract go above the line, as do bonuses for things like making extra tricks. You could complete a game in one hand, if you bid and make a contract of five in a minor suit (clubs or diamonds), four in a major suit (hearts or spades) or three no trump. If you make a smaller contact, that counts as a part score, which could be combined with others hands to complete a game, provided your opponents don’t do so first. Once either side completes a game, a line is drawn underneath so any previous part scores won’t count towards the next game. The scoring system encourages aggressive bidding, so even if you have mediocre cards one deal, your opponents might overbid, and you would have a chance to get points by setting them, or keeping them from making their contract. Thus the bidding and card play are interesting enough by themselves, that gambling on the score is not necessary to make it enjoyable for most players, unlike poker or blackjack. I enjoy the game; I hope you will as well. You can read more about it in the daily bridge columns in your newspaper. You can play in person, with your friends or at clubs. You can play on-line. Yahoo has a beginner’s bridge lounge. How many people here have ever played bridge? Of those, keep your hands up if you have played in the past year? Maybe the rest of you can use them as resources as well. |