Artheon posted a comment to my bridge post, and it gives me a great chance to talk about exactly what I do like so much about bridge.
I just checked out Bridge on Wikipedia and it sounds like a more complicated version of hearts. I guess what I’m wondering is what makes the game so interesting? That’s sort of a broad question, but I never really cared for hearts because my luck is so bad I never get good hands and it’s hard to stay interested if all your hands are bad. Is there any place on the web that you can play it with others?
That is exactly what I like about bridge. Well, duplicate bridge specifically. Rubber Bridge is a game that works much like the games of hearts you complain about. You play the hands you’re dealt, your partnership against an opposing partnership, and the game ends when one partnership or the other reaches a certain score. This is the game that’s commonly played socially, and in rubber bridge you are somewhat at the mercy of the cards you’re dealt.
Duplicate bridge works differently, and you need more than four players to play it, which is why I play at the Kansas City Bridge Studio. In duplicate bridge you are seated in a section, and you’ll stay playing one direction all night (either east-west or north-south). You’ll start at a table, and play maybe three hands. The hands are pre-dealt, and are stored in what is called a bridge board. When you finish the hand you record your score on a sheet that stays with the hand and place the four hands back in the board as they were when you played them. Then when you’ve played a certain number of hands at your table (usually two to four), the north-south pair remains seated, the east-west pair moves one way, and the boards are passed another way. Then each table plays the next set of boards.
At the end of the game, every partnership will have played every board in the game, and each board’s score sheet will have a score for each north-south partnership and each east-west partnership. The beauty of this system is that the scores themselves really don’t mean much. You earn points based on the difference between your scores and the scores of the other partnerships that played sitting your direction. So you can go a whole night and never really get any cards going your way. If this happens, you’ll be defending a lot of hands while your opponents play them. But if you can defeat those contracts a few times while the rest of the field lets them make their contracts, you’ll earn points and have a good score at the end of the night. If the cards are sitting your way, you will be playing the hands most of the night. If you can make 11 tricks when most of the rest of the field makes 10, you’ll earn points.
So in that sense, it is a card game that removes a lot of the luck of the cards from the result you’ll end up with. The bidding is another aspect that is a lot of fun, and is probably my favorite part of the game. You score better points for accurate bidding. For example, for two partnerships could play the same hand with spades as the trump suit, and both could take ten tricks with the hand. However, if one of the teams bid that they would take ten tricks, and the other team bid that they would take nine, the team that bid to take ten tricks will get a bonus and score better then the other team.
As a computer type guy, I look at bidding in bridge as an interesting information encoding problem. During the bidding, there are only a certain number of bids you can make. (1,2,3,4,5,6 or 7 of a suit or No Trump, pass, double or redouble) On the other hand, there are a lot of things you want to communicate with your partner. Do you have a particularly strong hand? Do you have a particularly long suit? Is your hand going to work better in a suit contract, or with no suit as trump? If your opponents are bidding as well, can you stop their suit if they start playing it? There are ways to ask and answer these questions using only the 38 legal bids. The downside is that bidding is complicated. Even a basic system that will just allow you to land in OK contracts can take a while to learn. On the other side, you can spend a lifetime refining your bidding system. There are tons of artificial conventions where the bids don’t necessarily mean what their natural meaning would be. However, you don’t need to play these conventions to play well, but adding them to your repertoire can help to ratchet up your game as you improve.
And yes, there are places to play online. My favorite is Bridge Base Online. The games you play through their software are duplicate games, and they even have a Beginner’s Lounge for people who are just learning. Also, if you can’t make the beginner’s lessons at the Kansas City Bridge Studio starting this Monday, the American Contract Bridge League has its own instructional software that will get you good enough to play in a beginner’s game at Bridge Base.
It’s a game that’s a lot of fun to play, and that you can spend a lifetime learning. Just when you think you’re getting good, you can go play in a regional tournament and get yourself humbled. Once you find a good partner, improving your partnership can be a lot of fun. You can try out new conventions, keep what works for you, and throw away what you don’t like. Another nice thing about duplicate bridge is that at the end of the night, you’ll get a sheet showing the hands you played that night, and you can review your scores to see where you had your problems. Were your problems in card play, in bidding, or in defense? If you can figure out what is giving you the most trouble, you can discuss that facet of the game with your partner and improve your game incrementally.
I’ll admit it’s not for everybody. It takes a lot of work to get good (I’m certainly not there yet), and furthermore it takes a fair amount of work just to learn how to play. But once you’ve learned how to play and tried playing a few competitive games, you’ll find yourself wanting to put in the extra effort it takes to improve. Though I don’t play a ton online, I am on Bridge Base as KC_Gimpson. If you see me on there, feel free to shoot me a message and I’ll definitely play a few hands with you.