15/04/2013
BRIDGE
Bridge is the Rolls Royce of card games. It combines the mental stimulation, Luck, and socializing that is hard to find in any other game. You can take it up as a child and play it with the same enthusiasm into your old age. You will find Bridge Clubs in every town and village in the country and for the princely sum of €5 you can have an engaging social night out. Is it any wonder then that just like the World Wide Web it is free to play bridge with anyone anywhere in the world on-line (bridgebaseonline).
What is it about this game that makes it so interesting? For any game to be so successful it must endlessly engage the mind at many levels. It should have an easy entry level but difficult or almost impossible to learn in its entirety. The vast majority of us will be happy to play at an easy level. Bridge players are not measured in one off situations like most other card games. Instead a number of games (or Boards as they are called) are played by everyone in the room and your ability is measured on how you played them.
Four people sit at a table. The players facing each other are partners and play against the other two. They are called North - South versus East - West. There are 52 cards in a pack. So to start things off say North deals out one at a time in a clockwise direction all the cards so that everyone has 13 cards. There are 4 suits in the pack namely Spades Hearts Diamonds and Clubs. Each player sorts her cards in a way that they can easily be enumerated. The cards in each suit in order of their importance are the Ace, King, Queen, Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four Three, and Two. Players evaluate their hands.
The idea of the game is that the partnerships bid at an Auction and the winners get a Contract to make so many Tricks. The losers of the auction aim to stop them. Depending on the contract, players could bid Game by bidding to make nine, ten or eleven tricks. They could bid a small slam by bidding to make twelve tricks and they could bid a Grand Slam by bidding to make all thirteen tricks but not too often!
Bridge started out being played as house games or in Men’s Clubs with just one single table. It was called Contract Bridge and the aim was to make a Rubber. The rubber comprised of bidding and making two Games. At the start everyone was Nil All. When a side achieved one game they were said to be Vulnerable. They would score a lot more for achieving the second game or they would lose a lot more for not making a contract. Nowadays bridge is more sociable and many tables (4 Players) play at the same time using the same boards. So bridge is now called Duplicate Bridge.
The language used in bidding is based on a system called Acol. (A men’s social club in London where bridge was first played was called The Acol Club.) It is a shorthand way to convey information about the estimated worth of the cards held by the partnership. Generally the player with the stronger of the two hands gets to play the contract which is just as well because as soon as the first card is laid by the opposition, the other partners hand is laid down on the table face up so everyone can see it. The player playing the hand is called Declarer and her partner is then called Dummy. Declarer makes all of the decisions and Dummy plays only cards already indicated. Everyone plays a card to each trick and there are thirteen tricks in every board.
There are two types of contract; contracts with No Trumps and Trump contracts. In a trump contract one of the four suits becomes a super suit. The way you evaluate your hand, the way you plan the play and the way you use the cards changes radically between the two types of contract. In no trumps both sides try to control the suits in a way impossible in a suit contract.
The Contract Bridge Association of Ireland (CBAI) is our governing body. Last year The European Championships were held here for only the second time. We are small fry! But we were fourth in the World Mind Games Championship also last year and an Irish player playing in Boston in partnership with an American are the current World Pairs Champions. The Irish Bridge Union (IBU) is an overseeing body made of the CBAI and the Northern Ireland Bridge Union (NIBU). The so called home countries ROI, NI, England, Scotland and Wales play for the Camrose Trophy every year. The ROI only started playing in it 1998 and we have won it five times! Before that England virtually owned it.
