The closest I’ve gotten to any sort of traditional card games are Go Fish, Old Maid, and a really drunken night-long bout of either spades or hearts (I was very drunk) with a determined (also drunk) professor.
A set of old friends just moved back into our local area, and they are very excited that apparently we have just enough friend couples (4 couples?) to play bridge.
I don’t want to let down my friends, but from what I’ve been seeing online, the game itself seems both complicated and a bit boring. If the best part of the night are the mimosas and the finger sammiches, then I really don’t know if I’m going to make it through.
Can anyone put a more positive (and hopefully less confusing) spin on how bridge works?
Only four people are required to play Bridge. Four couples would allow you to play
a form of the game called “Duplicate” which eliminates luck by having each team
of four players play both sides of the deal.
If you enjoy Spades you should also enjoy bridge, since the principles of play are
I think identical identical for any suit contract. Rook is also similar to Bridge.
Basic bidding ought to be simple to learn, and No Trump contracts are not all
that scary.
If the game bores you after a few tries maybe your friends can find another
player, and let you just tend bar.
Game play wise it’s like this, but in fact the bidding adds a whole new dimension to the game. It’s literally like building languages out of basic verb/noun combos. While ostensibly, bidding “1 club”, the lowest possible bid, means “I believe my partnership can take 7 tricks with clubs as trumps”, it only really ends up meaning that in game play if everybody else at the table - your own partner as well as both opponents - pass and let the bid stand as the final contract. Therefore, in general, an opening of 1C does not seriously offer to anybody that you should play with clubs as trump attempting to take only 7 tricks. In fact in most predominant bidding systems, it can be bid on as few as 3 clubs (i.e., it could be your shortest suit) and in some systems, is completely artificial and says nothing about clubs at all.
It’s the bestest card game ever to me; playing it well requires many different skills requiring card counting, picturing the card positions in 4 hands (one of which is “dummy” and exposed to the entire table), communicating with your partner in both bidding and play, possibly deceiving opponents in bidding and play, watching your partner’s card signals (count or attitude), and putting all the different possibilities and probabilities together and doing something creative.
But if you’re a casual card player - if your experience of spades or hearts is to throw cards around, and the idea that you should always be calculating your entry/exit cards, keeping track of who’s shown out of what suits or how many cards your opponents and/or partner are now known to have, etc., - horrifies or scares you more than it excites you, well at the least you won’t be a serious bridge player. If it actively bores you that you would have to work so hard for “just a card game” then it’s definitely not for you.
My First Wife and I counter this by bidding “oneclub” or “ONE. CLUB!”
In retrospect, I’m not sure what you mean. oneclub means, “I think I can support you if you have good cards of every suit.” ONE. CLUB means, “I have a shit load of clubs.”
It might interest you to know that spoken bidding was done away with
in sanctioned tournaments decades ago because the of the potential for
obtaining unfair advantage by voice inflection.
Now each table of players has a box of cards containing all possible bids
from which the players select their (mute) bids.
In the highest level tournaments screens were also introduced to prevent
partners from seeing each other. In I think the 1973 world championships
two players were actually observed exchanging unauthorized information
by playing footsie, so the screens had to be extended below the table to
floor level to ensure fair play.
To be perfectly honest, I learned to play bridge when fairly young [in Girl Scouts, of all damned places] and it is stultifyingly boring. I can not think of any way that I could possibly recommend bridge to anybody. Oddly enough, I was actually quite good at the damned game, and could regularly with a good partner beat the pants off my grandparents [who nearly made a religion out of bridge]
I’ve played a lot of bridge in recent years, after learning in my 30s, although am currently taking a bit of a break. I love the game but I don’t know if I’d recommend it as a casual, social activity - it’s a hard game to pick up. It’s not unlike chess in that the ‘rules’ can be explained and understood in 5 mins, but how long does it take before you’re properly playing (and enjoying) chess and not just pseudo-randomly moving pieces around?
It’s not even hard to pick up, tbh, it’s more that you’d need to actively learn, rather than just absorb it. So it would all come down to how motivated you were to do this. Maybe you’ll play a hand and be instantly smitten - try it.
I like bridge a lot, but it requires constant learning and effort to even become moderately capable. How serious are these other players? If they’re even remotely serious, this may be a problem.
Bridge is the most mentally challenging of all the card games, since it is so complex and nuanced. You need to know who to value and bid your hand, how to respond to your partner’s bids, how to play the hand out, and how to defend when someone else is playing the hand. There are always issues of interpretation, misdirection, and protection that you need to take into account, not to mention bidding conventions. People who take it seriously can get extremely cutthroat at it, though it’s easy enough to find people who take a more casual attitude.
The only way to learn it is to play. And play. And play. And play. After a few thousand hands, you’ll see enough combinations to understand how to make the most of whatever cards you have. It is more a game of skill than any other card game.
If you want to try it out, read up a bit on it and then go to Bridgebase Online. Find a table a kibbutz (i.e., watch the game play). See how people bid and play the hand and try to get a feel for it. There’s a special section for casual play if you want to dip a foot in.
My family occasionally used to play Whist when I was a kid. I’ve never played Bridge. Nowadays, Oh Hell is the standard trick-taking game in our family.
I played whist from time to time in college, but only as an occasional break from bridge. In my freshman dorm, immediately after lunch someone would shout out “fourth*” and the game would begin and would continue until midnight, as people joined and others left.
*You need four players, of course, so the phrase, “fourth for bridge” was a call that you needed one more player to start a game. In our case, you could easily get three players just by indicating you wanted to play a game.
Just for curiosity, have you ever played Euchre? While not actually derived from bridge or whist, it plays as if it were deliberately constructed as a simplified version of the game. Rather like the relationship between checkers and chess, euchre tends to be looked down upon by serious bridge players, but it might serve as a good introduction to how seriously bridge hounds take the game… (I remember once playing Euchre for 8 straight hours on a bus between Fredericton and Antigonish, for instance…)
And no, I haven’t played whist or euchre, and I don’t even have any coherent memories of the spades/hearts rules (remember - very drunk).
All my other experiences with playing cards involve magic tricks or card houses. I don’t even play Solitaire on my computer, and am not exactly sure how it would be set up if I were asked to play it IRL.
I will try it out, because my friend is *soooooo *excited, but I’m not going into it with much confidence.
Those online bridge places - are they ok with clueless utter newbs trying to figure out the game while playing with them, or do they want people who at least know the basics?
I honestly prefer Spades/Hearts to bridge, solely because no one makes up complicated code schemas using low bids to exchange hidden information in spades.
I suspect, based on my experiences, that if you enjoy trying to communicate in semi-code to your partner in what’s ostensibly a game with no table talk (and doing it in such a way as to fool your opponents who are stealing signs) you’ll enjoy it quite a bit more than Spades. Me, I find that more irritating than anything else and it cripples my enjoyment of the rest of the game.
In duplicate, your partner is required to announce “Alert” anytime you use a non-blatantly obvious bidding convention, and vice versa. Opponents are then entitled to request an explanation. Also, each player carries a bidding card with whatever system the team is playing clearly marked–opponents can inspect the card as well.
