I have played bridge for a long time and at several different levels and I can say that it is a very challenging and competitive game.
One of the principal reasons that I would argue in favor of playing with the same person is that it allows the partnership the ability to develop a consistent set of bidding conventions. There are countless conventions (and entire books written about them) and it is comforting to know, for example, what you and partner mean by an opening “1 No Trump Bid” and how to respond to it.
I played local, state and regional ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) tournaments for about 3 years back in the late 70’s and finally stopped when I realized the time commitment and expense required to reach the elevated levels of playing (Grand Master:)). In all of my playing I cannot recall any incident of cheating being called out but I’m sure that it was there.
There is also an excellent computer game (not online) called Bridge Baron (I believe now it is up to version 25) that allows for single player mode where both the skill levels of you and your opponents can be adjusted.
I’m sure it’s true that the vast majority of Bridge players are high-minded, but consider that you could write the above statements about literally any pursuit. Long-term, cheating is almost always a losing strategy, since you don’t improve your craft, and if you do it long enough, you’re likely to get caught. Yet, people cheat in all sorts of competitions because in the short term, it can pay off quite well.
I don’t think that your claims about the lack of cheating in Bridge are particularly convincing. They are good arguments for why one should not cheat (at anything, really), but they fall short of convincing me that people don’t cheat.
And it’s quite clear that, from a tactics point of view, information passed between partners outside of the bidding process could increase one’s chances at Bridge, so there’s plenty of motivation to cheat. I’m only very much a beginning Bridge player, but there are plenty of times you have to play the odds, and knowing that, say, your partner has a particular card rather than it being in your opponent’s hand, could easily tip the scales.
Most competitive bridge is played at duplicate and not for money. If you cheat and get away with it, you get the “satisfaction” of coming in higher than you might have otherwise. If that makes you feel good, then you might cheat, but there really is very little motive to do so for most people.
Also don’t ignore the culture. People tend not to cheat at bridge, golf, and tennis in my experience – sure in informal settings, some one might give you a mullligan or not enforce a penalty at a bridge table. This is a different culture than say football in which linemen will deliberately hold and hope to get away with it.
I just took up Bridge late last year despite the mockery of my wife, who called me an “old lady” though she admits she tried it once online and didn’t get it.
I’ve been playing Bridge Base for about 3 months now and find the game highly addictive. I play the Duplicate mode and get crushed when I only get 25% or lower, and the rare times I score 75% or more its celebration time to reward my brilliance. Occasionally, I play with real life players, but I find the gameplay slow.
As for cheating, I get the impression there ain’t no money in it. Yeah, theres gambling in bridge, but whats the point of trying to game the system unless some casino develops a Bridge based game, and Bridge geniuses somehow find a way to cheat them out of millions. My impression of Bridge gambling is that were playing for hundreds, at most. Not sure what tournament play costs, but even there, they use blinds.
I highly encourage kids to learn three games to improve their math skills, Texas Hold Em, Craps and this:
I once knew an expert Bridge player and she told me that when playing Duplicate Bridge, it is best to just play the same as you would normally play for other forms of the game.
The reason she gave is that the techniques used for Duplicate Bridge are different from those used in other forms of Bridge. But they only apply to a very tiny percentage of hands and only expert players know enough to recognize those hands where they should employ diff techniques.
She told me that people do more harm to their results by trying to recognize those hands where diff techniques should be used that they would be much better off to just forget about it until they became expert players.
Good luck to you and I hope you enjoy yourself playing Bridge. It’s a great game and a great way to meet people and make friends.
I would certainly disagree. In rubber bridge (or scoring at IMPS), making the contract is the ultimate. You make standard safety plays giving up a possible overtrick to protect against a 4-1 split for example. You do this because it matters by how much you beat your opponent so if you make the nonvulnerable game its 420, nonvulnerable game with overtrick is 450, but being set one trick is -50. The +30 -470 is a poor trade-off. In duplicate it matters only how many others playing the same cards as you that you beat. It’s more of a +1 -1 kind of bet so most will not take the safety play if it costs you an overtrick a small fraction of the time.
Agree with OldGuy - you have to appreciate how IMPS or MP scoring influences bidding and play, most intermediate players at the club would know the basic considerations here. It’s not an expert thing.
It’s not something to go OTT about, and just playing good bridge will always be the main difference maker, but you’ll be in for some disappointing boards if you pay it no heed.
I do play (online), and usually I read the bridge column for the same reason you do. So I have to forget everything I know, in order to get that same perspective, which is, as you say, quite amusing.
Sometimes I take the column, circled in red ink, to a colleague at work (who knows nothing about the game), and just say with a pronounced intensity: “Can you believe this?”, and walk away.
Funny … I noticed this semi-zombie thread today. Reading through it I had the idea to quote **Amateur Barbarian **and say I do the same thing. And here you’ve already quoted his post.
For those who might not appreciate what Amateur Barbarian, LSLGuy, and I are talking about, imagine if you were to see a small space in the newspaper every day that says only things like this:
[QUOTE=Bridge Column]
There are plenty of people at the Dyspeptics Club who would consider raising one spade to two as East, to muddy the waters for the opponents, but at unfavorable vulnerability today’s East was not among them. Accordingly North-South had a relatively free run to four hearts, against which West cashed his two high spades and shifted to a passive trump. That left declarer free to tackle the hearts and clubs as best he could, without any help from the opponents. At the table he saw no need to look further than drawing trumps and advancing the club king. West took the trick and continued with his passive defense, by returning a club.
Now South tested clubs first, then when they failed to behave he took the diamond finesse, and was more hurt than surprised when it lost.
South was about to start lamenting his bad luck when he noticed from his partner’s premature gloat that this would be inappropriate. Untypically, he asked his partner if there was anything he could have done, rather than trying to absolve himself from blame. What was the response?
South should have drawn trumps ending in his hand then led a low club toward the dummy. West cannot gain by taking the trick and having his ace fall on empty air. But when he ducks, he is thrown in at the next trick with the club ace, to give a ruff-sluff or lead diamonds for declarer. Either way, 10 tricks result.
[/quote]
This mystical narrative isn’t accompanied by any visual representation of its course of action–it just shows a cryptic diagram of the initial deal of all 52 cards, so that one must somehow imagine all of this playing out as though it were the most obvious thing.
(1) You can only communicate to partner with things in game play (bids made, cards played), and NOT via environmental side effects (inflection, tempo/hesitation, accompanying gestures, etc.).
(2) Opponents are entitled to know all agreements you have established with your partner as to what bids or plays mean.
Information that may be imparted by environmental “tells” are “unauthorized information”, or UI; in tournament play (played competitively in a large field), you may call a Director to inform him/her of the UI, and later, there may be adjustments to the score awarded for it if deemed material and reasonably acted upon. For “rubber” bridge (played for money won/lost between just the four players at the table), if played at a bridge club there will still be a Director; if informally played at home, it’d be up to the players involved to work it out.
They are only cheating if considered voluntary, intentional and consistent. Bridge can be a hard game, and sometimes you have to think, which can break tempo. That’s OK. However, it is unethical to intentionally hesitate a long time to give the impression that you have something to think about, with the purpose of throwing your opponents onto a different track.
Regarding #2 - you are only required to tell people, when asked, what your agreements with partner are (note that it’s the partner of the player whose bid or action you have a question about must answer - not the player who made the bid or action). If you have no agreement, or cannot recall the agreement, you can say so without penalty. They are not entitled to know what YOU think or interpret the bid as, only what you have agreed upon.
The fun of the game is not in hoodwinking your opponents with hidden information, anyway, but in outsmarting your opponents (where “opponents” may more accurately be described as “everybody else holding your cards at other tables” rather than “the two people you are playing against at your own table”). The column guizot just quoted is a great example. To translate it from the jargon, it boils down to this:
There are 52 cards in the deck, and 4 players. Everybody gets 13 cards. The players are designated by the cardinal directions (North, South, East and West), with N-S partnered against E-W.
Every round of play, a person leads a card from his/her hand, and everybody else plays a card going clockwise. When all four players have played a card, it is called a “trick”, and the winner of the trick now leads to the next trick. There are rules about what you must do if you can - “following suit” - and who wins the trick - highest card in the suit led, or highest “trump” - but never mind that. The point is, there are 13 tricks in every Bridge deal.
In the column, a player was in a “contract” (the name of the game!) that meant he had to take 10 out of 13 tricks. Taking would might be a bonus, but taking fewer means getting a minus score instead of a plus score.
South took what might be called a “guessing” line of play based on probabilities, which is common in bridge. “Testing clubs” and “seeing if they behaved” essentially means hoping that the suit breaks “normally” - i.e., if N-S had 8 clubs between them, there are only 5 for E-W, and most of the time, about 68%, they will break 3-2 (3 with one and 2 with the other). A “finesse” is a 50/50 play, gambling that a specific player holds a specific card (e.g., if West has the King of this suit I can take 2 tricks instead of 1 if I play towards North instead of the other way around).
As you learn to play bridge, it is drilled into you that you should try to “combine your chances” - instead of betting it all on a pure 50/50 guess, try another line first - like winning two clubs to see if they “behave” first - making the 50/50 guess unnecessary, but with that guess still available as a fallback if the first gambit does not succeed. So the complex-sounding initial line of play described in the article is meant to sound reasonable, even advanced. It seems simply unlucky on this day that the line of play failed. Hey, that 68% chance of clubs “behaving”, plus 50% of the 32% of the time when they don’t - that’s an 84% chance of success, pretty darn good!
The Holy Grail of playing a bridge hand, though, is to realize when there is a 100% chance line - rock solid “cold”. That’s the point of the article. And there is no bigger gloat to hold over partner’s head (which while obnoxious, is still far better than rubbing it in to your opponents) is to point out that he or she “went down in a cold contract”. On this hand, South had such a line - where he could have engineered things so that on a specific trick, West would have a choice of either refusing to win it (“ducking” it) and setting up the rest of the hand for 10 tricks for South; or, if he did win it, no matter what his next move was, it would set up 10 tricks for South.
Being in a position to say to oneself, God-Damn-I’m-Clever, is largely what attracts people to bridge.
So true! Me and some friends once tried to play bridge going by what we “knew” about it from a few newpaper clippings. Crazy stuff, though more of a freeform tabletop rpg excercise than what I would guess bridge really is.
When partner makes a bid that is conventional (it doesn’t mean what it explicitly says about the suit bid) and unusual (much harder to explain certain conventions are so commonly used they are understood), I must state “alert” or in some cases something else before the next person bids to warn opponents that I am interpreting the bid unusually. For example If I respond 4 Diamonds to a 1 spade bid, that might be a splinter bid which says partner I like spades (I have 4 or more of them), and I have at most one diamond (so I can trump your small losing cards in that suit), my partner should announce “alert” ASAP.
At tournaments and most duplicate games at clubs, players should carry with them a convention card which explains what their bids mean. The opponents (but not the players themselves) are allowed to consult these at any time, so even if a player forgets his own conventions, the opponents can find out. In addition, if my side makes the highest bid, so that I or my partner will be declarer and be playing both his/her own cars and the dummy cards, then any misexplanation or any failure to alert must be stated before the play of the hand. At that point there may be some adjustment or penalty imposed.
The defending side does not make such a correction until after the play of the hand as it might communicate information to partner. Again some penalty might be imposed.
If my partner makes an error in explaining our conventions or fails to alert it in a timely manner, I am not allowed to make any inference that s/he has forgotten our agreement and must bid and play as if I believed his/her bid meant what our convention says it means. The exception would be if this were impossible based on authorized information I have. For example if I make a bid (Blackwood 4 NT) asking partner how many aces s/he has and the response says 3, but I hold 3 myself, I am allowed to infer partner made a mistake, and I need not inform opponents that partner made a mistake.
Similarly if partner forgot our convention and made a bid, he is not allowed to be reminded by my alert that he made a mistake. He must not bid or play using this information. Nor need he explain to opponents he bid in error. Opponents are entitled to know what our agreements are but not our own inferences.
