Bridge by Bruce T. Holmes

Bridge

I grew up in a bridge family. Mom and Dad loved the game, and they taught my brother and I. You need four people to play the game, and there were four of us. When one of us got restless, we'd round up the family and get a game going. Some of my fondest memories of my folks are at the bridge table.

I think most people use bridge as a way to socialize. It's a nice way to spend an evening with another couple. Theoretically, you're playing bridge. But a lot of time gets spent talking about who-knows-what. You deal another hand. You talk. Bridge serves as the filler for the moments when the conversation lags, creating a graceful structure for the evening.

It's a fun, intellectually challenging game with enough chance and luck thrown in to keep you surprised.

There are always two teams at a bridge table. Your partner sits opposite you. The people on either side of you make up the opposing team. The cards are dealt, and you begin a little contest, called the bidding. You go around the table and each player gets to tell how many tricks they think they could take given the hand they've been dealt. (Although, if your hand looks really useless you can "pass" instead.) I'm not going to pretend to teach you how to play bridge, but I do want you to understand the fun of the bidding. It's like owning a secret code book, and using those clues to finally guess that it's Mr. Mustard in the Library with the wrench.

When you do get down to playing the cards, your partner's hand and yours will need to work together. So what you'd really like to do is see what cards you each have and talk it over. Except that would be cheating. But you can listen to what your partner bids. If they pass, they obviously don't have much. But if they bid one spade, it would be fair to assume they have some points and more than a few spades. OK, how would that sort of hand fit with the one you've got? Good bridge players use their bids to give their partner all sorts of detailed information about their hands. There are clues and agreed upon meanings to the various bids. If you know what you're doing, you can figure out the hidden hands with surprising accuracy. Learning how to understand a hand and talk the bidding lingo takes some time, and there are classes and books on how to do all this well.

Then whichever team bid the highest gets to play the hand and find out if they guessed right. Or at least one person does. His or her partner gets to lay their cards on the table and spend the rest of the hand twiddling their thumbs. It's called being the dummy (what a nice name for it), and it's boring. If you need to use the bathroom or get a drink, now's your chance.

You play the hand by laying down four cards in succession from the four separate hands. Top card wins the trick. It may sound simple, but there are all sorts of strategies you can use as you play the game. My Dad was an amazing bridge player, and I can't tell you how many times I thought I had him beat, only to watch my beautiful high cards prove useless because of the clever tricks Dad used in playing the hand. At the end of each hand points are awarded.

If "use it or lose it" applies to brain matter as well as the body, then think of bridge as weightlifting for the brain. It's also a fun way to get together with other people, laugh over the weird cards you're getting, wonder about a different way of playing the last hand, and talk about your lives.