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When the bridge is too hard.....

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When the bridge is too hard.....
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Heart of England Bridge

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Bridge Introduction
Bridge Introduction

Many card games are based around the idea of a "trick". Each player starts with the same number of cards usually fanned and facing the player. Someone starts the trick by selecting a card from their hand and placing it facing up on a table. The next player, usually to the left of the first, must choose a card from the same suit as the first card played to the trick, if they have one. If they don't, they choose a card from any other suit, known as a "discard". They place their card facing up on the table. The next player to their left chooses a card similarly and so on until all the players at the table have contributed a card. The cards on the table are inspected and the highest ranking card wins the trick. Aces are usually deemed to be the highest card in suit. Discards cannot win the trick. The trick is attributed to the player that played the card. This player chooses the first card to play to the next trick. The game ends when all players have played all their cards and the winner is the player who has won most tricks. Sometimes, before play starts, one suit is designated as the trump suit. When a player cannot "follow suit", and the suit led is not a trump card, instead of discarding the player may play a card from the trump suit. This is deemed to defeat all non-trump cards played to the trick. However, if the next player does not hold a card in the suit that was led, he can win the trick by playing a higher ranking card from the trump suit, "overtrump". This is how many popular card games including rummy, whist, hearts etc are played. When playing bridge there are always four players, each holding thirteen cards. The four players play as two teams of four, the player on the same team sit opposite each other and try to work together.

You can see that the way to win most tricks is to hold lots of high ranking cards. If there is a trump suit, you win most tricks if you have lots of cards in the trump suit. Where bridge differs from other trick based games is that there is a preliminary stage, known as the auction, where the players bid to take on a target of winning a certain number of tricks, always at least seven, in a game where one of suits is designated as the trump suit, or they bid to play in no trumps. The scoring system encourages the pairs to take on larger targets, by giving bonuses for achieving them. However, the non targeted side only have to prevent the target being reached to take away the score from the game. The new skill introduced is the judgement, during the auction, of how many tricks the two hands held by each pair can make, and some of the luck is removed. The skill of playing the cards to make the committed number of tricks is still required! This is at the heart of the various forms of contract bridge e.g. Rubber bridge and Chicago bridge. You only need four players and one pack of cards to play. However, it is still quite an advantage to be dealt the higher cards, or most of the trumps.

Duplicate bridge adds in a further level of competition. It is played by at least eight players, playing at at least two tables. The new factor is multiple packs of cards, dealt once at the beginning of a session, into storage devices known as boards. A few, say four, of these deals are used by the players sitting at a particular table, an auction takes place to set a target, the play of cards happens, the target is reached, or not, and the scoring points are calculated and recorded. The cards are returned to the board. When all four deals have been played, the boards will be moved to different tables, and different players will play them. New scores, for the new players, will be calculated and added to the record for each deal. At the end of the session each pair is ranked on their success, compared to other pairs, with each deal. To do well, the players must get the maximum possible score from the deal, and the opposing pair must play their cards to minimise it! The overall score for the session will be based on the combined success rates for each pair on each board. This makes the game still more based on skill rather than luck - though you can't eliminate luck altogether. It also makes it chance for a social gathering, and many duplicate bridge clubs are strong communities.