Chess Grandmaster and multiple times British Champion Jonathan Mestel, who now plays Bridge, discusses the different fascinations of each game in his critical essay, A Chess-player’s view of Bridge.

If you’re old enough you may know that I used to play chess for England and was once the World U17 champion. I don’t play much over-the-board any more, though I still take part in chess-problem solving contests, as does John Nunn. Most of my competitive game-playing time nowadays is taken up with Bridge. I have had some more modest success at that game too and so I’ve been asked to share some observations on the two games.

First of all, let me say that from a technical standpoint, Chess is unquestionably the richer game. The variety and beauty of what can occur on the chessboard greatly exceeds even the most elegant occurrences at the card table. And this is despite the fact that chess is also more clinical, more arithmetical. So what is it that Bridge has to offer? Why is it many chess-players get lured towards Bridge, sometimes never to return?

Chess is a game of perfect information – in principle the best move(s) are calculable precisely. Our inability to analyse them out because of the depth of the game leads to some apparent uncertainty, but it is not like the genuine uncertainty of Bridge, with its unknown distribution of the other cards. At bridge we have to make decisions with imperfect information. We gather what clues we can, take various measures to skew the odds in our favour, but at the end of the day even an 80% chance doesn’t always come off. We can do the right thing and fail, and we can do the wrong thing and triumph!

Chess is an unforgiving game. We all know what it’s like to blunder in a winning position and then have to defend a worse endgame for 2 hours. Whose fault is it? Ours. No question. We played a bad move. We weren’t unlucky – we were stupid. When a comparable disaster happens at the bridge table, firstly we soon start again with a new hand and secondly, it is possible that we may actually have done the right thing, but been unlucky. We can blame Fortune for our failings! Or, if our temperament is that way inclined, we can blame Partner.

Bridge is a collaborative effort between you and your partner. When bidding, you pass information to each other until one or other of you makes a final decision. The teamwork continues while defending a hand. When the two of you come up with an imaginative, cooperative defence to set an apparently unbreakable contract it is a great (but rare!) feeling. How much more common are the stories of partner’s crimes than of his/her cleverness. For it is true that partner can do much more damage to your prospects than can either opponent. When disaster strikes, it must surely be Partner’s fault – our own contribution to the debacle may get forgotten.

These twin factors, the unknown card distributions and Partner’s putative folly, ensure that it can take a very long time for all the luck to average out and an objective assessment of our ability at Bridge to appear. In Chess, the objective nature of the game quickly forces on us the brutal realisation that our skill is limited. Of course, we can strive to improve and enjoy the game anyway. But my firm belief is that almost every bridge player thinks they are a better player than they in fact are. This is comforting! At Bridge, you can beat teams who are better than you, because of the greater randomness. This we can interpret as us improving. When correspondingly we lose to a team who is weaker than us, we were clearly unlucky.

I have been a bit cynical above. Bridge has many different things to offer. Each hand starts in the deep unknown and the discovery element in bidding and play is intriguing. The psychological aspects of understanding what opponents are up to, and how to mislead them, is appealing. Interpreting partner’s actions is even more important, though it is strictly laid down of which aspects of partner’s behaviour you may legally take notice.

For beginners at Bridge and Chess, my advice would be very similar. Begin with the basic tactics: understand the sorts of things which can happen in a hand; how to play certain card combinations, learn when you have to take tricks quickly and when you should play passively. In Chess, players concentrate too much on specific sequences of opening moves. There is a reasonable parallel between Opening Theory in Chess and Bidding Theory in Bridge. You should learn the basic bidding principles, e.g. when bids are forcing, what suit lengths they imply, when to limit your hand. To my mind, developing a complex system with long strings of artificial bids is like chess players memorising 25 moves of theory and then immediately hanging a piece – it is a waste of effort, when starting out. There is a fascination and indeed value in developing bidding methods for hands which come up once every 2 years – it’s just not a priority.

So enjoy your Bridge – it certainly has things to offer that Chess does not. Of course, it is (or should be) the more sociable game – you are expected to talk to your opponents on occasion, and there is a mini post-mortem every 8 minutes. And yet social need not mean friendly – even strong players can be unpleasant to opponents and partner alike, although it is usually the not-so-strong ones who are the worst offenders. But you, I am sure, will not be like that; you will become the kind of genial opponents that one doesn’t mind losing to quite so much. Good Luck!