Thus, there is something innately human about bridge. It’s about minds meeting (to crush other minds).
Bridge players are self-sufficient super-rationalists, lone wolves who might prefer to tackle the world with their wits alone, but they can’t-by design, they must rely on a partner-and therein lies the brilliance of the game. The name might conjure flocks of little old ladies, but the play is cutthroat, a stylized form of intellectual aggression. Bridge is an exercise in intuition, linguistics, math, and mystery. Even beginners are expected to be able to count all fifty-two cards, which means-armed with such a wealth of information-you forever feel you’re on the verge of figuring out the game, but you never do. Once the play of the hand begins, each player can see the location of half the cards in the deck. There are only fifteen legal words you can use to form exactly 38 bids, which must be used to discuss the 635,013,559,600 possible hands a player might be dealt. After the deck is dealt, you and your partner bid against your opponents on whether a particular suit will be trump and how many tricks you might take. It is a trick-taking game, like hearts or spades, played by a pair of partners. Perhaps there’s something about me that can’t sit still.Īn explanatory word about bridge, which would have been completely unnecessary some 70 years ago, when the game was played in 44% of American homes:īridge is arguably the deepest, most beautiful game humans have come up with. Among other places, I’ve played bridge in Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco, Gatlinburg, Gettysburg, London, Dallas, Kansas City, Chicago, and Bermuda. I imagine the games we play say a lot about us. Before we used paper to print money, we used it to play cards. The human impetus to play games is an old one. Football, soccer, Chutes and Ladders, Sorry!-these were the games of my childhood, plus a sadistic outdoor pastime called “Spread Eagle” that gripped my fifth-grade class with religious fervor and whose unflinching denouement involved unlucky participants standing against a brick wall, execution-style, and getting pegged (often in the crotch) with a tennis ball. I didn’t grow up playing bridge, or even cards, really. It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life. The first in a series of personal essays about the games we play, what they mean to us, and why we so often feel compelled to justify our obsessions.
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