Ultimate Book of Card Games: The Comprehensive Guide to More Than 350 Games (56 page)

The highest individual bidder leads. Players must follow suit if possible; otherwise they may play any card. Tricks are won by the highest trump or, if none, by the highest card in the leading suit. As in Hearts and Spades, players may not lead trumps until trumps have been broken or unless they bid a board, in which case they may lead trumps. If the Big Joker leads a trick, all other players
must
play their highest trump; if the Little Joker leads, they must play their lowest trump.

1. DIFFICULTY
   :
   high
   
2. TIME LENGTH
   :
   long
   
3. DECKS
   : 1
   

If you are new to Bridge, you have a long road ahead of you. This is not intended to frighten you off. Instead, it’s meant to manage your expectations. There are thousands—literally—of books dedicated to Bridge, and committed players can spend lifetimes mastering its nuances. That’s because Bridge is complicated. And worst of all, you need at least four people to play a proper game of Bridge—not two, three, or five, but precisely four, preferably with similar amounts of playing experience.

Now for the good news. Even detractors acknowledge that Bridge is among the world’s finest card games. If you commit time and mental energy to learning Bridge, after just a few hours you will be hooked. It’s OK if you don’t immediately understand every twist and turn. With even a rudimentary understanding of Bridge’s rules and strategies, you will enjoy it.

A BRIEF HISTORY
All Bridge games are descendants of Whist. In 1905, Whist enthusiasts in London, New York, and Boston codified a new form of the game, called Auction Bridge. In 1926, the millionaire Harold Vanderbilt tinkered with the game’s rules on a Caribbean cruise and singlehandedly invented Contract Bridge. Enter Ely Culbertson and his wife (an Auction Bridge teacher), Josephine Dillon. They took Contract Bridge and turned it into an international phenomenon in the 1930s and ’40s, making and losing many millions of dollars along the way.

Ely Culbertson, credited as the man who made Bridge, wrote no less than ten Bridge books, and transformed the game into a mainstream success. Culbertson was also a true character. In his autobiography,
The Strange Lives of One Man
, he writes, “This is the complete story of my life, told as candidly and as ruthlessly as I could. All the names and places, including the jails, mentioned herein are authentic.”

Contract Bridge (sometimes called Rubber Bridge) is the quintessential version of the game, and it’s the game described first below. Contract Bridge is a bidding and trick-taking game. At the start of each hand, the teams bid on how many tricks they think they can win. The team with the highest bid earns (or loses) points based on whether they achieve their bid. Over the years, other popular variations have evolved, including Duplicate Bridge (played at professional tournaments), Chicago Bridge (a simplified four-deal version), and Honeymoon Bridge (for two players).

NUMBER OF PLAYERS
Bridge is always played by four players divided into two teams. Partners sit facing one another, and are universally referred to as North, South, East, and West, based on their positions around the table. The teams, then, are North-South and East-West.

HOW TO DEAL
A standard fifty-two-card deck is used. Card rankings are standard, with aces always high. The suits rank (high to low) no trump, spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs.
No trump
(abbreviated NT) means there is no trump suit, and it acts like a fifth suit for the purposes of bidding. Spades and hearts are
major suits
and score higher contract values than diamonds and clubs, which are
minor suits.

All dealing is clockwise. Deal thirteen cards to each player, one at a time. It’s important to have a second deck of cards at the ready, shuffled by the dealer’s partner. At the end of one hand, the alternate deck is used to deal the next, to speed the game along.

BIDDING
Most of Bridge’s complexity is in the bidding. At its simplest, bidding determines the minimum number of tricks a team must win, as well as the trump (or no trump) suit for the hand.

Bids always assume a base of six, so that a bid of 1 commits you to winning seven tricks, a bid of 2 commits you to winning eight tricks, etc. Since suits are ranked in Bridge, a bid of 2 of hearts beats a bid of 2 of diamonds or 2 of clubs, but loses to a bid of 2 NT, 2 of spades, or to any bid of three or higher.

The dealer always opens the bidding, which then proceeds clockwise around the table. The dealer may
pass
or make a bid at any level. The bid is intended to communicate information about the dealer’s hand to his or her partner (more on bidding strategies later). Either way, the next player either must pass or beat the dealer’s bid. For example, if the dealer opens with 2 of diamonds, the next player must bid 2 of hearts or more, or pass.

Players may also
double
an opposing team’s bid, which effectively doubles the point value of the previous player’s bid and is used to punish a team for overbidding. For example, if North opens with 2 of diamonds and East replies with an aggressive bid of 4 of spades, South may double. This means South believes East has overreached and is likely to lose the bid of 4 of spades.

A team that’s been doubled may then
redouble
the bid. This is akin to a doubledare, and it
quadruples
the points at stake. In the example above, West might redouble South’s double of East’s 4 of spades. Note that if the next player in rotation makes a higher bid, all doubles and redoubles are canceled. So in the example above, if North replies to West’s redouble with a bid of 4NT, the doubles and redoubles are ignored and East must decide whether to
overcall
(e.g., make a higher bid, in this case any bid of five or more) or to pass.

A typical bid can be diagrammed as follows, starting at North and with East-West ultimately winning the contract at 4 of hearts:

Players who pass are allowed to rejoin the bidding on their subsequent turns. The bidding ends when three players in a row pass. The winning bid is called the
contract
, and the player who opens the bid in the
winning suit
is the
declarer
. In the example above, even though West makes the highest hearts bid, East is the declarer because East opened bidding in hearts.

BIDDING STRATEGY
Players always start by calculating their hand’s point value. This is a simple two-step process:

First, calculate your
high-card points
: 4 points for an ace, 3 for a king, 2 for a queen, 1 for a jack. There are 40 total high-card points in a deck, so you’re in a decent position if you hold more than 10 points.

Next, calculate your
long-suit points
. Score yourself 1 point for each card in a suit
longer
than four cards. For example, if you hold six diamonds, score yourself 2 long-suit points.

So, the hand A of spades-K of spades-10 of spades-5 of spades-Q of hearts-J of clubs-10 of clubs-8 of clubs-5 of clubs-3 of clubs-2 of clubs-K of diamonds-5 of diamonds contains 13 high-card points plus 2 long-card points, for a total of 15 points. The rule of thumb for bidding in Bridge is:

Pass with fewer than 12 points.

With 13 or 14 points, bid at the one level in your longest suit.

With 15 or more points and a balanced hand (e.g., you have at least two cards in every suit) bid 1NT.

Once the bidding starts,
short-suit points
are added to your score if and when your partnership finds a
suit fit
. This helps you decide whether to bid or not
for a slam
or a game. The rule of thumb for determining suit fit: You must hold four or more cards in the suit bid by your partner (e.g., your partner opens 1 of spades and you have four-card support in spades). In this case, give yourself the following short-suit points:

5 points for a
void
(no cards) in any suit.

3 points for a
singleton
(just one card in a suit). Don’t score yourself high-card points
and
singleton points. A singleton K of diamonds, for example, scores 3 points for high card or 3 points for the singleton, but not both!

1 point for a
doubleton
(just two cards in any suit).

Whenever possible, teams try to make the following contracts to earn bonus points at the end of the hand:

SMALL SLAM
This is a bid of 6 of spades, 6 of hearts, 6 of diamonds, 6 of clubs, or 6NT. You may lose only one trick to your opponents. Teams should hold at least 33 to 36 points to bid a small slam.

GRAND SLAM
This is a bid of 7 of spades, 7 of hearts, 7 of diamonds, 7 of clubs, or 7NT, and requires a team to win every single trick! To bid a grand slam, teams should hold at least 37 points between them.