Bridge Players Day

What the day is

Bridge Players Day is observed on March 5. Contract bridge was codified in 1925, reportedly worked out by Harold Vanderbilt during a cruise, and set off one of the largest crazes in the history of card games.

Origin and background

The card play is descended from whist and is the part that looks familiar. The auction is what makes bridge distinctive. Partners must decide how high to bid and in which suit, and they need to know what the other holds in order to do it, but the rules forbid any communication except the bids themselves. Each bid therefore carries meaning beyond its face value, agreed in advance as a system, and the auction becomes a constrained language for transmitting the shape and strength of a hand through a very narrow channel. That is why a bidding sequence is intelligible to experienced players and opaque to everyone else, and why conventions have names and are disclosed to opponents.

Duplicate bridge then removes most of the luck. The same deals are played at every table, and a pair is scored against how everyone else did with identical cards. A terrible hand is not a misfortune if the rest of the room did worse with it, which is what allows bridge to function as a competitive game rather than a gamble.

It has been studied for cognitive benefit in older players, and the findings are the usual correlational tangle, with social contact plausibly doing as much work as the mental effort. What is not in doubt is that a club night is several hours of concentrated thinking in company.

The game's problem is demographic. Club membership has aged sharply, numbers have fallen for decades, and most clubs are acutely aware that they need beginners.

How to take part

• Find a local club. Nearly all run beginner sessions and want new players badly.
• Learn the auction as a language rather than memorizing bids.
• Play online first if walking into a room is the barrier.
• Try duplicate rather than social bridge to see the luck disappear.
• Take a friend. It is a partnership game and easier to learn in pairs.