Contract bridge
Contract bridge, or simply bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard 52-card deck. In its basic format, it is [|played] by four players in two competing partnerships, with partners sitting opposite each other around a table. Millions of people play bridge worldwide in clubs, tournaments, online and with friends at home, making it one of the world's most popular card games, particularly among seniors. The World Bridge Federation is the governing body for international competitive bridge, with numerous other bodies governing it at the regional level.
The game consists of a number of, each progressing through four phases. The cards are to the players; then the players call in an seeking to take the, specifying how many tricks the partnership receiving the contract needs to take to receive points for the deal. During the auction, partners use their bids to exchange information about their hands, including overall strength and distribution of the suits; no other means of conveying or implying any information is permitted. The cards are then played, the trying to fulfill the contract, and the trying to stop the declaring side from achieving its goal. The deal is scored based on the number of tricks taken, the contract, and various other factors which depend to some extent on the variation of the game being played.
Rubber bridge is the most popular variation for casual play, but most club and tournament play involves some variant of duplicate bridge, where the cards are not re-dealt on each occasion, but the same deal is played by two or more sets of players to enable comparative scoring.
History and etymology
Bridge is a member of the family of trick-taking games and is a derivative of whist, which had become the dominant such game and enjoyed a loyal following for centuries. The idea of a trick-taking, 52-card game has its first documented origins in Italy and France. The French physician and author Rabelais mentions a game called "La Triomphe" in one of his works, and Juan Luis Vives's Linguae latinae exercitio of 1539 features a dialogue on card games in which the characters play 'Triumphus hispanicus'.Bridge departed from whist with the creation of "Biritch" in the 19th century and evolved through the late 19th and early 20th centuries to form the present game. The first known rule book for bridge, dated 1886, is Biritch, or Russian Whist written by John Collinson, an English financier working in Ottoman Constantinople. It and his subsequent letter to The Saturday Review, dated 28 May 1906, document the origin of Biritch as being the Russian community in Constantinople. The word biritch is thought to be a transliteration of the Russian word Бирюч, an occupation of a diplomatic clerk or an announcer. Another theory is that British soldiers invented the game bridge while serving in the Crimean War, and named it after the Galata Bridge, which they crossed on their way to a coffeehouse to play cards.
Biritch had many significant bridge-like developments: dealer chose the trump suit, or nominated his partner to do so; there was a call of "no trumps" ; dealer's partner's hand became dummy; points were scored above and below the line; game was 3NT, 4 and 5 ; the score could be doubled and redoubled; and there were slam bonuses. It also has some features in common with solo whist. This game, and variants of it known as "bridge" and "bridge whist", became popular in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1890s despite the long-established dominance of whist. Its breakthrough was its acceptance in 1894 by Lord Brougham at London's Portland Club.
In 1904, auction bridge was developed, in which the players bid in a competitive auction to decide the contract and declarer. The object became to make at least as many tricks as were contracted for, and penalties were introduced for failing to do so. In auction bridge, bidding beyond winning the auction is pointless; for example, if taking all 13 tricks, there is no difference in score between a 1 and a 7 final contract, as the bonus for rubber, small slam or grand slam depends on the number of tricks taken rather than the number of tricks contracted for.
The modern game of contract bridge was the result of innovations to the scoring of auction bridge by Harold Stirling Vanderbilt and others. The most significant change was that only the tricks contracted for were scored below the line toward game or a slam bonus, a change that resulted in bidding becoming much more challenging and interesting. Also new was the concept of "vulnerability", which made sacrificing to protect the lead in a rubber more expensive. The various scores were adjusted to produce a more balanced and interesting game. Vanderbilt set out his rules in 1925, and within a few years contract bridge had so supplanted other forms of the game that "bridge" became synonymous with "contract bridge".
The form of bridge mostly played in clubs, tournaments and online is duplicate bridge. The number of people who play contract bridge has declined since its peak in the 1940s, when a 1941 survey found it was played in 44% of US households. The game is still widely played, especially amongst retirees, and in 2005 the ACBL estimated there were 25 million players in the US., the average age of contract bridge players in the US was 71. The game rose in popularity online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gameplay
Overview
Bridge is a four-player partnership trick-taking game with thirteen tricks per deal. The dominant variations of the game are rubber bridge, which is more common in social play; and duplicate bridge, which enables comparative scoring in tournament play. Each player is dealt thirteen cards from a standard 52-card deck. A starts when a player leads. The leader to the first trick is determined by the auction; the leader to each subsequent trick is the player who won the preceding trick. Each player, in clockwise order, plays one card on the trick. Players must play a card of the same suit as the original card led, unless they have none, in which case they may play any card.The rank of the cards played determines which player wins the trick. Within each suit, the ace is ranked highest followed by the king, queen and jack and then the ten through to the two. In a deal in which the auction has determined that there is no trump suit, the trick is won by the highest-ranked card of the suit led; cards of suits other than that led cannot win. In a deal with a trump suit, cards of that suit are superior in rank to any of the cards of any other suit. If one or more players plays a trump to a trick when void in the suit led, the highest-ranked trump wins. For example, if the trump suit is spades and a player is void in the suit led and plays a spade card, they win the trick if no other player plays a higher spade. If a card of the trump suit is led, the usual rule for trick-taking applies and the highest-ranked card of that suit wins.
Unlike that of its predecessor, whist, the goal of bridge is not simply to take the most tricks in a deal. Instead, the goal is successfully to estimate how many tricks one's partnership can take, and then to meet or exceed that estimate. To illustrate this, the simpler partnership trick-taking game of spades has a similar mechanism: the usual trick-taking rules apply with the trump suit being spades, but in the beginning of the game, players bid or estimate how many tricks they can win, and the number of tricks bid by both players in a partnership are added. If a partnership takes at least that many tricks, they receive points for the round; otherwise, they lose penalty points.
Bridge extends the concept of bidding into an, in which partnerships compete to win a, specifying both how many tricks they will need to take in order to receive points and the trump suit. Players take turns to call in a clockwise order: each player in turn either passes, doubleswhich increases the penalties for not making the contract specified by the opposing partnership's last bid, but also increases the reward for making itor redoubles, or states a contract that their partnership will adopt, which must be higher than the previous highest bid. Eventually, the player who bid the highest contractwhich is determined by the contract's level as well as the trump suit or no trumpwins the contract for their partnership.
In the example auction below, the east–west pair secures the contract of 6; the auction concludes when there have been three successive passes. Note that six tricks are added to stated contract values, so the six-level contract is a contract of twelve tricks. In practice, estimating a good contract without information about one's partner's hand is difficult, so there exist many bidding systems assigning meanings to bids, with common ones including Standard American, Acol, and 2/1 game forcing. Contrast with Spades, where players only have to bid their own hand.
After the contract is decided and the first lead is made, the declarer's partner lays their cards face up on the table, and the declarer plays the dummy's cards as well as their own. The opposing partnership is called the, and their goal is to stop the declarer from fulfilling his contract. Once all the cards have been played, the deal is scored: if the declaring side makes their contract, they receive points based on the level of the contract, with some trump suits being worth more points than others and no trump being worth even more, as well as bonus points for any. If the declarer fails to fulfill the contract, the defenders receive points depending on the declaring side's undertricks and whether the contract was doubled or redoubled.
Setup and dealing
The four players sit in two partnerships with players sitting opposite their partners. A cardinal direction is assigned to each seat, so that one partnership sits in North and South, while the other sits in West and East. The cards may be freshly dealt or, in duplicate bridge games, pre-dealt. All that is needed in basic games are the cards and a method of keeping score, but there is often other equipment on the table, such as a board containing the cards to be played, bidding boxes, or screens.In rubber bridge each player draws a card at the start of the game; the player who draws the highest card deals first. The second highest card becomes the dealer's partner and takes the chair on the opposite side of the table. They play against the other two. The deck is shuffled and cut, usually by the player to the left of the dealer, before dealing. Players take turns to deal, in clockwise order. The dealer deals the cards clockwise, one card at a time. Normally, rubber bridge is played with two packs of cards and whilst one pack is being dealt, the dealer's partner shuffles the other pack. After shuffling the pack is placed on the right ready for the next dealer. Before dealing, the next dealer passes the cards to the previous dealer who cuts them.
In duplicate bridge the cards are pre-dealt, either by hand or by a computerized dealing machine, in order to allow for competitive scoring. Once dealt, the cards are placed in a device called a "board", having slots designated for each player's cardinal direction seating position. After a deal has been played, players return their cards to the appropriate slot in the board, ready to be played by the next table.