December days: Bridge

[cjwatson]

jack asked me to talk about bridge. I'll assume people largely know what it is and talk more about my experiences of it, but I'm happy to write up a basic primer as well if people would like.

I tried to learn bridge at some point in my early twenties, I think in the period when I often visited emperor, atreic, senji, et al to play card games. (As I recall we usually ended up playing Doppelkopf, which I rather miss, or canasta.) I never really got the hang of it at the time, though I think that had more to do with me than with the lovely people I was playing with, and usually crashed out spectacularly in declarer play; so I tended not to bother with it for a few years.

When I started working at nCipher in 2003, we had a mid-sized office for the development team and a good half of them liked to play card games, so they usually commandeered a meeting room at lunchtime and went to play bridge. I decided it was worth joining in and having another go. People there were patient enough to teach me, and this time I managed to reach a fairly reasonable social standard in a couple of months; the very geeky approach to bridge there helped me a lot, with a commonly-agreed set of maybe not spectacular conventions but ones which were pretty reliable, randomised dealing sheets to make the hands more interesting (hey, we were a cryptography company, that kind of thing went with the territory), and a general attitude to the effect that amusing failures were (a) amusing and (b) worth analysing to see how you might do better next time. At the time I was also socialising pretty frequently with the SGO crowd and we often played bridge then too.

Since I left nCipher I've played much less and am fairly rusty on the whole, but ghoti learned to play at some point along the way, so occasionally we manage to have an afternoon of it and I still love it. I still play more or less as I learned back then: weak twos, loser-counting, transfers over 1NT if I can remember them, and just about enough slam bidding conventions to get by if need be; so really nothing very fancy as far as real bridge players go, but enough that I can have a reasonably fun game. It's definitely something I'd like to do more of. Our eldest (B) can play given a bit of a run-up, and with any luck we'll be able to teach our middle child (J) the basics over the next few years too.

Referring back to my thoughts on board games, I think the root of what I like about bridge is that luck usually levels out over the course of the number of games you might normally play, and there's almost unbounded potential for slight improvements to your skill level to improve your chances of making the most of hands. In recent games I've managed to pull off card-play gadgets like squeezes once in a while, which is very satisfying when it works.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!