Bridge is a card game for four players. In a club or tournament game, there may be several foursomes playing at once, but the game itself is a one-table, four person game, where all 52 cards are in play, and the four players form two partnerships, with partners sitting opposite one another. When we talk or write about bridge hands, we refer to the seats as North, East, South and West, and to the partnerships as North-South and East-West.
To start, the four players choose some method of deciding partners and seats, and who will deal first. Each player gets thirteen cards and the dealer makes the first bid. It is bridge etiquette to leave your cards face down until the dealer has finished dealing all the cards. This way all four players can sort their hands at the same time and nobody gets a head start. While one player deals, his partner shuffles a second deck and places it to his right, so that the next deal can begin as soon as the last one ends, with the next dealer sliding the new deck from his left to his right, for a cut by the previous dealer, as the other two players collect the cards of the old deck together for a shuffle.
Each deal of bridge has two phases: the auction, and the cardplay. The auction determines which suit (if any) will be the trump suit, which of the four players will be the declarer, and the number of tricks that the auction-winning side must attempt to win. The real action is in the cardplay, where we must reveal what exactly a trick is, so we'll describe the cardplay phase in detail first, then return to the auction.
The left-hand opponent (LHO and RHO are well-known bridge terms) of declarer makes the first play, choosing a card from hand and placing it face down on the table. Often a player makes this first play by mistake when it is someone else's turn; playing the card face down prevents a card being exposed in error. When it is confirmed that the opening lead is from the correct hand, the card is turned face up, and the next player, declarer's partner, becomes dummy: all of his or her thirteen cards are laid out on the table, sorted into suits.
With these thirteen cards on the table for all to see, both defenders and declarer can see their hand and the dummy hand, and know that all missing cards can only be in one of the two other hands. For the declarer, any missing cards must be in a defender's hand: one or the other. For the defenders, missing cards may be with declarer, or with partner. Every card is in play and must be somewhere! Much of bridge skill consists in figuring out the location of the missing cards, especially the highest ones, and working out from this the best line of play to take. Compared to other four-player games where missing cards may be in any of the other three hands, or in many games not dealt at all, this makes bridge cardplay a fascinating contest of logical thinking.
The contest is one of tricks. The first lead is followed by declarer choosing a card from the dummy hand to play, followed by the next defender choosing a card, and then declarer plays the last card of trick one. One of these four cards will be the trick-winning card, and the next trick begins with the hand that won the previous trick, with the other three players playing in turn. In this way, thirteen tricks, each consisting of one card from each hand, are played, and the result of the deal is the number of tricks won by each side. This total is compared to the tricks contracted for in the auction to determine the number of points each side wins or loses.
Declarer plays cards from his or her concealed hand, and also from the exposed dummy hand in turn. Usually declarer simply calls out the intended card when it is dummy's turn to play, and the player who is the dummy (the term dummy is not meant to imply mental deficiency but to insist that once the declarer is determined, his partner cannot continue to take part with comments or advice of any kind) picks the card up to indicate that it has been played. Some declarers say "play low," or some other such phrase, to indicate what to do.
The cardinal rule of bridge and other trick-taking games is this: the first player to play to a trick may lead any card, but the other players must follow suit if they can: if a spade is led to a trick, the other players must play spades unless they haven't any left. Following suit is so important to bridge that you can never gain by not doing so; often the trick count will be adjusted if you revoke, which is the bridge term for failing to follow suit. It is important to train yourself to focus on the suit of the card led, even if the other players play different suits before it is your turn to play.
Most tricks will have four cards of the same suit, and the highest card wins. Aces are high, followed by kings, queens, jacks, and then the number cards from ten down to two. If someone fails to follow suit they cannot win the trick unless they play a trump card. The auction determines if there is a trump suit and any trick that includes trump cards is won by the highest card played in the trump suit. Discarding a non-trump when you are out of the suit led can never win the trick, even if you discard an ace.
(Near the end of the cardplay, one side, usually declarer but sometimes one of the defenders, realizes that the end result is clear, and claims the rest, or sometimes some portion of the rest. "You get a spade trick and I have the other tricks" is commonly heard. This is not done to be smart, or to intimidate or deny someone their winners, but merely to save time, allowing more deals to be played. If the other side has an issue with the claim, the Director should be called to decide what to do next.)
Now for the auction phase that precedes the cardplay. Bridge auction language consists of just fifteen words that must convey information about all types of hands:
one two three four five six seven
notrump spade(s) heart(s) diamond(s) club(s)
pass double redouble
That's all there is. Starting with the dealer, each player in turn either makes a call or passes, until there are three passes in a row ending the auction (or four passes from the start of the auction, in which case neither side scores any points on that deal and there is no cardplay). Possible calls are:
At the end of the auction, the declarer is the player, on the side that made the final contract bid, who bid that suit first. If North begins the auction with a bid of One Spade and later South bids Two Spades, then later Three Spades, then later Five Spades as the final bid of the auction, North would still be the declarer. Declarer's task is to try to make enough tricks to fulfill the contract: seven tricks at the one level, eight tricks at the two level, up to thirteen tricks at the seven level. Declarer's side will win points for making the contract and the defender's side will win points if the contract is defeated. Scores are reciprocal: a plus score for one side is a minus for the other side. (There is much more to scoring in bridge and we will cover it all in BBB#2.)
Now it's time to reveal why bidding is so mesmerizing. If a player bids Three Hearts in the middle of an auction, this is an offer to play with hearts as trump and try to take nine tricks. If the next three players pass, this is what the target is for declarer in the cardplay. But players have discovered that the limited language of bidding can also be used to pass information about their hands, and bidding systems have developed much the same way as humans evolved from single-celled organisms, except that bridge players worked a lot faster than evolution! That Three Heart bid, depending on the context, could mean "I have a strong hand which includes a heart suit," "I have a weak hand with lots of hearts," or even in some situations "I have control of this suit: the ace of hearts or a heart void," or even "I have lots of spades and would like you to bid spades!" Learning about specific bidding sequences, different systems of bidding, and what the bids within them show, is one of the main elements of the bridge learning curve, for many the most exciting!
That's bridge in a nutshell: dealing, bidding, cardplay, scoring, next hand. Experienced players can get through 8-10 deals in an hour, but beginners take a while to get up to speed, since there are so many decisions that a new player must think through that an experienced player has faced many times and knows instinctively what to do. So your first objective in bridge should be to thoroughly understand the way it is played. Even if you have no idea of the meaning of the bids in the auction or the cards that have been played, watching a hand in progress, following the auction and the cardplay can be quite exciting: will declarer make the ten tricks the contract requires before the defenders get four? It's best to watch experienced players play at first, and then later you can read newspaper columns, online bridge articles, some of the other articles on this site, and even bridge books and visualize the deals being described.
One more element to describe: the difference between single-table bridge and duplicate bridge played in a club or tournament. At single-table bridge, during the cardplay, the cards in a trick are tossed into the middle of the table and declarer or one of the defenders collects the four cards and stacks them as the cardplay proceeds, to keep track of tricks won by each side. In duplicate bridge, the four players must keep their thirteen-card hands separate: it is vitally important that they do so, so that at the end of the cardplay the cards go back into the "board," the special contraption that holds four thirteen-card hands. The board is passed to a new table and now another group of four players can play the exact same deal, allowing scores on the same deal to be compared between tables. Boards are marked with the dealer and which sides are vulnerable (a key factor in scoring) in a preset way so that every player deals one out of every four deals and each partnership is vulnerable half of the time.
To keep the four hands separate, duplicate players play cards not to the middle of the table but directly in front of them. It takes a bit of getting used to if you've played bridge, or hearts, or spades, to have to look at each player's "play space" on each trick, but you quickly get used to it. Once a trick is completed, each player keeps a record of the tricks won and lost with the face down cards, placing them left to right with the long edges pointing to the trick-winning side. When the thirteenth trick is played, the players agree on the number of tricks, correcting any disputes, put their cards back in the slot for their thirteen cards, score up the deal, and play any other boards remaining in the round. Once the round is done, boards and some pairs move to new locations for the next round.
In duplicate bridge, the score you get on each deal is not as important as the rank of that score among the tables of players who have played that deal. If you have a score of minus 1400 on a board, down four doubled and vulnerable with the East-West cards, it may feel like having eaten a dog food sandwich. But if that board goes to the other tables and one by one the North-South players all bid and make a vulnerable Six Spades, this is worth 1430 to them, and your minus 1400 is better than the other East-West pairs' minus 1430! The raw scores are compared and every pair gets one matchpoint for each score on a board from their direction that is worse, and a half-matchpoint for a tie. At the end, the raw scores don't much matter and it is only the matchpoints that count. Each pair will get a score, converted to a percentage of the total possible matchpoints; a score of 65% or so is a good bet to win, but sometimes in a close game you can win with less, and occasionally a score of 65% is outscored by a pair having a monster game.
All this comparison scoring makes for a very new game, one where every deal counts toward the end result, not just the big hands that produce big scores. The ability to declare or defend in such a way to get an extra trick is as valuable, perhaps more valuable, than getting to the best contract in the auction. Over the course of the session, every pair in a room plays all or almost all of the deals in the game, and at the end players can compare stories. After a large tournament's afternoon session, nearby restaurants are taken over by bridge players with their sheets of hand records from the most recent session, discussing their results!
Duplicate bridge can be played with any number of players, from a small club game of 4-8 tables, to a larger club with 10-20 tables, to a tournament with dozens, even hundreds of tables divided into several different sections of 12-18 tables. Many clubs and most tournaments use bid-boxes to lower the sound level in a room and avoid having conspicuous bids like 'Seven Notrump!' stand out, along with scoring units that are connected to the scoring computer, eliminating the need for paper scoring. Both are surprisingly easy to learn how to use. Playing in a large event like this is an incredible experience: you play a few hands against players at every level, and even a few hands against the area's best players. Getting a decent result against expert opponents can make your day, even if your final score wasn't so good! Bridge with a foursome is fun, but at a big tournament with four hundred it is an amazing experience, win or lose!
An example deal: Bridge on the web is different than bridge on paper. In a book or newspaper bridge column you will usually see a hand diagram, a table of bids in the auction, and then some text explaining what happened. Online we can do much better, putting you at the table watching one player as a deal unfolds little by little. Click the 'Next' button below to advance through this hand; at each step there will be more bids or plays revealed, and comments in the space below. Enjoy!
Next up: BBB#1: Establishing Useful Habits
Previous: Bruce's Bridge Basics: Author To Reader