Contract Bridge
When I first heard of the term bridge I did not know what it was, but it was offered at my university as one of the PE classes. The most I found out about it when I asked around the campus is that it is a card game, although I did not have an idea as to how it is played exactly. When I did find out, I found it a tad bit complicated.
Four players play the game, with two forming partnerships. These four players are dealt thirteen cards each (therefore using up all cards of the fifty-two card deck), and the goal is to be able to achieve the most number of points from the hand you currently hand. What happens is that one hand is showed on the table, face-up, and this is somethng that you and your partner decide on, and the other hand is hidden from your opponents. The players make bids in the form of the cards, and to be able to win, they have to have at least a specific number of cards of the same suit that give them the highest points. The bid that a person makes determines what happens in the play: for example, if the last bid was 5d, then there will be eleven tricks (or eleven rounds, or eleven cards to be played, as tricks are the cards in the game) played, the six initial ones assumed, and the five additional ones from the bid, and it should be in the suit of diamonds. When a player runs out of cards from the suit, that is the only time he may play another card. These cards are scored, and the cards follow the ranking used in poker, with the ace as the highest card and the twos as the lowest cards. The one with the highest score wins. There’s more to the gameplay than just these things I have mentioned – there are a lot of complicated technicalities and instructions that have to be explained at a deeper level – but for those beginners looking for the very basic definition of the game then this should work and give you an idea of how difficult it is to understand for the first-timers.
The game’s origins date back to the eighteenth century. Its predecessor is a popular card trumping game called the Whist, which was a very popular English card game at the time and remained popular in the following century. It was not until near the turn of the twentieth century that documentations of the first developments towards contract bridge first appeared, but the game of bridge we know of today was fully developed in the year 1925. What makes contract bridge different from the bridge variations is that a contract is made: the players declare how many tricks they are going to take, and what the conditions are for this particular move.