Bridge

From Tractatus

Club Card. Download: (pdf 40K) (ps 140K)

Tournament Card. Download: (pdf 40K) (ps 140K)

• Library of Bridge Conventions referred to on this site.
• Library of Bridge Agreements I play.
• Some interesting hands.
• Library of Special Bridge Techniques

My favorite card game. What I like most about it is the enormous amount of information you get, with just enough randomness to force the player to guess carefully. If you have no idea what bridge is, the Contract Bridge article on wikipedia is a good place to start.

Currently, I am a member of the American Contract Bridge League, and play regularly at the Bridge Center of Mid-Hudson Valley[sic] with Gabor Drasny. We play an aggressive Convention Card. The general approach is Standard American, but with a 12-14hcp NT, using Transfer Walsh after One Club. Two-level preempts are two-suited. Some of the conventions used are painful to do without once you have played them(Conventions/Negative Free Bids, Conventions/Drury, Conventions/Bergen); some are just incredibly useful(Kantar, Ekren); and some are just plain mean (Timbuktu).

I started playing Bridge in High School beacuse Julie Gittings taught it to the people who would hang out in Learning Enrichment. Basically, I played the game as defined by the opening chapters of Goren's Third Edition. That means that I played with fairly strict opening requirements, and only basic Standard American conventions.

I continued to play the game in the CS Lounge at CMU. In fact, I even got Deanna to found a Bridge Club, which I never attended because it was the same time as the CMU Gaming Club. Sorry Deanna! By this point, I had become a little more sophisticated, but not much.

Fortunately, when I came to IBM, I started playing in a lunch game with (primarily) John Monti and Bill Maine. They put me in touch with the DCBA, I currently play at The Bridge Center every Tuesday night.

This got me playing standard, competition, Masterpoint style bridge.

For a while I played Precision, and I would like to do that again at some point in the future.

WHich pretty much brings us up to date.

How the bridge bidding is formatted, see also /XML