Bridge

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Wendy Woloson

Bridge, a competitive four-person card game, began in the late nineteenth century as a version of partnership whist which incorporated bidding and suit hierarchy. First called bridge-whist, by the turn of the twentieth century its name had been shortened to simply bridge, and was a popular American high-class club game.

Contract bridge, the most commonly played version, was invented by millionaire Harold S. Vanderbilt in 1925--he made technical improvements over a French variety of the game. Soon after this and into the 1930s, bridge became a faddish leisure activity of the upper class in Newport and Southampton.

By the 1950s card games of all kinds were popular forms of leisure that required thinking skills, incorporated competition, encouraged sociability, and demanded little financial outlay. Bridge was no exception and the game became a popular pastime for the upper and upper middle classes. Although daily bridge columns appeared as syndicated features in hundreds of newspapers, most contract bridge players, in fact, tended to be older, better educated, and from higher income brackets than the general population. Through the decades the game continued to be popular and according to the American Contract Bridge League, about 11 million people played bridge in the United States and Canada in 1986.

The game itself was played with two sets of partners who were each dealt 13 cards from a regular deck. The cards ranked from ace high to two low, and the suits were also ranked in the following way, from lowest to highest: clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades, and no trump. The bidding, or "auction" before the actual play of the cards determined the "contract"--optimally, the highest possible tricks that could be won by the most deserving hand, and the designated trump suit. This pre-play succession of bids among the players was as important as the play itself, and served also as an opportunity for players to signal to their partners the general makeup of their hands. The play itself required people to be alert, to keep track of cards played, and to continually refine their strategies as tricks were taken, making it an intellectual activity regardless of whether it was "social" or "duplicate" bridge.

Social, or party bridge, was a casual version of the game that allowed people to converse during play, and had more relaxed rules about proper play and etiquette. Very often people would throw bridge parties, popular especially from the 1950s to the 1970s, as a way to show their hospitality but with little obligation to bear the burden of socializing for an entire evening: playing bridge enabled people to engage in small talk while the intellectual requirements of the game gave people an excuse not to converse if they were not so inclined. Other forms of social bridge were practiced by local bridge clubs, informal groups that met once or twice a week and played for small stakes--usually between $1.50 and $3.00 per session. It was common for members of these bridge groups and those who engaged in regular games of party bridge, usually husbands and wives (who often chose not to play as a team in order to avoid marital tension), to alternate their hosting obligations, establishing reciprocal social relations while setting up informal games of competition. People enjoyed this form of entertainment because it was relaxing, enjoyable, somewhat refined, and inexpensive.

While this form of bridge largely had the reputation of being high-class and a bit priggish, with people believing that only rich white older women played the game as they sat around nibbling crustless sandwiches in the shapes of hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds, bridge actually had a large influence on the general population. College students took to playing less exacting forms of the game that also employed bidding systems and suit hierarchies, including hearts, spades, euchre, and pinochle.

In contrast, competitive bridge was more combative. People earning "master points" (basic units by which skill was measured according to the American Contract Bridge League--300 points gained one "Life Master" status) would join tournaments with similarly-minded serious bridge players. The most common form of competitive bridge was "duplicate," a game in which competing players at different tables would play the same hand. In this game it was not enough to just win a hand against one's immediate opponents, but it was also necessary to have played the same hand better than rivals at other tables. Competitive bridge players commonly scoffed at social bridge, deeming it too casual a game that allowed for too much luck and chance.

As with many other forms of leisure activities and hobbies, bridge allowed a vast number of Americans to engage in an enjoyable activity on their own terms. While there were basic rules to bridge that defined it as an identifiable game, people incorporated it into their lives in radically different ways. Social players used the game as an excuse to gather among friends and relatives, making games regular (weekly or monthly) occurrences that encouraged group camaraderie. In contrast, duplicate bridge players who sought out more competitive games, often in the form of tournaments, took the game much more seriously and thought of it as a test of their intellect rather than an innocuous pastime.