17 Facts About Contract bridge

Contract bridge, or simply bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard 52-card deck.

Rubber Contract bridge is the most popular variation for casual play, but most club and tournament play involves some variant of duplicate Contract bridge, where the cards are not re-dealt on each occasion, but the same deal is played by two or more sets of players to enable comparative scoring.

The first rule book for Contract bridge, dated 1886, is Biritch, or Russian Whist written by John Collinson, an English financier working in Ottoman Constantinople.

Biritch had many significant Contract bridge-like developments: dealer chose the trump suit, or nominated his partner to do so; there was a call of no trumps ; dealer's partner's hand became dummy; points were scored above and below the line; game was 3NT, 4 and 5 ; the score could be doubled and redoubled; and there were slam bonuses.

In 1904 auction bridge was developed, in which the players bid in a competitive auction to decide the contract and declarer.

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Vanderbilt set out his rules in 1925, and within a few years contract bridge had so supplanted other forms of the game that "bridge" became synonymous with "contract bridge".

Form of Contract bridge mostly played in clubs, tournaments and online is duplicate Contract bridge.

Normally rubber Contract bridge is played with two packs of cards and whilst one pack is being dealt, the dealer's partner shuffles the other pack.

Contract bridge points are doubled or quadrupled if the contract is respectively doubled or redoubled.

Duplicate Contract bridge is scored comparatively, meaning that the score for the hand is compared to other tables playing the same cards and match points are scored according to the comparative results: usually either "matchpoint scoring", where each partnership receives 2 points for each pair that they beat, and 1 point for each tie; or IMPs scoring, where the number of IMPs varies with the points difference between the teams.

Duplicate Contract bridge is played in clubs and tournaments, which can gather as many as several hundred players.

Duplicate Contract bridge is a mind sport, and its popularity gradually became comparable to that of chess, with which it is often compared for its complexity and the mental skills required for high-level competition.

In October 2017 the British High Court ruled against the English Bridge Union, finding that Bridge is not a sport under a definition of sport as involving physical activity, but did not rule on the "broad, somewhat philosophical question" as to whether or not Contract bridge is a sport.

Basic premise of duplicate Contract bridge had previously been used for whist matches as early as 1857.

In 1958, the World Bridge Federation was founded to promote Contract bridge worldwide, coordinate periodic revision to the Laws and conduct world championships.

Much of the complexity in bridge arises from the difficulty of arriving at a good final contract in the auction .

Strong Contract bridge playing programs such as Jack Bridge, WContract bridge5, RoboBridge and many-time finalist Bridge Baron, would probably rank among the top few thousand human pairs worldwide.