As you may recall, I have grown to love the challenging card game bridge. I've been playing for a few months now, but still usually raise several questions per hand and am constantly seeking reassurance for my decisions from the elite bridge players at work (which they're always happy to give me, and for that I'm grateful).
I was just getting comfortable playing with a partner and another team of two when it happened - I was asked to play duplicate bridge for the first time.
Duplicate bridge is an eight-person game played by splitting into teams of two, with two teams per table. The same bridge deal is played at each table and scoring is based on relative performance. The element of skill is heightened because essentially the goal of the game is to play your hand better than that of another team who played that exact same hand.
First of all, I have little skill with this game because I'm still learning. I consider myself to be at the point where I understand why what I did was not a good move, but not at the point where I don't make those bad moves in the first place.
So trying to outdo another team made up of bridge tournament champions just had bad news bears written all over it.
Luckily, my friend Brian asked to be paired with me, presumably so that all the other players would have a chance at winning, and we began to play. I'm usually pretty bold - mostly because I like to see what happens if I do something. However, during this game, I was adhering strictly to the conventional rules of bridge and bidding extremely conservatively.
And because of this - and because of sheer luck that the other teams weren't making their contracts - we were in first place at the end of the second of three rounds.
I made sure to screw that up, however, with a disastrous round of no trump and we ended up in third. Not bad for my first time, though!
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