Hacker News Reader

Comment by spekcular | Hacker News Reader

I think the author makes some good points, and certainly I find this article more more compelling than the poker one. Trick-taking card games seem like a great choice for kids. However, when I looked into bridge specifically, the following things turned me off.

1) It requires a dedicated, long-term partner. If your partner isn't available, you can't play. "Pick up" bridge with strangers simply isn't feasible in the way that randomly matching teams on, e.g., an online FPS or tower defense games is.

2) The game is fundamentally broken by certain bidding strategies, which must be banned.

3) There's no way to prevent opponents from cheating by using out-of-game signals (e.g. timing of bids). This can even be done unintentionally. So fair play is always an open question.

Perhaps someone who knows more can comment about whether I'm wrong?

View on HN

I am the author, and I have played bridge for a very long time:

1. Pick-up bridge is certainly possible, and you can walk into a club and find a partner. You have to be playing a "standard" bidding system with them, though. If you do this, expect to play a lot of Standard or 2/1 in America, ACOL in Britain, etc.

2. This is kind of true, except the strategies that are banned are mostly banned because people don't want to play against them. The ACBL is run by grandmas who want you to play bridge like a grandma, so they ban a lot of things. The world bridge federation is a lot more reasonable. The only truly game-breaking bidding systems were forcing-pass systems, and those are banned in order to preserve the diversity of the game (if not, everyone at a competitive level would have to use a forcing pass system).

3. I think this is correct, although cheaters do end up getting caught when their play deviates too much from "correct." Fantoni/Nunes ended up getting caught this way.

Bridge anti-cheating is some of the most elaborate in the world: at the top level everything is sanitized to remove the possibility of information transfer.

For local or friendly play it can be much more fun to openly discuss the hand as it’s being played, especially if one pair is much better at bridge than the other.

Bridge seems to be a game of "lets take all the good parts of Spades then overcomplicate it".

Kids can definitely learn all the lessons mentioned by playing Spades and its much quicker to teach.

Most of the fun in Spades is not being serious, which is easier if you're not playing for money. Long bizarre rambling hilarious discussions about how many tricks we can take vs how much BS the other team can throw down. If you play with super strict players whom think anything other than saying a number is "cheating" then Spades is incredibly boring. "Well I donno maybe with some luck I think I could possibly take three if I'm lucky how are you feeling?" "Oh they're saying they'll take 8, you know those two, they're always overbidding, how do you feel about taking 9."

Imagine playing DnD but all you can do is roll dice, call out numbers, and not talk any shit at the table.

Where I was in high-school, bridge happened to be extremely popular (and also another Whist variant, some kind of Oh Hell).

I can assure you that most of the bridge games from that high-school time were extremely funny and hilarious.

So I do not believe that whether a game is boring or funny has much to do with the rules of the game, but more with what kind of players participate.

Also, I do not believe that the rules of bridge are too complicated. When I was much younger, many simpler card games were entertaining, but by the time we were in high-school, most other card games, except bridge, seemed much too simple to provide any kind of intellectual satisfaction after a skillful win.

I like bridge. I want bridge to be more popular, but I don't think that will happen.

To extend from your first point. Top level players have their dedicated partner, and their own bidding system where the information transmitted is much more refined. This is all very fascinating!

But it also makes it unwatchable for anyone not dedicated to this art. Sometimes even the commentators don't know the meaning of a bid.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com