Yes, I've been learning to play Bridge. I'll admit that at first, I was a little put off by the idea, because I was under the impression that Bridge was played only by old people who spent the majority of their time complaining that all music these days just sounds like noise, or perhaps sitting around talking about how much fun it is driving on the freeway with their left blinker on for no apparent reason, just to mess with everybody else's minds.
But my roommates and all their friends play and in order to further the cause of roommate bonding (since nobody else wanted to get matching tattoos), I said, "Dammit! I'm going to play Bridge! I will fight the stereotype of Bridge players being old people who spend most of their time compiling mental lists about what foods give them gas!1 I will play Bridge and like it!" To which several people around me told me to shut the hell up. If you're going to have an inspirational moment, don't have it during a eulogy.
But anyway, Bridge, for those of you who aren't really familiar with the game, is a ridiculously complex card game that makes financing a second mortgage seem relatively sane by comparison. And I thought it would be nice to educate my readers further (which is probably a bad idea because eventually you'll just spend your time watching PBS documentaries and I'll only be left with people who Email me asking if I'm a girl and whether I want to have virtual sex.) by teaching you the finer points of the game of Bridge.
The first part of any Bridge game is the bidding. This is where you go around telling people how many points you are going to make, and what suit you would like to be trump. A "Trump" suit is one that can beat most other cards, go on to make millions in real estate, and then screw over its ex-wife in the divorce settlement when it leaves her for a model half its age. The trick to bidding, as I've discovered, is to bid something that has absolutely nothing with what you really want to bid. This is so that you can secretly communicate information to your partner. (Kind of like in elementary school, when we all spoke Pig Latin and thought we could swear in front of the teacher without her knowing it. Boy, we were idiots.) So for example, if you want to bid 4 diamonds, the best thing to say is "2 clubs". This really means "I've got a lot of good cards, but I'm wondering if you have any diamonds. And I really like that shirt. Is it from the Gap?"
Oh yeah, that's the other thing. Every bid can secretly mean huge paragraphs of information. Peace treaties and major business deals can be negotiated using just Bridge bidding.
First player: 1 Spade. ("When I was digging in the garden with my spade, my back gave out on me.")Next comes the round where you actually play the cards. This is also known as the "Explain to Todd how he screwed up" round where after each hand, my partner calmly and courteously explains to me that I was a total bonehead. This is usually because instead of counting every card that every person played and keeping a mental tally in my head, I was... get this... trying to hold a conversation. Can you believe it? What an amateur.
Partner: 2 Diamond. ("Oh, that's tough. That happened to me at the baseball diamond the other day. You should try my chiropractor. He's great.")
First player: 3 Heart. ("Great. Thanks for the tip. Hey, have you noticed that all that rock music sounds like noise these days?")
Partner: 3 Spade. ("No kidding. And what about those presidential debates? Are they boring, or what? I'd almost rather be forced to watch Brooke Shields try to do comedy.")
First player: 5 Diamond. ("Yeah, the only thing duller than those presidential debates is looking at your vacation slides. Ha!")
Partner: 7 Club. ("I'm going to club you over the head seven times.")
First player: 7 No-trump! ("Ouch!")
And this, to me, is the biggest problem with Bridge. I always thought that playing cards was just an excuse to have something to do while you're hanging out with your friends. The best example of this being the great drinking game Asshole, which goes something like this:
So Bridge, a game where you actually have to concentrate on the game itself, holds less appeal. But since I'd like to at least get to the point where I can start criticizing other people's playing, I'm still trying to learn. Which is why, if you see me these days, I might be hanging out in some cafe, cards sprawled out in front of me, reading some obscure Bridge book like, Possible Interpretations When Somebody Bids 1 Heart (Part 2 of a 5-volume set.)
I might also be the one asking the cafe clerk to turn down that darned rock and roll music. It all sounds like noise to me.
1Enforcing stereotypes of old people is still okay, though, since that's a group I don't belong to.