A Bridge Too Far

Maybe it dates back to the very early 1970's, when Mom and Dad would have other Moms and Dads over to play bridge.  Mom would wear her black and white houndstooth coat dress and they'd serve hors d'oeuvres and canapes and drinks and all us kids would have to stay downstairs - or at least out of the living room - and it all seemed very grown-up and even a little exotic, this whole bridge thing.

Or maybe it's because a decade and a half later, when there was a group of people in the Planning Department who played bridge at lunch, I was Number 6 and thus only got to play if two people were out sick, which didn't happen often.  As anybody who knows me knows, the best way to get me to want to do something is to tell me I can't do it.

But whatever the reason, I've always been vaguely fascinated by bridge.  And for a variety of reasons, none of them particularly compelling, I've never really played.

I had hoped that I'd be able to play with my Mom (without the coat dress, sadly, although certainly with some sort of snack) while staying in Omaha this winter.  But with the holidays, her bridge club only met once so all I got a quick refresher and just played for a short time.

But along with learning how to weave, learning bridge is on my to-do list now that I'm in Chicago.  (As an aside, I am so glad the term "bucket list" appears to have passed out of fashion.  In addition to being just a dumb phrase, in my humble opinion, it always seemed so passive.  Either put something on the list of what you're going to do, in which case it's really a to-do list, or stop kidding yourself.  Yoda was right.  Do or do not, there is no try.)

Whatever the inconveniences of living in a city of 2.7 million people, one of the great advantages is that when you Google "Chicago bridge club" you get a long list of choices.  So I did that the other night and selected, largely due to its proximity to my preferred mode of transportation, the Red Line, the Lawson Bridge Studio which meets on Monday and Wednesday evenings.  I emailed to find out whether they were open to beginners and was pleased to learn that on Wednesday nights in fact, they were, and you didn't even need to bring a partner.

And so last night I went.

The group meets at the Ann Sather restaurant on Belmont, and fills up the entire west half of the place.  There were 46 people, and I was the youngest person in the room except for about three guys until four high school kids young people so smart that you could see it oozing from their ears from Whitney Young Magnet High School showed up.  I was reminded a bit of what my Dad said about twenty years ago when we went to Florida at Christmas.  He loved being in the airport, populated as it was by a lot of old people retrieving their grandchildren: "I feel so young!" he'd said.  Now, twenty years later, I get it.

The Lawson Bridge Studio advertises itself as "friendly game - cookies served" which actually is a pretty good plan for most of one's life, come to think of it.  The cookies were okay, although store bought (I'd hoped for house baked at Ann Sather, but it's easier to stop at one when they're store bought).  The friendly game part was just as advertised.  It's just that they're not exactly used to have more-or-less complete novices wander in.  And while I've been around what I now know is called "social bridge" or "party bridge," I'd never played duplicate contract bridge.  In case you've never played, duplicate contract bridge involves a lot of equipment:

These little plastic boxes just hold the cards you use to bid.  There are plastic cases called "boards" that hold the playing cards themselves, which are pre-dealt, but I didn't get a picture of those.  And they have little computers that look like big digital calculators at each table.  I was pretty intimidated by all this stuff, I will admit.

My "guaranteed partner" was Phil, the Director (they have a Director!), and he told me to hang out while we waited to see whether there was going to be an odd or an even number of people show up, to see whether Phil would be able to play or whether I'd be assigned another victim partner.  So I spent about twenty minutes trying to stay out of the way and then moving from table to table as more and more people arrived.  It was chilly last night, so I had a jacket which I didn't want to hang up because I was afraid I'd forget about it when I left.  Thus I carried the jacket from table to table, along with my cup of coffee.  I'm proud to report that the jacket, which is white, remained white the entire evening despite its proximity to coffee being carried from here to there.  Still, moving around was clumsy and it added to my initial sense of awkwardness.

At first Phil assigned Bob to size me up.  Bob asked me whether I played American Standard and he didn't mean it as a trick question.  Of course, I was without a clue so I explained my bridge experience, which mostly consisted of watching other people play.  Then he started talking about points for bidding and I started to remember that, oh yes, you have to count the points in your hand.  Even since last December, I'd forgotten about that rather central aspect of the game.  Phil later asked me whether I'd studied with anyone.  Studied with anyone!  I guess there are classes that you can take but they way he said it made me think of some sort of musical prodigy or something.  Definitely not me!

I've played a lot of cards - generally euchre, having spent most of my adult life in Indiana - so the actual playing of the game was relatively straightforward for me.  Follow suit, try to get to your partner when your hand stinks, void a suit when you can so you can trump, etc.  Not that I'm great at it, but I know how to do it.  The challenge with bridge, as you know, is bidding.  It is a combination of secret code and art form.  I felt a bit like I'd walked into a room full of people speaking a foreign language.  Well, in fact, I had.  Some of it I picked up enough to get by but I know that I blew several hands.  Phil was very patient.

The reason it's called "duplicate" is that everybody plays the same hands over the course of the evening.  That's what the boards are for:  after you play each hand, you put your cards back into the board and then it is passed on to the next table.  The purpose of the little computers is to feed the hand results into a laptop that then keeps the total scores.  You can check it out here if you are so inclined.  The website lets you go back and see how other people played the game, letting you see whether and how you could have done better.  Actually, I wasn't the worst player, which just goes to prove that I've got remarkable luck.

Most people were very friendly - and I met a guy who had grown up in Omaha, which I brilliantly deduced by observing his Rosenblatt Stadium t-shirt.  Somebody told me about another bridge group that has a 30-minute lesson beforehand.  Phil told me about a learn-to-play-bridge program that you can download from the American Contract Bridge League's website, and I did that when I got home so that I can be all ready for next week.

Now I just need to run out and pick up that houndstooth coat dress.