German Bridge How-To

The Bridge How-To

Introduction

The bridge here is refered to the Contract Bridge. It is the most popular variant in the bridge game family. The rules of the game is very simple, and I guess you can know how to play within an hour. However, if you wana understand the techniques and be a skill player, well, depends on your telent, you must take longer time to achieve it. The game requires a partner to co-operate with you, there are usually 2 kinds of players, they are the causal one and serious one. Of coz play with those serious players with improve your skill quick, but you will sometimes be blamed/scolded by those players when your performance is not good ^_^.

Basics

Card - The cards use are the same as the poker card, except that the 2 joker cards will not be used, so the 52 cards will be used. Also, the size of the card is a bit thinner (but not neccessary).

Strength - The strength order of the cards are AKQJ1098765432. A (Ace) is the biggest, K (King) is the second, Q (Queen) is the third, J (Jack) is the fourth.........2 (Deuce) is the smallest. Only same suit of cards can compare strength.

Suit - There are four suit in the game, they are Spade ( ), Heart ( ), Diamond ( ), Club ( ). Among the four suits, Spade is the highest, Heart is the second, Diamond is the third while Club is the smallest. Normally Spade & Heart are called Major Suits, and Diamond & Club are called Minor Suit. You will see later in the score section why major contract is preferred to minor one.

Suit and No-Trump Contract - There are two kinds of contract, one is suit contract and the other is no-trump contract. In a suit contract, if you are shorting of a suit which is playing in the round, you can discard a side card (always loss) or play a trump card to win this trick which is called trump. However, for a no-trump, all side card played are considered as discard and will loss.

Bidding - This is the process to confirm the contract.Each players bid by turn in a clockwise manner. Both parties bid according to the bidding system they agreed before the game. A bid composes of a level and a trump suit.The level is ranged from 1 to 7. For level 1 contract, you need to win at least 7 tricks out of 13 to fulfill the contract. For level 7, 13 tricks is required. In general the minimum tricks required is L+6. For the trump suit component, you can choose any one of the suits as the trump contract or select no-trump as you contract. Though no-trump is not a suit, it is considered as the higher order suit in bidding. Since the bidding is an public auction process, you must bid higher suit with the same level as the current bid, or bid higher level with a lower suit. Besides the bid for contract, three more options are avalilable, bid pass if you don't want to play a contract. Double, if you don't believe that your opponents can fulfill the contract. ReDouble, only when one side double the contract, which means that you are certain that your contract can be fulfill. The bidding will be ended if no one bid a higher contract than the current contract bid.

Rules

Bidding System

The bidding system is a kind of standard convention used between bridge partners to communicate from the bidding process. There are a lot of major bidding systems with their variants. However, more than 90% of then will base on the High Card Point (HCP) to evaluate the card strength.

The HCP system is very simple, points will be assigned to the honour cards with Ace = 4, King = 3, Queen = 2, Jack = 1. A card deck composes of 40 HCP with each player on average get 10 HCP in each game.

Here are some of the bidding systems:-

Natural System #1 Natural System #2 Natural System #3

Precision #1 WeWeWeb's Natural System #1

Score

The basic scoring for bridge is simple and standard. There are some other kinds scoring rule for diffierent matchwa. The most famous social bridge game are the rubber bridge. For pairs competition, Match Point (MP) will normally be used. For team competition, team matches will be compared by means of International Match Point (IMP), and the overall results are measured by means of Victory Point (VP).

Techniques

The game is really great and profound. There are tons of materials on the net, and you can find them easily in the internet or from books. However, you can refers to the topics in below.

Single Suit Playing Guide	Play Techniques Guide	Tutorial
Quiz