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A number of card games similar to whist can be traced all the way back to the early 16th century. They were all trick-taking games with a variety of minor variations. Whist became the dominant form, and enjoyed a loyal following for centuries.
In the 1890s, the innovation of allowing the dealer to choose a trump suit became popular in the United States and the UK, and the resultant game was called "bridge whist". In 1904, the concept of using an auction phase to determine which player got to designate the trump suit caught hold, and this variation was known as " auction bridge".
The modern game was the result of innovations to auction bridge made by Harold Vanderbilt. He wrote down his rules for contract bridge in 1925 and it became the dominant form of the game within a few years. It has supplanted all other forms of the game, including "auction bridge", so that "bridge" is now synonymous with "contract bridge".
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word bridge is the English pronunciation of biritch, an older name of the game of unknown Middle Eastern origin. The OED reports speculation that it may come from a Turkish term, bir-ьз which translates as "one-three" and is said to refer to the fact that one hand is exposed and three are concealed.
The game is played with one complete deck of 52 cards. One player is the dealer, and deals 13 cards to each player. In the next round, the player left of the current dealer will be dealer. For convenience, two decks are often used, so that the dealer's partner may shuffle for the next hand while the current hand is being dealt.
The dealer makes the first call, and the bidding continues clockwise until three players in rotation have passed after any call. A call is any bid, a pass, a double or a redouble. (However, the word "bid" is often used informally in place of "call".)
When a player has the turn to bid, he may do any of the following:
A bid must include a number of odd tricks (from one to seven) and a denomination. Odd tricks are the tricks that a partnership proposes to take in excess of six (known as book). A denomination is any suit or notrump specified in a bid.
Each bid must supersede the last preceding bid by naming a greater number of tricks in any denomination, or by naming the same number of tricks in a higher ranking denomination. The rank of the denominations in descending order is notrump, spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs.
The auction ends when there have been three passes following a bid (or double or redouble). The last bid becomes the contract. The player on the partnership that made this final bid who first bid the denomination of that bid (suit or notrump) will be the declarer.
When, in a deal, all four players have passed without there being a bid, the deal is scored as a zero and the cards are passed on to the next dealer.
A pair is allowed to try to pass information about their hands, but this is restricted in two ways:
Thus, one may have all kinds of meanings for bids, as long as they are told to the opponents.
The meaning of the various bids in a partnership are called that partnership's bidding system. There exist a number of different bidding systems, such as Goren, AcolAcol is a bridge bidding system. Originally it was the name of a road in Hampstead, London, where there was a bridge club in which the system started to evolve in the 1930s. The Acol system is continually evolving but the underlying principle is to keep t, Standard AmericanStandard American is the standard bidding system for the game of bridge in the United States. This system, or a slight variant, is learned first by most beginners in the USA. Most advanced or expert players in the USA play a variant of 2/1 Game Forcing., the Precision ClubIn the game of contract bridge Precision Club is a strong club system that was invented by C. Wei and used to good effect by Chinese teams in the 1960s. Their success kicked off a wave of experimentation with strong club systems around the world., etc.
A bid that means something different than a certain range of points and length in the suit bid and/or a willingness to play in that suit, is called a convention. There are many conventions, some of the most famous are Stayman, Jacoby transfersIn contract bridge the convention of Jacoby transfers is used to describe various types of hands after partner opened 1 No Trump, complementary to the Stayman 2-Club response. Its main purpose is to play the hand in 2 of a major suit (that is spades or he and BlackwoodThe Blackwood convention is a bidding convention in contract bridge that was developed by Easley Blackwood. It is intended to be used in cases where the combined hands of a partnership are so strong that a slam is a possibility. It allows one partner to g.
The decision of how high and what suit to bid is fundamental to the game, but broadly it will depend on how highly one values one's hand. There are a number of techniques used for this. The most basic is the Milton Work point countThe point count is the fundamental method of hand evaluation now used in the card game of bridge. It consists of high card points plus distribution points (except when bidding notrump). See table 1. For example, the hand: S: A K 4 3 2 H: 7 5 D: Q 6 4 C: K. This can be augmented by other guidelines such as losing trick count and law of total tricks.
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