In my last post, I mentioned that Barbara Seagram taught a session at our local bridge club. What I didn’t discuss was a significant aspect of this. Yes, it was teaching about bridge (defending against no trump contracts), but the other aspect is that Barbara, and others, are putting a significant effort into raising funds to help their fellow men. They are raising money to purchase water filters for the villages of Laos.
When I do my short (approximately 5-minute) chat before a game that I’m directing, I talk about things like “leads out of turn”, “revokes”, “unauthorized information” and the “role of the director”. Those sorts of things tend to deal purely with the auction and the play; however, there is another aspect of the game — the social aspect.
I have to be honest, I’d rather read The Bridge World than the Bridge Bulletin. That’s not because the latter is a bad magazine, but I’m simply not interested in who has won what Regional or National tournament, who has made Life Master or where the various tournaments are. The former happens to suit my bridge tastes, but it’s a bit pricey and I find I don’t always finish reading one month’s Bridge World before the next arrives.
I said the “Bulletin” isn’t bad. In fact, it usually has some quite interesting articles.
The Director arrives at the table to be greeted by: “He played a card and then went to change it!”. “No I didn’t, I thought of playing a card and decided on a different one.”
What are the rules (Laws) that apply to played cards?
The lowly bridge board, the tray that holds 52 cards as four separate bridge hands — would it ever be hard to play duplicate bridge without it. It is central to our game, but so often we fail to follow the rules about using it and how the cards are to be controlled.
Some of those rules are so ingrained that we follow them by habit, but others we sometimes seem blissfully unaware of.
