The great majority of bridge players out there are little old ladies who know how to play the game through years of experience and trial-and-error. They follow rules and patterns but they don't really understand where those patterns come from or why they are the way they are -- and they don't really want to understand either. "Don't explain things to me, just tell me what to do!"

Most teaching programs out there are geared towards such players. However, my feeling is that teaching the game to an experienced and intelligent gamer is better using a different tactic, one that focuses more on the "why" instead of the "what". So here goes.

Bridge started out being a very simple game, scoring-wise. One side got to declare trumps and score points, but as a requirement they had to take more tricks than the opponents. That's at least 7 tricks, so they scored points for each trick they took above the 6th one. The way the points worked was:

If clubs are trumps, each trick is 6 points.
If diamonds are trumps, each trick is 7 points.
If hearts are trumps, each trick is 8 points.
If spades are trumps, each trick is 9 points.
If you play without any trumps, each trick is 10 points. Playing without any trumps was called "biritch", and eventually evolved
into the name of the game.

(Nitpickers: Yes, I know that there is an even older scoring system than this that used different score values. I'm starting in 1904 instead of 1886 here.)

Each bid has a literal meaning. For instance, a bid of "three spades" means "I think my partner and I can take nine tricks with spades as trumps". Players competed in bidding, and the highest bid got their suit to be trumps.

At some point someone got the idea that there should be a bonus for hitting 30 points. They called this a "game", and a bit like in tennis, once one side scored enough for a "game", the scores reset, and whichever team got to two games first won the whole match (called a "rubber").

For those who can do arithmetic, getting to 30 points using the above chart is:

5 club tricks
5 diamond tricks
4 heart tricks
4 spade tricks
3 notrump tricks

These values became ingrained in bridge-players minds so much that they were kept when the scoring system was redesigned in 1925:

Clubs and Diamonds ("minor" suits): 20 points.
Hearts and Spades ("major" suits): 30 points.
Notrumps: 40 points for the first, 30 for the rest.
Game threshold: 100 points.

These basic values are still used today.

The reason bidding is so complicated is due to the fact that there's a big score difference when you get to the game threshold. Let's say that you and your partner like spades, and that there is a 300 point bonus when you BID to the game threshold, but only a 50 point bonus if you're short (called the "partial bonus"). To wit:

If you bid "one spade" and make it, you get 80 points.
If you bid "two spades" and make it, you get 110 points.
If you bid "three spades" and make it, you get 140 points.
If you bid "four spades" and make it, you get 420 points.
If you bid "five spades" and make it, you get 450 points.

Any trick above your bid is 30 points, so, for example, if you bid "two spades" and take 3 more tricks than your bid, you get 200 points (NOT 450, because you didn't bid the game threshold).

The strategy lesson here is: If you can make four spades (take ten tricks), it's VERY important to bid it! But if you can only make three spades, it's not important to bid three at all; you can stop at one spade and get the same amount of points (170).

Therefore, the bids below game are much more useful if you ignore their literal meaning, and use them as stepping stones to get to the right point. Here's some examples, showing a full list of different ways on the path to 4S.

You: "1S". Partner: "4S". You: "Pass".
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."
"4S" means: "Well, I think I can take five more."
"Pass" means: "Okay, that's ten. Let's stop."

You: "1S". Partner: "3S". You: "4S". Partner: "Pass".
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."
"3S" means: "Well, I think I can take four more, but not five. Are you at least six?"
"4S" means: "Yes, we have at least ten."
"Pass" means: "Let's stop."

You: "1S". Partner: "3S". You: "Pass".
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."
"3S" means: "Well, I think I can take four more, but not five. Are you at least six?"
"Pass" means: "No, I have five. Let's stop."

You: "1S". Partner: "2S". You: "4S". Partner: "Pass".
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."
"2S" means: "Well, I think I can take two or three more, but not four."
"4S" means: "I have a really good seven; it might be enough for us to get another trick."
"Pass" means: "Okay, let's stop."

You: "1S". Partner: "2S". You: "3S". Partner: "4S".
You: "Pass".
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."
"2S" means: "Well, I think I can take two or three more, but not four."
"3S" means: "I'm at seven. Which do you have, two more or three more?"
"4S" means: "Three more."
"Pass" means: "Okay, that's ten. Let's stop."

You: "1S". Partner: "2S". You: "3S". Partner: "Pass".
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."
"2S" means: "Well, I think I can take two or three more, but not four."
"3S" means: "I'm at seven. Which do you have, two more or three more?"
"Pass" means: "Two more. That's not enough. Let's stop."

You: "1S". Partner: "2S". You: "Pass".
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."
"2S" means: "Well, I think I can take two or three more, but not four."
"Pass" means: "Well, I don't have seven, so we don't have enough. Let's stop."

You: "1S". Partner: "Pass".
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."
"Pass" means: "Well, I can't take two more, so we don't have enough. Let's stop."

We can summarize all this interchange into a simpler chart:
"Pass" means: "Let's stop. Either we've gotten to ten tricks and bid it, or I'm sure we don't have enough."
"4S" means: "I think we have ten tricks."
"3S" means: "I think we have nine tricks, and possibly ten if you have one more than your promised minimum."
"2S" means: "I think we might possibly have ten tricks, but I can't even guarantee nine."
"1S" means: "I can take five to seven tricks."

What's useful to note is that the lower bids are short of their literal meaning. Saying 1S when you're not actually confident of having 7 tricks means that you can find the game when, say, both partners have 5 tricks each. The sacrifice is that sometimes you'll end up in 1S
or 2S and not be able to make it, but in practice this isn't a problem because the opponents will probably be bidding if you can't make 1S or 2S. Another sacrifice is that sometimes you'll have nine tricks but only be bidding 2S. But hey, it's the same score, so that's
not a sacrifice at all!

Real bidding is, of course, a lot more complicated because you rarely happen to agree with your
partner as to your best suit, and some bidding must be spent to find it. Also, counting tricks is less precise; often it's better if you can count fractional tricks. This means that there's good demand for quick and simple ways to evaluate how strong a hand is. There was a lot of strategy arguments over the best way to do this back in the 1930s, but one system has prevailed, and it's a system where there's about 40 points in the deck, and each trick is about
3 points.

Hopefully that gives a gentle introduction to the strangeness that is bridge bidding. Thanks for reading!

This is a good mathematical introduction to why you might bid to a certain level. Learning to bid, however, is much more complicated. I recommend new players to take a class at their local bridge club. I've been playing duplicate tournament bridge for over 10 years and am 32 years old. Most people require more structure to learn this game, gamers or not.

Wei-Hwa was not trying to teach proper bidding, but to explain how it developed.

Very well done.

Bidding theory comes down to:
1) Which suit (or no trump) is best?
2) Which level (game, part score, or slam) is best?

Everything else is details.

Probably the biggest epiphany in learning how to bid is knowing which bids are forcing and which bids your partner can pass. People will explain a lot of rules, and a lot of cases, but they are all basically explained by the above theory. If a game is possible, you can't pass. Once a game becomes impossible, you give up (pass if you are in the 'right' trump, or bid it).

I don't think I had someone explain things this clearly until I'd be playing for a few months (or longer). Again, well done.

Wei-Hwa,

Excellent article!

I am curious, though, about your note:



However, the books I have from as late as 1910 (Elwell on Auction Bridge) give the old scoring system (Spades - 2 pts, Clubs - 4 pts, Diamonds - 6 pts, Hearts - 8 pts, NT - 10 pts). The earliest reference to 6/7/8/9/10 scoring that I can find is Foster's Auction Bridge For All, from 1916. Of course, my library of Auction Bridge books is fairly limited; I'd love to find an earlier reference to 6/7/8/9/10 scoring. Also - do you know if the change from requiring the dealer to bid came at the same time as the scoring switch?

For the two people who've bothered going through the above paragraph - I'm also curious just when the general designation for the hands changed from Y-Z-B-A to N-S-E-W (respectively). Foster's book still uses the Y-Z-B-A designation, but Work and Whitehead's books from 1926 both use N-S-E-W.

This sequence is not played this way by most experienced bridge players. It is more pre-emptive. There are other ways to force and/or explore strength and fit(s).

Again,

The OP is not explaining a bidding system in detail, he is illustrating a series of bridge conversations explaining how bids can convey information and responses. Almost none of the dialogues he used would be exact for any bidding system in use today ... but he was not trying to illustrate a complete system. He was trying to find archetypal examples using simplified components (only one suit mentioned, ignoring opponent bidding, ignoring which seat is opening, ignoring sacrifices, ignoring vulnerability, even ignoring slam level considerations). He is showing the non-bridge-player how bidding can be a conversation , not trying to teach non-bridge-players a bidding system.

For those who don't (yet!) play bridge, the "Ah-HA!" moment here is that a conversation with meaning can take place during bidding entirely through the actual bids. If (when!) you become interested in the game, you will learn many more 'words' and 'sentences' employed in this eloquent dialogue than the admirable few syllables used by Wei-Hwa in his instructive starting example.

Point taken.

I'm still not 100% sold on Bridge, but I will say that this is the best explanation on the basics and meaning of Bridge bidding that I've ever read.