Tedium - Bridge To Nowhere  ♠️♥️♦️♣️

Today in Tedium: As you probably know about me, I used to spend years working in newspapers. But of the many things that were in newspapers, one of the things I never understood was why most newspapers had a dedicated bridge column, next to the funnies and the crosswords. It was just a card game! But somehow this game had earned its place in the newspaper over something … say, more generally appealing. But, apparently that column is no joke to bridge players—when The New York Times dropped its bridge column in 2015, it led to hundreds of complaints. What about bridge makes it so appealing? And why did that appeal lead to a straight-up video game console licensed by the BBC? Today’s Tedium tries to figure it out. — Ernie @ Tedium

Noted bridge players Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. (via Greater NY Bridge Association)

Explaining what makes bridge so appealing to certain types of people … and what limits that appeal to everyone else

Now, bridge—in its most common form, contract bridge—has been around for about a century, with an evolution that goes back centuries further. Like games you may be more familiar with, such as spades, hearts, or euchre, it relies on a “trick-taking” approach, which effectively means that the people with the highest card values win the hand.

But games like spades, hearts, or euchre are relatively easy to understand. What about bridge? Well, the thing that makes it more complicated is the use of a bidding system, in which two of the four players playing (you absolutely need four players) make a series of agreements, or bids, based on the quality of your hand of 13 cards. The cards are ranked aces high, while suits are ranked spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs.

Together, the two teams, teammates across from one another, try to make clear the value of their competing bids during an “auction” process. This is where the complications come in—the bidding process makes the game hugely challenging for new players to understand right off the top and requires a degree of skill, similar but not directly comparable to Texas hold ’em poker.

To give you an idea of how indecipherable this can be for someone who doesn’t already know how to play bridge, I’d like to share with you an episode from the first television series about the game, Championship Bridge, which aired during the late ’50s and early ’60s and was hosted by star bridge columnist Charles Goren. (Chico Marx of the Marx Bros. was one of the contestants, which is about as bright as the star power gets on this show.)

If you don’t know anything about bridge, you may find the bidding process to be completely indecipherable, much in the same way that you might find a column about bridge to be full of jargon. Even in a television format, where everything is being explained slowly by Goren and his cohost, Alex Dreier, you can feel completely lost.

But if you are familiar with bridge, you might find this to be the very thing that appeals to you, because of the level of strategy involved.

That Warren Buffett would get into a game like bridge (he apparently plays eight hours a week, which he can do because he’s Warren Buffett) very much reflects the kind of person that would get into a game like it—one that can see the depth of the strategy it encourages and how it flexes some strategic muscles, the kind that someone like Buffett, known for his business deals, might excel at.

A good way to think about this in terms of video games. Lots of different types of video games exist—from simple-to-understand card games like solitaire, to side-scrolling games, to first-person shooters, and everything in-between. In many ways, bridge is the real-time strategy version of a card game, in which the rules actually turn out to be really important to manage and understand what’s happening inside of the universe and you have to react on the fly.

Another comparison point is board games that come with their own complex sets of rules. It’s not the format that attracts players. It’s the depth when everything is executed properly.

A console dediated to bridge, and nothing else. (Wikimedia Commons)

Why the BBC once sold a bridge-specific video game console

So the thing that got me interested in this topic in the first place was, of course, a video game console.

Dating to the same period as the original NES, this console is effectively a tool for teaching players the ins and outs of bridge without needing three other people. And as you might imagine for a very specific console like this, it was developed by a bridge enthusiast who dabbled as a computer programmer—Andrew Kambites, a player who had found success in bridge tournaments before turning his energies to an incredibly specific console.

The Guardian described the device, with an extra-long headline, as “an expensive way of developing your talent, preserving your ego, and protecting your reputation.” Because bridge and reputation go together, obviously!

This device, while having a handful of cartridges, was only meant for one thing—playing different varieties of bridge. But despite that, the console came with a number of booklets for the cartridges that were themselves miles long.

But the conceit was noble—essentially, the console was sold as a way to help bad bridge players become good ones—even if, in the context of video games themselves, the general idea seems wasteful and might be better solved by offering a game that worked with an existing console. For people who were fans of bridge, as cited in The Guardian, it nonetheless was a huge leg up from what was available before.

“A remarkable innovation—a computer solely for bridge only accepting specific cartridges written in its own, high-level language: bridge Machine Code—the Companion affords the user the ability to learn or brush up on the basics and to progress, via new cartridges, to an advanced standard of play,” the unbylined article stated.

(In reality, the console was using relatively standard hardware for the era, a Z80 to be specific, giving it something in common with both the Colecovision and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.)

For video game standards, this was not a good machine. A few years ago, the small-scale British gaming YouTuber Tamaracade, teaming with the larger-scale British gaming YouTuber RMC, did a joint clip on the device—and neither of them were particularly kind.

Tamaracade, who called the device “the worst console ever made,” saw lots of issues with the fact that there seemed to be little in the way of sound output.

“Yes, I know it’s for a card game, which doesn’t really go ‘beep boop beep,’” she said. “But you still want some kind of audible feedback when you use this thing.”

RMC’s Neil Corbett, meanwhile, pointed out the simple math equation that made the device a bad purchase from a technology standpoint.

“This would have set you back £199 ($165) back in 1985,” Corbett explained. “And to put that in some kind of context, that’s £35 ($29) shy of the entry-level BBC Micro computer, on which you could have bought some bridge software and played bridge.”

Corbett suggested that the device was intended for older audiences, specifically pensioners, which was supported by the fact that the manual actually quotes someone named “A Pensioner” in its marketing materials.

But despite all this, the Byron Parkin, the managing director of BBC Enterprises, made it clear that they felt strongly about it in comments to The Guardian: “The BBC only puts its name onto quality products.”

So to put it simply, this is not a good device by computing standards, but by bridge standards, it was arguably revolutionary. No longer did you have to embarrass yourself by practicing your skills with three other people. Now you could go through your teething period at home, using a television set.

Because you never know when you’re going to be competing against Warren Buffett.