The history of contract bridge

Whist, and the invention of dummy

Bridge descends from whist, the English trick-taking game codified in the eighteenth century and played seriously enough to produce Edmond Hoyle's famous treatise. Whist had no bidding: trumps were decided by turning a card, and the play was everything.

The transformation began in the 1880s with a game recorded in London as Biritch, or Russian Whist. It introduced two ideas that define bridge: one hand is exposed as dummy, and the trump suit is chosen rather than turned. Its origins are murky — variants were played in the eastern Mediterranean, Constantinople and Russia, and the name's etymology is still argued about.

Auction bridge followed in 1904, adding competitive bidding for the contract. It was enormously popular, and it had one fatal flaw: you scored for every trick you took, whether or not you had bid it, so there was little reason to bid accurately.

1925: Vanderbilt fixes the scoring

The decisive change was made by Harold Stirling Vanderbilt in 1925, reportedly while on a cruise through the Panama Canal. His innovation was simple and total: only tricks you have contracted for count towards game.

That one change made the auction the heart of the game. Under auction bridge, bidding was a formality before the real business of play; under contract bridge, describing your hand accurately to your partner became the central skill. Vanderbilt also introduced vulnerability and the modern slam bonuses.

The new game spread with extraordinary speed. Within five years it had displaced auction bridge almost everywhere, and by the 1930s bridge was the dominant social card game of the English-speaking world.

The Culbertson era and the Battle of the Century

Contract bridge's popularity was engineered by Ely Culbertson, a promoter of genius who built a publishing business around his bidding system and then staged a public contest to prove it. In 1931–32 he played a 150-rubber match against Sidney Lenz, champion of the rival school, in a New York hotel, with reporters filing daily copy. Culbertson won, and the Bridge Battle of the Century sold an enormous number of books.

The bidding-system wars that followed produced the vocabulary players still use. Culbertson's honour-trick valuation gave way to Charles Goren's point count — ace 4, king 3, queen 2, jack 1 — which is simpler, almost as accurate, and is how essentially every player now evaluates a hand.

Governing bodies followed the game: the American Contract Bridge League in 1937, the World Bridge Federation in 1958, and the Bermuda Bowl world championship from 1950.

Bridge today

Bridge is no longer the mass social game it was in 1935, when it was played in nearly every middle-class household in America and Britain. What it has instead is a deep competitive infrastructure: national federations, a world championship cycle, a recognised place in the International Olympic Committee's list of sports, and millions of tournament players.

Two modern developments matter. Online play has kept the game alive for a generation that never learned it at home, and it is how most new players now start. And computers have taken longer to master bridge than chess or Go: bidding is a communication problem with a partner and imperfect information, which is exactly the kind of problem search engines handle worst. Strong programs exist, but bridge has not had its Deep Blue moment in the same decisive way.

The game's reputation for difficulty is half deserved. The play is learnable in an evening; the bidding is a language, and languages take time. That is also why people who take it up rarely stop.

Common questions