Whist was a trick-taking game in which each partnership attempted to win as many tricks* as possible. There was no bidding auction, and the trump suit** was ordinarily determined by turning up a card. By the time Edmond Hoyle published his influential treatise on whist in 1742, the game had become a serious intellectual pastime among fashionable English players. The standard game was eventually played to ten points and later became known as Long Whist after a faster five-point version, Short Whist, became popular in the early 19th century. Short Whist eventually displaced its older cousin, in part because shorter games meant more rubbers—and, where money was involved, more opportunities to gamble.
Bridge did not simply emerge from English whist through a single, gradual series of rule changes. Its immediate ancestry appears to have involved several European games, particularly Russian members of the whist family that combined whist-like trick play with elements of preference-style bidding and declaration. By the middle of the 19th century, Russian games such as whist-preference and Yeralash contained features that would later appear in bridge.
One of the most important surviving links is an 1886 pamphlet entitled Biritch, or Russian Whist, published in England by John Collinson after he encountered the game in Constantinople. Biritch already contained a surprising number of features recognizable to a modern bridge player. One player became declarer while the partner's cards were exposed as a dummy. No-trump play was possible, and opponents could double the value of the tricks with a call of contre, while the declaring side could respond with sur-contre, effectively redoubling. Trick values differed according to the denomination: no trump was worth the most, followed by hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. The game also awarded bonuses for small and grand slams and for winning a rubber.
What Biritch did not yet have was a true auction. The dealer selected a trump suit or passed the choice to his partner; the partnership did not competitively bid a number of tricks against its opponents. Nevertheless, the essential architecture of bridge—declarer, dummy, no trump, denomination-based scoring, doubling, slams, and rubber play—was already taking shape.
During the late 19th century the game spread from Constantinople and other centers into Western Europe. By the early 1890s the name bridge had replaced Biritch in English usage. Bridge was adopted by fashionable clubs in Paris and London, and in 1894 it was introduced at London's influential Portland Club. The club issued a formal code of laws in 1895 and revised it in 1905. Bridge also found an enthusiastic following in the United States and rapidly displaced whist as the fashionable partnership card game.
The next major innovation was Auction Bridge. Around the beginning of the 20th century, players began replacing the relatively simple declaration procedure of Bridge with a competitive auction. Instead of the dealer or partner merely selecting the denomination, both partnerships could bid for the right to become declarer. By 1908, the Bath and Portland clubs had agreed upon a formal set of Auction Bridge laws.
Auction Bridge greatly increased the strategic importance of bidding, but its scoring still differed fundamentally from modern Contract Bridge. If a partnership won the auction with a low bid and then took additional tricks, those extra tricks could still count toward making game. Consequently, there was often little reason to bid higher than necessary to secure the contract. A partnership might bid one heart, take ten tricks, and still receive enough trick points to win the game.
The decisive change came in 1925. During a cruise aboard the steamship Finland, American railroad heir Harold Stirling Vanderbilt devised the scoring system that became Contract Bridge. Vanderbilt drew upon both Auction Bridge and the French game Plafond, which had already introduced the principle that only tricks actually contracted for could count toward game. He substantially redesigned the scoring system, establishing a 100-point requirement for game, creating the modern distinction between vulnerable and non-vulnerable partnerships, revising bonuses and penalties, and making the number of tricks actually bid crucial to scoring.
This last change is the central difference between Auction and Contract Bridge. In Auction Bridge, a partnership generally wanted to bid only high enough to win the auction because additional tricks could still help make game. In Contract Bridge, only the tricks contracted for and made count toward game. If a partnership is capable of making four hearts but bids only two, it receives game credit for only the two tricks it contracted to take. Similarly, slam bonuses depend upon actually bidding the slam. Accurate bidding therefore became a fundamental part of the game rather than merely a means of deciding who would play the hand.
The name "Contract Bridge" reflects this requirement. A partnership is not simply choosing a trump suit; it is entering into a contract to take a specified number of tricks. Failure to fulfill that contract results in penalties, while success can bring substantial rewards. Vanderbilt's vulnerability system added another layer of risk and reward, increasing both bonuses and penalties once a partnership had won a game.
Contract Bridge quickly swept aside Auction Bridge and entered its Golden Age in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Famous expert matches captured enormous public attention. Among the most celebrated was the 1930 Anglo-American match, which featured a team headed by Col. Walter Buller of England against a squad led by Ely Culbertson of the United States. Buller, who had predicted that his team would beat the Americans "sky-high," instead suffered a decisive defeat.
The victory enhanced Culbertson's reputation as one of the game's leading authorities. His Contract Bridge Blue Book became a bestseller, and the following year he challenged another prominent American expert, Sidney Lenz, to a lengthy match intended in part to demonstrate the superiority of Culbertson's bidding system. The Culbertson-Lenz match became a media spectacle and helped fuel bridge's extraordinary popularity. For a time, bridge rivaled baseball as one of America's great national pastimes.
In the following decades bridge fever diminished somewhat, but interest in the game remained substantial. Sports Illustrated carried regular bridge columns and articles, and Time placed Charles Goren, popularly known as "Mr. Bridge," on its cover. Goren helped popularize the point-count method of hand evaluation that remains the foundation of most modern bidding systems.
Bidding systems and conventions also continued to proliferate. Partnerships developed special meanings for particular bids in an effort to describe their hands more accurately. There has long been debate over whether this increased complexity has hurt the game's accessibility, but there is little doubt that bidding theory has greatly improved players' ability to reach the best contracts.
Duplicate bridge also became increasingly important during the 20th century. In ordinary rubber bridge, luck in the deal can have a major effect on the outcome. Duplicate bridge reduces that factor by arranging for different partnerships to play the same deals. The cards are preserved in boards and passed from table to table, allowing each pair's result to be compared with the results achieved by other players holding exactly the same cards. Duplicate bridge began its rise during the 1930s and remains the standard form of tournament bridge.
International standardization accompanied the growth of organized competition. Bridge authorities in the United States, Britain, and France agreed upon an international code during the early 1930s, followed by important revisions later in the decade. These efforts helped establish a common framework for competition throughout the world.
World championship play began in earnest after World War II. The Bermuda Bowl, first contested in 1950, became the premier world team championship. The United States dominated its early years, but beginning in 1957 Italy's legendary Blue Team embarked on one of the most remarkable runs in the history of any mind sport, winning ten consecutive Bermuda Bowls.
The Blue Team included players who are still regarded among the greatest ever to play the game. Bridge writer Sally Brock once recalled that when she was at university, the ultimate compliment at the bridge table was, "You played it like Garozzo!"— a reference to Italian star Benito Garozzo.
The United States did not regain the Bermuda Bowl until 1970, in a championship that did not include the full strength of the Italian Blue Team. Yet the American team's story was itself remarkable.
In 1964, Texas multimillionaire Ira Corn decided to build a team capable of defeating the Italians. He financed a group of leading players, giving them the opportunity to study and practice bridge as a full-time occupation. Known as the Dallas Aces, they became one of the first systematically organized professional bridge teams.
The Aces won the Bermuda Bowl in 1970 and again in 1971, demonstrating the value of intensive professional preparation. Their success also foreshadowed the increasingly professional nature of top-level bridge. Today, elite players may compete as paid partners or teammates of sponsors, allowing some to make bridge their full-time career.
Although the extraordinary popularity of bridge's American Golden Age may never return, the game has maintained a genuinely international following. European countries have produced many of the world's strongest players; Iceland, despite its tiny population, won the Bermuda Bowl in 1991. France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Israel, China, and many other nations have developed strong bridge cultures and international teams.
Few games have undergone such a long transformation while preserving so much of their ancestry. From Cotton's 48-card whist of 1674, through Russian whist variants and Biritch, to Bridge, Auction Bridge, Plafond, and finally Vanderbilt's Contract Bridge, each generation added ideas that changed the nature of the game. What began as a comparatively simple partnership trick-taking game eventually became one of the world's most sophisticated card games—a game played across cultures, generations, and national borders.
Special thanks to David Watford for his historical notes and corrections, particularly regarding the development of Whist, Biritch, Auction Bridge, and the scoring innovations that led to modern Contract Bridge.
**One suit (clubs, diamonds, hearts or spades) whose cards outrank all the cards in the other three suits.
© Jeff Tang. All Rights Reserved.