Fantasy's Realities

   For the two decades of our marriage, Dan and I have been involved in a world most of you are unfamiliar with.  No, not that, you pervs!   It's the fiercely competitive, highly stressful cut-throat world of  duplicate bridge.   This is by no means the game your parents and aunts played, which involved four people getting together around a card table to eat, talk, drink, talk, play some cards, talk, and generally enjoy a social evening; this is not the pastime portrayed by Luci and Desi, with Ethel and Fred. Nope, this is a highly-structured, regimented form of the game with strict rules and proprieties.  Dozens of players (at the club level) or thousands (at the regional level) gather together in a meeting hall, or ballroom,  to spend four hours sweating and straining and making excuses to their partner for the lousy way they bid and/or played a hand. 

       The difference between party bridge and duplicate is that in the former, after each hand has been dealt, bid, and played, the score is recorded and the cards are shuffled.  The element of luck is supreme... sometimes your side gets the good cards, sometimes they get them.  As soon as a hand is finished, it's forgotten.  And nobody, including you, ever knows if you really played it well.  In duplicate, the same hands are played by every pair in the room, and the results at each table are recorded and fed into a computer. A score is awarded for every hand, for each pair you beat  or tie  (+1 point for a higher score, +.5 if you had the same result.)  Your total score for the session of twenty-four hands determines your placement in the field, thereby measuring your expertise as a player.   The element of luck is almost totally eliminated, since everyone gets to hold the same cards that you do.  Skillful bidding and play now is what earns you a good score.  What it just took me a gazillion words to explain, Mr. Webster summarizes in a brief entry:     duplicate bridge   Function: noun   Date: 1926
     : a tournament form of contract bridge in which identical  deals are played in order to compare individual scores 

     Like tournament chess, you advance through the ranks as you accumulate points for beating opponents.  These points are worthless in real world; they can't be "cashed in" for rewards or trinkets.  Their value is intrinsic,  an intangible acknowledgment of the time and tears you have invested in earning them.   Dan and I have traveled around the country participating in tournaments at the rate of three a year.  We call them "vacations," but the glamour and lure of the cities we visit is secondary to the call of the cardboard kings and queens.  As certified instructors and directors, we have also been fortunate enough to go on many cruises as "guest lecturers," giving lessons and running bridge games aboard ship.

   Duplicate bridge is demanding, difficult, frustrating, and stressful, yet the hundreds of thousands of addicted players agree, there's no other activity like it.   Just don't ever call it a game!

Quotations about Winning:

"If it doesn't matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?"    Vince Lombardi

 "In accordance with our principles of free enterprise and healthy competition, I'm going to ask you two to fight to the death for it."  Monty Python

"And while the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department."  Andrew Carnegie

"That's what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games." Richard Bach

"Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing."   Vince Lombardi  (obviously an expert on winning and losing)

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• #1 Comment from katyjonescorpus 
  3/7/06 11:41 AM | Permalink

  Well said !!
  
  waves and smiles,
  
  
  Kachie aka Katy