Bridge to a Present

As a boy, I remember my parents getting progressively more involved with a neighbourhood bridge club ... that is, the card game.  This consisted of some two score player teams, mostly couples, with games organised at private houses on agreed-upon nights.  How it worked was thus; using a physical bulletin board, or this heavy plastic-and-metal object called a "phone," as a host you'd try to organise just eight couples for an evening from the available much-larger pool.   Eight couples made four tables; and most people in my parents' monetary bracket could easily afford a set of four folding card-tables.  My parents stacked theirs next to the washing machine.

If you didn't wish to host, you could put your name down on the board and get yourself invited to someone else's house.  My parents would play weekly and about once every six weeks (though not in the summer), they'd host their own game.

The preferred version that my parents played still is called "duplicate bridge."  Imagine, if you will, four tables where the hands are pre-dealt before anyone sits down.  Each hand is put in a sleeve, which is ready for the players when sat.  Then the hand is played, the score is counted, and the original hands are replaced into the sleeves for the next players.

Imagine, if you will, four tables arranged in a manner that we'll call East, South, West and North.  I'm going to use Anglo-Christian names here, because this was the 1970s and, sorry, everyone was AC.  So imagine the Randalls and the Johnsons are playing at the East table.  At the south are the Holts and the Brimsmeades; at the west are the Bolters and the Paxmans; and at the north are the Nicheforucks and the Williams.

So all four tables play their pre-dealt hands.  Get ready, because this gets complicated.  Here's a diagram, if it helps.

From each table, on the second round, the green couples all move counter-clockwise, while the tan couples move clockwise.  To the table where the Johnsons have just played the Randalls, the Holts arrive from the south and the Williams arrive from the north.  See, the idea is that, eventually, each couple plays at all four tables (not seeing the same hand twice), and at no time do the same couples ever play against each other.  Here's a diagram for the second round of play.

At this point I start to get confused.  For the third hand, if the Johns keep going clockwise and the Randalls counter-clockwise, they'll play each other again; so instead, the tan couples continue going clockwise and the green couples jump across the compass, from north to south, south to north, east to west and west to east.  That is, the Holts and Nicheforucks switch, as do the Bolters and the Randalls.  Which gives this layout:

Confused beyond all reason?  Yeah, me too.  It takes adults to invent a system like this.  In the end, I couldn't figure it out.  I end up with four couples all shifting tables and having to play each other again.  The duplicate bridge rules I could find online are all for more than four tables at a time ... so I can't say for a fact this is how my parents and their club did it.  I was nine.  And in bed.  Under threat of extreme punishment, because this was the 1970s when parents were still allowed to beat their children.

Anyway, I'm getting caught up with details.  My failure to make sense of the dance aside, I went through this process to give a feel for the dance that occurred after each round of play.  All together, sixteen people get up, go the bathroom, get drinks, smoke (right there in the living room, because that was also expected) and otherwise talk about the oil crisis or what a bunch of twits those Liberal bastards were under Trudeau.  That is, the other Trudeau, the present-day one's father.

Laying in bed, not sleeping — of course — I could hear the shifts being made.  I listened to a room of adults laughing, falling quiet, laughing, falling quiet, in a familiar routine.  Without music playing, because they didn't.  Bridge nights were always a Friday.  They lasted until midnight, and many's a time I remember my parents coming in after midnight when going to play at someone else's house ... not drunk, at least not that I could tell.

But on a Saturday morning I'd get up early (I always did, the best cartoons were on early) and find that my parents were too tired to clean up.  That was rare; they were usually demons for a clean house and I'd get up and the living room would be pristine, my father having done it before going to bed.   But sometimes, nothing was done.  The folding chairs were still in place, the ashtrays full of butts, wine-glasses still with a swallow of vintage in them.  Those weren't my first taste of wine (we were allowed a tiny eggcup-sized sip on Christmas), but they were a taste I had from time to time.

Bridge was not just a game.  It wasn't merely social.  People cared about testing their skill against one another, which is the purpose of duplicate bridge.  The winner (and there were door-prizes in private homes in those days, usually a bottle of something but it might be other things) was the couple that scored best playing the same hands.  Skill mattered.  Performance was measured in points.

If all they wanted to do was just play bridge, they could have moved round the room and dealt new hands with every round.  Apparently, that wasn't satisfying enough.

Now, I could say something about how casually those folks drank while playing cards, which nearly everyone does, now as then ... and how infantile it is to find some brands of people muttering that, absolutely, D&D shouldn't be played while *gasp* drinking!  But as it happens I don't drink during D&D.  I don't care if others do, but they don't either.  Not because it's wrong — I mean, seriously, is there some sort of accident that happens involving dice, pencils and a miniature I'm not aware of?  But because we want our heads about us.  It's a thinking game.

Moreso than bridge, I guess.

I think rather I want to highlight any sense that D&D isn't reality, or that reality isn't D&D.  Gathering a table to play, I'm not running a group of "characters" or that of a fantasy realm.  I'm employing those tropes to create an unusual set of problems which a circle of humans undertake to solve.  As a DM, the act of stringing words together to convey a scene, or extrapolate on a player's action, is honest work that takes effort and skill to do well.

Managing a player demands a host of other skills, from handling and explaining rules to lifting the spirits of individuals who are having a bad night — sometimes from the dice and luck, and sometimes because they lost their jobs just two days before the game.  It's admitting that we're wrong and giving ground when that's called for, and standing on a line and not taking one step back when a point needs to be made.  It's giving a "good game," but it's also not selling the game's cow when milk's going to be wanted on another day.

I don't do these things in a "fantasy world."  My player may want some terrific piece of bling that could be used to smash a host of enemies, and I may be willing to let that happen — but every minute I've got to guage in my mind what the consequences will be for me, the game, the player, the other players and what sort of games I'll be running to ensure a challenge still exists.

In bridge, the cards do most of the work.  The order of cards provide an umpty-upt million combinations that keep the game fresh, at least for bridge players, but when running the game, I am the cards.  And it's foolish to think that responsibility isn't very real when handling both long-time and new players.

It urks a little, then, to be told I take the game "too seriously," when that comes up now and then.  What I take seriously are my friends — their respect, their approval, their sense of satisfaction and their unavoidable life-driven difficulties, whatever those are.  Asking me to "relax" or "take it easy" means, to my stupid ears, like I'm being told not to give as much as I can to my friends, who deserve every drop.

This is no doubt because of how seriously my parents took bridge night.  When the game was "at home," dinner was early, the dishes were done early, the living room's set up was sacred, and woe-betide any child who was seen when the doorbell rang with the first guests.

Now, obviously, that sounds odd to the modern sensibility.  Lest anyone be uncertain, I don't ascribe to any of the nonsense my parents did.  My players all knew my daughter when she and I were both much younger, and naturally my grandson knocks everyone's elbow during games now.  He moves from lap to lap, begs candy, sometimes delays a running all by himself and I don't mind.  I'm only speaking of how the event of game play was treated in my childhood, though the game was different.

It can't be coincidental.

_____

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