Contract Bridge is a member of the family of trick-taking games of Whist. Contract bridge is the leading Whist game enjoying loyal players for centuries. Bridge is the English pronunciation of a game called Biritch, also known as Russian Whist.
The oldest acknowledged rule book for Biritch was from 1886. It documents a lot of significant bridge-like progress from whist. For example, the dealer chooses trump suit, or he can nominate his partner to choose the trump suit; no trumps; the partner’s hand becomes dummy hand; points scoring above and below the line; the doubling and redoubling of the score; and slam bonuses. This game and all its variants of it is known as bridge or bridge-whist, became a big hit in the U. S. and the U.K. in the 1890s despite the more established of whist.
In 1904 auction bridge, was created, in which players bid in competitive auction to choose the contract and declarer. The object of bridge is to have as many tricks as possible but at least as many as were contracted for. The game penalizes when the players for failing to earn the number of tricks.
Harold Stirling Vanderbilt was responsible for majority of innovations to scoring of auction bridge. The change made the bidding more difficult and appealing. Also the idea of vulnerability, by making sacrifices to protect leads in a rubber more expensive. The various scores were corrected to generate a more balanced game. Harold Stirling Vanderbilt set out his rules in 1925, and within a few years contract bridge had supplanted other forms of the game. Thus “bridge” has become identical with “contract bridge.”
In the USA, the most popular form of bridge is duplicate bridge, which is played at clubs, in tournaments and online. In the UK, the popular game in both homes and clubs is rubber bridge, as is duplicate bridge.
There are quite a few free and subscription-based servers accessible for playing contract bridge on the Internet. OKbridge is the longest running Internet Bridge service; players of all standards, from newbies to champions can be found playing contract bridge. OKbridge is a subscription based club, so it offers premium services such as customer support and ethics reviews. Bridge Club Live is an online subscription-based and institutionalized Bridge club. The Bridge Club Live claims to be “The Friendliest Bridge Club of the World”. It organizes four to six day annual meetings in diverse countries each year to gather its members. Online clubs gives features to entice players, for example earn ACBL masterpoints, or play in online contract bridge tournaments, have compiled lists of friends, purchase software to improve contract bridge skills, and earn money playing contract bridge. The highly viewable Bridge Base Online features the VuGraph where important international events are shown for anybody who is interested to watch. SWAN Games is a fresh player of the subscription-based online clubs. Bridge Base Online is an online bridge club that has largest population in the planet, for the large part because it gives free play to regular games thereon.
This article was written by Alexis.
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