Word: carding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...exposed hand made possible much greater subtlety and ingenuity of play. In 1903 or thereabouts, bridge-playing British civil servants stationed at a remote outpost in India hit upon the idea of bidding for the privilege of naming the trump suit. Within a decade, auction bridge had captured the card tables of the U.S. and Europe...
...Mississippi Heart Hand. For bridge's enduring and growing popularity, urbane Novelist William Somerset Maugham has a simple explanation: "Bridge is the most entertaining and intelligent card game the wit of man has so far devised." Of all partnership card games, bridge is the most challenging to the mind. Nobody can become a good bridge player through experience and rule learning alone; the game requires thought. There are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands, and the value of every one can be modified, sometimes drastically, by the distribution of unseen cards in other hands. Even an incurably cautious...
...System as Servant. Because the actual trick-taking value of a hand depends on how the other cards lie, the bridge player must strive to 1) infer the contents of the unseen hands, and 2) convey the picture of his own hand to his partner. In these tasks, a bidding system is an indispensable tool-but so are attention, memory, psychological perceptivity and clear thinking, plus that obscure talent called "card sense." In addition, a really good bridge player has a talent that Charles Goren defines as "the ability to make sound decisions under pressure." Rules, he warns, are made...
...took a long international evolution to produce modern bridge, with its beautiful balances between competition and cooperation, system and psychology. The ancestral game of whist, which still survives in English and New England villages, was bridge without bidding: the trump suit was decided on by turning up the last card dealt. Edgar Allan Poe wrote of whist: "Men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous." But with no bidding and no exposed hand to guide the players, the game was crude and guessy compared...
French Ceiling. At the height of auction's popularity in the midigsos, the keen card mind of famed Yachtsman Harold S. Vanderbilt focused on the game's essential defect in comparison with present-day bridge: overtricks in excess of the bid counted toward game, just like bid tricks, so that a partnership could make a game without bidding it. Card Buff Vanderbilt found in the French variety of auction called plafond (ceiling) an innovation that he liked: only tricks bid and made were scored toward game, over tricks counting as above-the-line bonuses...