Contract Bridge
Also known as Bridge, Rubber Bridge, Duplicate Bridge
- Players
- 4 players
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards); most tables keep a second pack with different backs to speed the deal
- Time
- 60+ minutes
- Difficulty
- Complex
- Category
- Trick-taking
Setup
Bridge seats exactly four, locked into two partnerships for the session, each player facing their partner. Seats are named for the compass points, so one side is North and South and the other East and West, and those names are used for everything from filling in the score to discussing the hand afterwards.
Settle seats and the first deal by spreading a shuffled pack face down and having everyone draw a card. The two highest play against the two lowest; the highest card of all picks a seat and deals first. The deal then moves one place clockwise after every hand.
Use the full 52-card pack with jokers removed. Cards rank ace high down to the two, and the four suits are equal until the auction settles which of them, if any, is trumps. The player on the dealer's left shuffles and the player on the dealer's right cuts. Deal the entire pack one card at a time clockwise, beginning with the player on the dealer's left and ending with the dealer, thirteen to each player. Two packs are worked in tandem. While one hand is being played out, the spare pack is put in order by the player sitting opposite the dealer, who then parks it beside the seat that deals next; the following deal is therefore prepared before anyone needs it, and nobody has to stop and work out whose turn it is.
You need a score sheet. Rubber bridge uses one ruled with a vertical line separating the two sides and a horizontal line across it; trick points are written below that line and everything else above it, which is why bridge players talk about scoring above and below the line.
Vulnerability is a state a partnership is in, and it raises the stakes in both directions at once: bonuses grow and so do penalties. At rubber bridge you become vulnerable by winning a game and stay vulnerable for the rest of the rubber. At duplicate it is simply printed on the board and owes nothing to what happened on the deal before.
One thing this entry leaves out on purpose: bidding systems and conventions. Acol, Standard American, Stayman, Blackwood, transfers and the hundreds of gadgets built on top of them are agreements a partnership makes about what its bids mean. They are not rules, and no two partnerships need use the same ones. What follows is the machinery of the game, which is identical whatever system you have agreed.
Play
THE AUCTION
The dealer calls first and calling passes clockwise. On your turn you make exactly one of four calls.
- Bid. Name a number from one to seven and a denomination: one of the four suits, or notrump. The number counts tricks above the first six, so a bid of four hearts undertakes to win ten of the thirteen tricks with hearts as trumps, and seven of anything undertakes to win the lot. Each bid must outrank the one before it, either by naming a higher number or by naming a higher-ranking denomination at the same number.
- Pass. No bid this turn. Passing does not put you out of the auction; you may bid later if someone else keeps it alive.
- Double. Available only when the last bid was made by an opponent and nothing but passes has followed it. It is a claim that the contract will fail. It changes nothing about the play and nothing about how many tricks are needed; it only inflates the score, multiplying what declarer earns for succeeding and what the defenders collect for beating it.
- Redouble. Available only to the side whose bid has just been doubled, again with nothing but passes since. It inflates the same figures further.
Any fresh bid cancels a double or redouble, and the new contract starts out undoubled. The auction closes when a call is followed by three passes in a row, and the last bid made becomes the contract. Should all four players pass immediately, nobody has undertaken anything: at rubber bridge the deal is abandoned and passes on, while at duplicate the board is recorded as a zero for both sides.
Beware the trap in the doubled part-score. Because the trick score is what gets multiplied, doubling can push a modest contract over the hundred-point threshold and hand the opponents a game they had not bid for. Doubling is a scoring weapon, not a defensive one.
Irregularities such as bidding out of turn or making a bid that is too low do not simply get rewound. The Laws prescribe a specific rectification for each, usually restricting what the offender's partner may do afterwards, and in club play a director is called to apply it.
DECLARER AND DUMMY
The side that made the final bid plays the contract. Declarer is whichever of the two partners first named that denomination anywhere in the auction, which is not always the player who made the last bid: if your partner opened one spade and you eventually bid four spades, your partner is declarer. Declarer's partner becomes the dummy and the other two are the defenders.
PLAYING THE HAND
Before anything at all is revealed, the defender sitting to declarer's left has to open — which means choosing that card from the auction and nothing else. Only then does dummy lay all thirteen cards face up on the table, sorted into suits, with the trump suit placed at dummy's right. Declarer now plays both hands, naming which card to play from dummy when it is dummy's turn.
Dummy is a spectator for the rest of the hand. Dummy chooses nothing, advises nobody, and may not look at another player's cards; the one thing dummy may properly do is ask declarer whether a suit really is exhausted before a revoke becomes established.
Each trick runs clockwise from whoever leads. You must follow the suit led if you hold it; with none of that suit you may play anything, trump or discard, and you are never obliged to win a trick you could win. Whichever trump on the trick is biggest takes it, and where no trump was played, the biggest card of the opening suit does. The winner leads to the next trick, and thirteen tricks are played out.
Failing to follow suit while holding the suit is a revoke. It stays correctable until the offending side leads or plays to the following trick, at which point it is established; correcting it in time costs nothing beyond the exposure, and a defender's withdrawn card becomes a penalty card that has to be played at the first legal opportunity.
An established revoke is not replayed. Play runs to the end of the deal and the books are balanced afterwards, once all thirteen tricks are in.
What the balancing costs depends on how much the offending side got out of it, and two tricks is the ceiling. That ceiling is reached in one situation only: the revoker took the trick they revoked on and their side went on to take at least one more before the deal ended. Fall short of either half of that and the bill is a single trick — either because the revoker won the revoke trick but the side took nothing afterwards, or because the revoker lost it while the side still ended up with that trick or one that came later. Three situations cost nothing whatever: an offending side that took no trick at all from the revoke onwards, a revoke on the twelfth trick, and a deal on which both sides revoked. Where even the transfer leaves the innocent side short of what an honest hand would have given them, the director makes up the shortfall by adjusting the score outright.
Any player may claim or concede the remaining tricks at any point by putting the hand face up and stating how the rest will go. Play stops there and then. If anyone disputes it, the claim is settled by ruling rather than by playing on, and any genuinely doubtful trick is given against the claimer.
Goal & scoring
Declarer's side must win at least as many tricks as the contract undertook. The defenders are trying to hold them to fewer. Only one side scores on a deal: make the contract and declarer's side is paid, break it and the defenders collect a penalty while declarer scores nothing whatever.
Trick points are earned only for the tricks actually contracted for. Anything beyond that is an overtrick and is paid as a bonus, which is the reason bidding a game and bidding a slam matter so much: the bonus attaches to what you promised, not to what you happened to take.
A game is a hundred trick points. At rubber bridge those points go below the line and accumulate, so a part-score of forty sits there waiting and a later part-score of sixty finishes the game off. Bonuses and penalties go above the line, where they count toward the final total but never toward game. Winning a game wipes the slate below the line clean and makes you vulnerable. The first side to win two games takes the rubber and its bonus, and the match is decided by adding each side's whole column, above and below.
Duplicate bridge cuts the thread between deals. The same cards are played at every table, so each board is scored on its own: nothing carries over, a part-score earns a small flat bonus instead of banking toward anything, and a contract worth a hundred trick points pays its game bonus there and then. Vulnerability is preset on the board.
That raw score is then converted into a comparative one, which is the real point of the format. Matchpoint pairs scoring ranks your result against every other pair who held your cards, so a twenty-point edge counts as much as a slam. IMP scoring compresses the raw difference between two tables onto a scale that flattens small gains and still rewards big ones. Either way you are judged against what everyone else did with the same thirteen cards, which is what removes luck of the deal from the contest.
Honours are a rubber-bridge relic: a bonus for holding a clutch of top trumps in one hand, claimed at the end of the deal regardless of who won anything. Duplicate does not score them at all.
| Scores | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Each odd trick in clubs or diamonds | 20 | — |
| Each odd trick in hearts or spades | 30 | — |
| Odd tricks in notrump | 40 first, then 30 each | — |
| Doubled or redoubled trick score | Doubled, or quadrupled | The multiplied figure is what counts toward game, so two spades doubled is already a game. |
| Game bonus | 300 not vulnerable, 500 vulnerable | Duplicate. At rubber bridge a game is a step toward the rubber bonus instead. |
| Part-score bonus | 50 | Duplicate only; at rubber bridge part-scores carry over. |
| Small slam, twelve tricks bid and made | 500 not vulnerable, 750 vulnerable | — |
| Grand slam, thirteen tricks bid and made | 1000 not vulnerable, 1500 vulnerable | — |
| Making any doubled contract (the insult) | 50 | 100 if redoubled. |
| Each overtrick, undoubled | 20 in a minor, 30 in a major or notrump | notrump overtricks are 30, not the 40 the first contracted trick pays |
| Each overtrick, doubled | 100 not vulnerable, 200 vulnerable | Twice that if redoubled. |
| Each undertrick, undoubled | 50 not vulnerable, 100 vulnerable | — |
| Doubled undertricks, not vulnerable | 100, 200, 200, then 300 each | — |
| Doubled undertricks, vulnerable | 200, then 300 each | — |
| Redoubled undertricks | Twice the doubled penalty | — |
| Rubber won two games to none | 700 | — |
| Rubber won two games to one | 500 | — |
| Unfinished rubber, side holding a game | 300 | — |
| Unfinished rubber, side holding only a part-score | 100 | — |
| Four trump honours in one hand | 100 | Rubber and Chicago only. |
| Five trump honours, or all four aces at notrump, in one hand | 150 | Rubber and Chicago only. |
Variants
Chicago (four-deal bridge) — A fixed block of four deals rather than an open-ended rubber, which is why it suits an evening with a known finishing time. Vulnerability is set by the deal number instead of by winning games: nobody on the first, dealer's side on the second and third, everybody on the fourth. Games and part-scores are settled inside the block: a part-score carries forward and can be completed into a game by a later one, and a part-score made on the fourth deal that does not finish a game scores a flat 100 instead. Game bonuses are the duplicate figures, 300 not vulnerable and 500 vulnerable, and there is no rubber bonus because there is no rubber. The auction, the play and the trick values are unchanged.
Minibridge — The auction is removed entirely, which makes it the usual way to teach the play first. All four hands are dealt and each player announces their high-card points, counting four for an ace, three for a king, two for a queen and one for a jack. The side with more of them declares, and the stronger of its two hands is declarer; on a tie the player who announced first takes it. Dummy then goes down face up before anything else, which is the reverse of the real game, and only after seeing it does declarer name the denomination and say whether the target is a part-score of seven tricks or a game. The player on declarer's left leads and thirteen tricks are played out exactly as in the full game. Beginners get to practise declarer play and defence months before touching a bidding system.
Honeymoon bridge — A family of two-player adaptations, since bridge proper needs four. In the common form each player is dealt thirteen cards and the remaining twenty-six sit face down as a stock. Thirteen tricks are then played at notrump with the non-dealer leading and no obligation to follow suit; after each one the winner takes the top card of the stock and the loser the next, so both hands are back to thirteen when the stock is exhausted. Some players turn the top stock card face up so that each trick is visibly a contest for a known card. Only now do the two bid against each other, doubles and redoubles included, until one of them passes, and the contract is played out with no dummy, the non-declarer leading. It preserves the auction and the card play, though not the partnership judgement that makes bridge what it is.
Auction bridge — The direct ancestor, played until the late 1920s and still occasionally dealt. Everything about the auction and the play is familiar, but declarer scores trick points for every trick above six, whether or not the contract called for them. Overtricks therefore count toward game, so there is no reason to reach for a risky contract when a low one that takes the same tricks scores identically. Contract bridge's insistence on being paid only for what you promised is exactly what killed it.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, American Contract Bridge League, The Bridge World, BridgeBum, Denexa Games, Britannica.