Guest Column: Technology and Bridge

This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions  – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is David Dobrin who runs B2B Analysts, where he spends more time than he’d care to admit - on Bridge.

“As I write this, 14,000 people are playing or watching bridge on Bridge Base Online, one of the online services that have transformed the game of duplicate bridge.  More than five hundred of them, including me, are watching Jimmy Cayne, the former president of Bear Stearns, play against a team of Turks.  It is 3:00 pm here in the US-- I'm procrastinating—so it must be 9:00 pm in Turkey.  

These calculations become second nature when you play as much as I do.  The Australians or Chinese who are watching play are obviously insomniacs.  Later on this evening, if I decide to play myself with one of those Turks, I’ll worry that he or she might be sleepy.

I've played bridge off and on ever since college (forty years).  It is an addictive and almost infinitely challenging game, comparable in difficulty to chess and to poker, but more nuanced, I think.

The best players in the world--Jimmy Cayne is one of them--don't play the parlor bridge many of you may know.  They play a form of bridge that largely eliminates luck.  In this form of the game--called "duplicate bridge," because the hands are duplicated--you don't score points by having good cards.  You can't; everybody else has the same cards.  You score by playing those cards better than the other people do.  It's a little weird; it's as if you were at a poker tournament, everybody at all the other tables was dealt the same cards you were, and at the end of the deal, you gave back the money.  But it works; it is a very, very good test of skill.

Back when I was in college, some of the better lounge bridge players had also played some duplicate, and they brought me along to a tournament one day.  The main floor of the Pasadena Convention Center was literally filled with card tables, as were every adjacent meeting room, and the auxiliary main floor.  There were 2,000 people sitting there, yet you could have heard a mouse scurrying across the floor.

A typical session of duplicate bridge lasts about 3 hours. You're doing nothing but sitting at a table and moving cards, but it's so absorbing that you rarely notice the passage of time.  There are good bridge players who have been successful in many other walks of life:   Bill Gates (who by the way has an interest in Bridge Base and plays there more than on MSN), Warren Buffett, and most of the executive staff of the late Bear Stearns. Despite that success, many of them would rather play bridge than do anything else; now that he's retired from Bear Stearns, Jimmy spends much of his day on line; the funny thing is that he did that even before he retired.

Duplicate used to be an expensive hobby, however.  You had to travel to tournaments and pay entry fees (which went to renting the halls and paying the directors).  For all this, you'd get something called Masterpoints that measured your results in those tournaments.  If you were pretty good, you could make a living of a sort playing pro (people who are paid to play with chumps like me). If you were very, very, very good, you might be able to enter the World Championships.  Otherwise, you just played when you had the time and the money. Over the years, for me, that wasn't too often.

Until online bridge came along.  Now, I can play whenever I'm not working or sleeping (or making dinner for my six-year-old or picking her up from school, etc., etc.) Any time I have a free moment, day or night, I know that thousands of people are playing in a hundred or more simultaneous tournaments.  If I want to win, I can play against people who play worse than I do; if I want humiliation, I can play against Jimmy Cayne or someone like him. Most of the time, I find people who play roughly as well as I do, and I have a good time. Most of my regular partners I "know" only by their online user name, but knowing them that way, you learn a lot about them. There is the Finnish internationalist (represented Finland in the world championships) who is a little too careless; the irascible, but brilliant American lawyer who will drop out of a game because he’s mad or because he has to be in court, sometimes you’re not sure which.  The Turks, I think, play more bridge per capita than anyone else; over time, I've learned a few words of Turkish, including some insults.

Do I have to play against people, Vinnie asked me, can’t I improve my game the way his daughter improves her chess by playing against computers? Well, no. Despite many promises, artificial intelligence techniques have had only a limited impact on bridge. You can now play a limping, sad game of bridge against a computer program, but it's a waste, unless the program knows some new Turkish insults. There are some small, limited areas where computer analysis can show you the optimal play, often a play that won’t be found even by experts at the table in real time. But the only time that’s really useful is during a broadcast of the world championships (when the players are sitting at a physical table, but what’s going on at the table is shown all over the world, with as many as 5000 people watching). The expert analysts who are commenting will use the program to see what the poor guy at the table ought to be doing, while we’re waiting to see what he or she will actually do. (In these matches, it is not wildly uncommon for a player to take 10 minutes to decide which card should be played.)

Miraculously enough, most of the time they do exactly the right thing. It may not sound as wonderful as Maradona dribbling through an entire opposing team and scoring, but to the hundreds of us who are watching, it really is.”

Comments

[David Dobrin]

By the way, the second picture shows Jimmy Cayne playing bridge. Jimmy is JEC.