History of Bridge: From Whist to Contract Bridge

Bridge grew out of whist, the English trick-taking game of the 1700s, through three steps: bridge-whist in the 1890s, auction bridge in the early 1900s, and contract bridge, which Harold Vanderbilt put together in 1925. Contract bridge is the game played in clubs and online today.

Each step added one big idea. Bridge-whist brought the dummy and notrump. Auction bridge let the players bid for the contract. Contract bridge made you bid what you wanted to score, and added vulnerability. Everything since then, from point count to Precision to robots, builds on that 1925 design.

Whist was the card game of English clubs and drawing rooms in the 18th and 19th centuries. Four players in two partnerships played 13 tricks. The trump suit was decided by turning up the dealer's last card, and there was no bidding and no dummy. Edmond Hoyle's short treatise on whist in 1742 made the game a fashion, and "according to Hoyle" still means "by the rules".

In the second half of the 1800s a new variant appeared. A pamphlet printed in London in 1886 described "Biritch, or Russian Whist", a game with three features that whist lacked:

• The dealer, or the dealer's partner, chose the trump suit instead of turning a card.
• One could choose to play with no trumps at all.
• Declarer's partner laid the cards face up, as a dummy.

The game spread through London clubs in the 1890s as bridge-whist, and soon simply as bridge. It also brought doubling and redoubling, which made the stakes much higher than in whist. By 1900 bridge had replaced whist in many of the clubs that once played whist every night.

In bridge-whist only the dealing side could choose trumps. Auction bridge, which appeared in England around 1904 and spread quickly in the following years, opened the choice to everyone. The players bid against each other for the right to name trumps, as they do today.

There was one key difference from the modern game: in auction bridge, every trick you took counted toward game, whatever you had bid. If you bought the contract for 1♠ and made ten tricks, you scored as if you had bid game. So the best tactic was to buy the contract as cheaply as possible and take as many tricks as you could.

In France, a variant called plafond ("ceiling") changed that: only the tricks you had bid counted toward game. Plafond was the bridge of French clubs in the 1910s and 1920s, and it pointed the way to the next step.

Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, an American millionaire and yachtsman, is credited with inventing contract bridge. In the autumn of 1925, on a cruise aboard the steamship Finland through the Panama Canal, he worked out a new scoring table with his friends. The usual account puts the first game at the end of October or the start of November 1925.

His design combined the plafond idea with new features:

1. Only tricks bid and made count toward game. Overtricks score, but they never complete a game.
2. Vulnerability. A side that has won a game becomes vulnerable, with bigger bonuses and bigger penalties.
3. Large bonuses for slams, but only when you bid them.
4. Higher trick values, which made game and slam decisions matter far more.

The new game spread through the clubs of New York within a year or two, and the scoring table he wrote is very close to the one we still use. Vanderbilt also gave his name to one of the oldest knockout team events in North America, the Vanderbilt Cup, first played in 1928.

Ely Culbertson made contract bridge a national craze in the United States. He founded The Bridge World magazine in 1929, wrote best-selling books, and promoted his own bidding system based on honor tricks. In 1931 to 1932, Culbertson and his wife Josephine played a famous 150-rubber challenge match against Sidney Lenz and his partners, followed daily in the newspapers. Culbertson won, and his books sold in huge numbers.

Valuing a hand by honor tricks was complicated. The simpler 4-3-2-1 point count (ace 4, king 3, queen 2, jack 1) had been made popular by Milton Work in the auction bridge era, but it was Charles Goren who built a whole bidding method on it. His Point Count Bidding in Contract Bridge (1949) made the count the standard way to judge a hand, and Goren became "Mr. Bridge" for a generation of players. Today almost every system starts with the same count, explained in high card points.

Duplicate play was older than contract bridge. Whist players in the late 1800s had already found ways to replay the same deals at several tables to take out the luck of the cards. John T. Mitchell and Edwin Howell designed the movements still named after them. Duplicate contract bridge took over the tournament world in the 1930s. See duplicate bridge for how it works.

The American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) was formed in 1937 from earlier bodies. In Europe, the European Bridge League dates from 1947, and the World Bridge Federation (WBF) was founded in 1958.

The first world championship, the Bermuda Bowl, was played in 1950. In the late 1950s and 1960s it was dominated by the Italian Blue Team (the Squadra Azzurra), with players such as Giorgio Belladonna, Walter Avarelli, Pietro Forquet and Benito Garozzo. Italy won every Bermuda Bowl from 1957 to 1969, and again in 1973, 1974 and 1975, a record no team has come close to since.

As players got stronger, bidding became a science. Some milestones:

• Blackwood (1933): Easley Blackwood's 4NT ace-asking bid. See Blackwood.
• Acol (1930s): the British system, developed at the Acol Bridge Club in London, with four-card majors and a weak notrump.
• Stayman (1940s): the 2♣ inquiry over 1NT, published by Sam Stayman and devised by several players around the same time. See Stayman.
• Jacoby transfers (1950s), from Oswald Jacoby. See Jacoby transfers.
• Precision Club (late 1960s): C. C. Wei's strong 1♣ system, made famous by a team from Taiwan that reached the Bermuda Bowl final in 1969.
• Standard American and later the ACBL's Standard American Yellow Card, with five-card majors and a strong notrump.
• 2/1 game force, which grew out of Standard American and is the most common expert system in North America today. See 2/1 game force.

The systems still read some calls differently, even the oldest conventions. You can see what 2♣ over 1NT means in every system, from 2/1 to Polish Club.

Bridge is played in clubs and tournaments in more than 100 countries. It is recognized as a mind sport: the International Olympic Committee recognized the WBF in the 1990s, bridge was part of the first World Mind Sports Games in Beijing in 2008, and it was a medal event at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta.

The internet changed the game more than anything since 1925. Online clubs appeared in the 1990s, and today you can find a game online at any hour of the day. Bridge robots play every seat, and double dummy solvers analyze a deal in a fraction of a second.

Training changed too. Instead of waiting for an interesting hand to come up, you can work on the exact decision you want. BridgeDummy's puzzles take a real bidding or lead decision, deal the hidden hands hundreds or thousands of times to fit the auction, and solve every option double dummy, so you see how a choice performs across all the layouts, not just one. The Bidding Room lets you bid random deals with EPBot robots in five systems: 2/1, SAYC, Acol, Precision and Polish Club.

Want to learn the modern game from the start? Read how to play bridge, and for the scoring Vanderbilt designed, bridge scoring.