Four Players, Two Sides

Bridge uses an ordinary deck of 52 cards with the jokers taken out. There are four suits, spades (♠), hearts (♥), diamonds (♦) and clubs (♣), and each suit has 13 cards. Inside a suit the ace is the highest card, then the king, queen, jack and 10, down to the 2 at the bottom. The top five cards, from the ace to the 10, are called honors.

The suits also have a fixed order of their own: spades at the top, then hearts, diamonds and clubs. That order has nothing to do with which card wins during the play. It matters only in the bidding, which comes later in the course.

One player is the dealer. The dealer shuffles, has the cards cut, and deals them face down one at a time, starting with the player on the left and going round the table until the deck is gone. Everyone ends up with 13 cards. On the next deal the job passes one seat to the left, so over four deals each player deals once. At a bridge club the cards often come already dealt in plastic trays called boards, and the dealer is marked on the board, and nothing else changes. You can read about that form of the game in duplicate bridge.

Pick up your 13 cards and sort them by suit, keeping each suit together with the high cards on the left. Most players alternate black and red suits, because a black spade sitting next to a black club is easy to misread at a glance. Then count your cards. If you have 12 or 14, say so before anyone plays, and the deal can be fixed.

The deal goes round the table to the left, and so does everything after it. The bidding starts with the dealer and moves to the left. During the play, each player in turn adds a card, again moving to the left. Seen from above, that is clockwise, and it never changes direction in the whole game.

Because that direction never changes, the seats carry meaning. If you know who dealt, you know who bids first. Once you know who won the bidding, you know who plays the first card, and you will soon see that playing last to a round of cards is often an advantage.

Every deal of bridge has the same shape. First comes the auction, where the players take turns making bids. Each bid is an offer to take a certain number of the 13 rounds of cards, with a chosen suit as the strongest suit or with no strong suit at all. The auction ends when three players pass in a row, and the last bid made becomes the contract that one side has to fulfill. If all four players pass without a bid, the cards are thrown in and the next dealer deals a new hand.

Then comes the play. The cards are played out in 13 rounds called tricks, one card from each player per trick. The side that won the auction tries to take at least as many tricks as its contract promised, and the other side tries to stop it. When all 13 tricks are done, the result is scored and the next dealer gets ready.

1. 1.The dealer deals 13 cards to each player.
2. 2.Everyone sorts and counts their hand.
3. 3.The auction, starting with the dealer, decides the contract.
4. 4.Thirteen tricks are played.
5. 5.The result is scored, and the deal passes to the left.

The next four lessons fill in that outline. You will learn how a trick is won, what it means for a suit to be the strongest one, why one hand at the table ends up face up, and how to judge the strength of the 13 cards you are holding before you bid at all.

Find your partner opposite you, know who is on your left, and check who dealt. When the cards arrive, sort them into suits with the high cards first and count to 13. That small routine at the start of every deal saves a lot of confusion later on.

For a walk through a whole deal from the shuffle to the score, see how to play bridge, and for more on the seats and their names, see bridge positions.