I love bridge. I think it is a great game. It never ceases to be both interesting and challenging to me. Every hand is like a new puzzle to figure out. And i love puzzles.
I have been playing competitively for just over 10 years - i went to my first duplicate club game in December of 1998. Looking back, i have had a fairly tumultuous relationship with bridge. I can see several distinct periods.
Discovery. When i was 9 or 10, my parents first tried to explain bridge to me. I remember my dad writing down some basic rules on the back of a paper plate. I remember a few wonky things like “open 1NT on any hand with 16-18 points” regardless of shape. Occasionally i would briefly fill in for someone when my parents hosted quarterly bridge parties. It was mostly a mystery to me, but it was fun.
My next memory of playing bridge was my senior year of high school. The AP tests were over, and the AP teachers across the board were letting us goof off and do whatever during class. Four of us formed a group in the corner playing bridge. We did that every day at least once a day for two weeks.
The next time i played bridge was in college. I went with a friend to another friend’s dorm room to play spades. Someone held a really strong hand w/o spades and said “Too bad we’re not playing bridge.” My response to that was “you guys know how to play bridge?” And their response was “Do you know how to play bridge?” It turns out, they had been trying to learn bridge and had dabbled in it. And so, we played bridge instead of spades.
Courtship. I became romantically involved with one of the guys i met in that dorm room over a deck of cards. In the 6-month period that followed, we played a lot of bridge with his roommates. A LOT. We would put the radio on in the back ground and jabber about life. It was a period of learning. I can tell you we didn’t know shit about systems or conventions. But everyone played a lot of hands. We had a good time. Some weeks we played every night. It was addictive. I loved it.
Then, someone found the local bridge club’s website. They had night games, and so we went out at 7:30 one Tuesday night to the local YWCA. It was terrifying. When declaring, you had to verbally call for the dummy’s cards - it was like being on stage! Once, we had a 1NT-2H auction. One opponent asked me if that was a transfer - I didn’t know what she meant. At another table, after i played a hand my opponent said “you endplayed me!” I later asked my partner “what’s an endplay?” and his response was “i have no idea, but it sounded good.”
Honeymoon. Despite a somewhat scary first duplicate bridge experience, we were hooked. Here was a place to play even when the roommates didn’t want to. Plus, we were introduced to the crack called “masterpoints.” Once you have acquired a bunch of them, it’s easy to forget how important they were in the beginning. But starting out, the lure of accumulating points and attaining Life Master status is too much to resist.
That first year of playing duplicate bridge brought immense changes in my bridge game and that of my friends. Notably, we got a lot better. In May we played in a tournament in Richmond - we were still playing in the Novice area, though that was the last time we ever did. We won something ridiculous like 26 trophies that week. They kicked us out of the novice game. I never looked back.
Bridge was addictive. I was learning at an incredible rate. I was playing a crazy system. Arguably, the focus should have been card play instead of system, but i was gradually getting better all around.
Conflict. As we got better, my regular partner and i started to recognize mistakes each other made. My partner was extremely competitive and unforgiving of mistakes. And quite critical. He would insult me, loudly, when i did something wrong. “Stupid” was often in his vocabulary. On several occasions, people we knew (and people we didn’t) would take him aside and try to tell him not to treat his partner that way.
We found another pair and traveled to many tournaments as a team of four. Sometimes my partner and i would fight so much that our teammates would make each of us play with one of them instead of with each other. I was once accused by a teammate of subconsciously sabotaging the team. He could have just said i was a bad player, but he thought there was some complex power struggle going on.
Misery. I started having dreams that i was playing bridge naked. Or that i was at the bridge club and had forgotten my shirt or my pants. I didn’t know it at the time, but that is a classic anxiety dream. Over time i started to dread playing bridge. On nights my regular partner & i were to play together, I began to suggest doing other activities instead, like a movie. This never worked - we’d play bridge anyway, and the night would already be starting off on the wrong foot.
[When i read over those paragraphs, i can't believe how it sounds. Was that really me? Enduring such treatment? But it really happened, and i let it.]
It took awhile, but I eventually ended that partnership. And stopped playing as much, because bridge did not make my life better. It wasn’t worth it.
Healing. I began to realize i had a lot of confidence issues relating to bridge, and some issues with how i related to all of my partners. When i first started playing with new partners, if i made a mistake, i found myself apologizing all over the place while at the same time I disregarded their errors. When we did poorly, i felt embarrassed that they had had to play with me. When we did well, i mostly just felt relief that i hadn’t messed up too much, instead of actually taking pleasure in having played well.
I noticed, though, that no one was yelling at me, or saying “why did you…”. In fact, it was often quite pleasant. I slowly learned to stop being so hard on myself. Being hard on myself had been a reactive and defensive response to a partner who was hard on me. I didn’t need to do that anymore. Remnants of those issues may remain still, though i’ve worked through a lot of it. I began to realize that i could play cards without anxiety.
Rekindling the Flame. And then, as time went on, i again went through a period of falling in love with bridge. The dark days were over. Bridge began to be something that did make my life better, something i once again looked forward to. I learned some confidence, which i had been sorely lacking. I learned not to fear being ridiculed. I learned how to have healthy exchanges regarding both mistakes that i made and mistakes that others made.
I don’t have dreams about playing bridge naked anymore.
Instead, i have dreams about winning big events. About being a someone in the bridge world. About contributing content to a bridge magazine. About being able to attend and compete in all the national bridge tournaments each year. About competing in the Women’s Team Trials. About representing the US someday in a world competition. Big dreams, not hindered by anxiety.
Ongoing Growth. I still go through ups and downs with bridge, as is generally the case with any relationship. I suspect i always will. Sometimes life is hard, and i can’t give bridge my full focus. Sometimes life is good and i can focus enough to do well in a tournament. Bridge is something i expect to be doing all my life. Our relationship is still relatively young, but i think it’s a love that will endure.
