Contract bridge

I didn't know anything about the game.

So I bought two bridge books.

I bought Cohen and Lederer's Basic Ackle and Clyde Love's Bridge Squeezers Complete.

Ha!

I went along to the local club, having read, I got my cards, you know, I'd go through the squeeze book and I had the cards out on the living room table to work out how this worked.

And went along to the local club and on that third or fourth hand, I said to some woman, oh, you could have made that on a double squeeze.

And she looked at me as I was from another planet.

And I realized I'd read two more Bridge books than any of them.

She played many all-night rubber bridge sessions while studying physics at Oxford University, but then she stepped away from the game to pursue her career and to raise her family.

She found her way back to bridge about 15 years ago and has since won the 2021 ACBL Whitehead Women's Pairs, placed third at the 2023 World Open Transnationals, represented England in the mixed team at the 2024 and 2026 European Championships, placing sixth and fifth respectively.

played on England's winning women's team in the 2024 Lady Milne, won the Imp Pairs at the 2024 Pooler Bridge Festival, represented England at the 2025 World Championships, won the Cagliari Cup at the 2025 Sardinia Bridge Festival, won the bronze medal in the 2025 Italian Mixed Championships.

won the 2026 European Winter Transnationals, and will represent England at the 2027 World Championships in Barbados.

She is also a trained psychotherapist, so I was particularly keen to hear her perspective on rudeness at the bridge table in general, and on my situation in particular.

So, yeah, I think it's sort of the social aspect as well as the actual intrinsic aspects of the game.

How would you

describe Bridge and the Bridge world to somebody who knew nothing about it, who didn't play, had no understanding at all of this community experience?

And a game like Bridge, there's teaching somebody to understand the game and understand it at a basic level, and then there's teaching somebody from scratch to understand it at a high level, and I think that's stupid.

Yeah.

I have a screenshot of a challenge I played with AJ.

[laughs]

And everybody was like, "That can't be real.

Like, were you trying?" I was like, "[laughs] Dude, I was trying." Like, basically the goal would be to play for Australia next kind of thing, you know? So like, it would be, like, I'm not, like, we're not just gonna hang around and play random Bridge games.

We're just go, you know, if we do it, we do it properly.

And I think if you really wanna learn Bridge at a competitive level, you've just gotta nosedive in.