St Andrew’s Bridge Club usually meets on Friday’s from 1.15 – 3.30pm. However, currently the club is not meeting!
GROUPS AT ST ANDREW'S
Bridge is derived from the 17th century card game whist, which was in vogue among the English nobility of the time. In whist, four players (who comprise two partnerships) are each dealt 13 cards from a 52-card deck, with a partnership’s objective being to win as many tricks as possible. There was no auction to determine the trump suit as there is in modern bridge, and the scoring was vastly simpler.
Though whist may seem crude in comparison to today’s bridge game, its popularity spread to other parts of the world, most notably the Middle East. In Turkey, it is believed that whist evolved into one of the first forms of bridge in the late 19th century. The calls “double” and “redouble” were added to double and even quadruple any betting stakes, and the concept of a declarer opposite an exposed dummy also emerged at this time. By the turn of the century, the game evolved into plafond (“ceiling”) in France and auction bridge elsewhere in the world. Plafond was an offshoot that required each partnership to state the number of tricks they were going to take, while auction bridge introduced the element of bidding to determine which suit, if any, would be trumps.