I’ve neglected my blog a little the last few days, apologies to all my regular reader.

One of the problems with working in the city is that every now and again things get a bit frantic. This is one of those times. Actually this is quite exceptional; often city volatility isn’t noticed by the mainstream media but this time we’re headline news.

It’s looking like quite an “interesting” year in prospect, while the various bubbles that have been slowly inflating over the last 15 years or so start to wobble…

But I don’t want to talk about that, I want to tell you how I got on with the bridge game at the weekend. It was great to see my old partner, it’s about 15 years since we last played and his hair isn’t the same colour as it was then. Neither is mine, of course. But we had a pleasant lunch and settled down to an afternoon game in the “newcomers” tournament.

There were 8 other pairs in the tournament, so we played  3 hands of bridge (“boards”) against each pair, 24 boards total. The great thing about bridge tournaments is that everyone plays the same boards but against different people, so that the scores on each hand can be compared like-for-like. You score 2 match points for every pair you outscore and one point for every pair you tie with, on each board. Add them all up and convert to a percentage.

In theory this takes most of the luck out of it; in practice it just means the luck is recharacterised. On a good day you get the straightforward hands against the skillful opponents, negating their skill, but the complicated hands against the donks, maximising their cluelessness. On a bad day it’s the other way round.

Anyway, on Sunday we played pretty well and were quite disappointed with our final score of just over 52%, 4th out of 9 and no prizes.

However, this particular tournament is scored nationally – clubs all over the country were playing the same hands against each other. So later that night, when we checked our national score, we were actually on 58.9%. This is a very respectable (although not winning) score, although surprisingly it’s actually a higher score than the pair that won in our heat.

It was great fun anyway and we’ll be playing again soon.

City crises permitting, of course!

An old friend of mine contacted me last week and persuaded me to partner him in a bridge tournament this weekend.

Bridge … now there’s a game I haven’t played in a long while.

It’s a bit like poker in many ways:

• It’s played with cards (well duh!).
• It’s a mixture of luck and skill.
• It involves betting (bidding).
• A good player will assign a range of possible holdings to their opponents and select the best action against that range.
• Doing the best thing can give the worst result, and vice versa.
• There are elements of bluff, representing a holding in order to get the opponents to do what they want.

But it’s also completely unlike poker:

• 13 cards is far too many to hold at once.
• You have a partner (or centre hand opponent as he’s sometimes called). This limits the amount of bluffing that is appropriate, because your partner is bound by the rules to take your actions at face value.
• It’s a game of full disclosure. Imagine what poker would be like if you had to fill in a form that said your basic style (tight aggressive), your starting hand ranges in each position, your light 3-bet frequency etc. And your opponents could not only inspect the form at any time but also ask questions about what your bets represented!
• I don’t get called “fish”, I get called “palookah”. Or “donkey” sometimes.

It’ll be interesting to see how I get on – my main memories of playing with this poker are of being told off a lot. Deservedly I might add; my bridge has a tendency to veer randomly from outrageously tight passive to maniac, which isn’t great for developing a partnership understanding!

The game is on Sunday, so I will be able to avoid being outdrawn in the Freezout League this week. Wish me luck, I’ll let you know how I got on!