Since FUCS camp, when Matt decided to teach a few of us how to play bridge I have been reading about bridge. I'm loving it's elegance compared to 500. There's so many rules and conventions that when you think about it are laymens terms for some interesting mathematical analysis. Awesome. And in essence it is a very simple tricks and trumps game. Game play is easy if you know about tricks and trumps. 500 players (like me) go "Oh.. is that it? People told me bridge was HARD". Yes, the rules are simple. The conventions are many and varied (hard to remember), but it is the analysis people find hard. Because there is such a nice structure you can plan and theorise a lot more than in 500. Same rules can generally be applied to 500, but with kitty as a random chance factor. Okay lets put it this way... It's like knowing all the words to "The sound of music" and *then* learning about scales and basic music theory. I feel like I've known it all along, but I didn't quite know how to describe what I was doing... or it was not quite formalised into my memory.

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Bridge

Since FUCS camp, when Matt decided to teach a few of us how to play bridge I have been reading about bridge. I'm loving it's elegance compared to 500. There's so many rules and conventions that when you think about it are laymens terms for some interesting mathematical analysis. Awesome. And in essence it is a very simple tricks and trumps game. Game play is easy if you know about tricks and trumps. 500 players (like me) go "Oh.. is that it? People told me bridge was HARD". Yes, the rules are simple. The conventions are many and varied (hard to remember), but it is the analysis people find hard. Because there is such a nice structure you can plan and theorise a lot more than in 500. Same rules can generally be applied to 500, but with kitty as a random chance factor. Okay lets put it this way... It's like knowing all the words to "The sound of music" and *then* learning about scales and basic music theory. I feel like I've known it all along, but I didn't quite know how to describe what I was doing... or it was not quite formalised into my memory.