From the current (March 2015) AARP Bulletin:
I’ve moved this topic from USCF Issues to All Things Chess.
There’s been plenty of articles about the bridge card game over the years espousing it’s ability to expand a person’s brain power.
Most of the articles run about the same as chess’s ability to increase a person’s brain power. Although one thing that bridge does much better is appeal to an older audience. Chess tends to be appeal to players that learned it when they were younger… that is, the younger you learn chess, the more likely you might develop a life long passion for chess.
I learned chess in 4th grade. So I’m guessing I learned when I was 9 years old. That being said, I"m sure I’ll learn to play bridge sometime. I used to play 3 handed pinochle when I was a teen.
Three handed pinochle was pretty ruthless. I’d describe pinochle as harder than spades, but not as hard as bridge. Pretty fun, but I suppose if I wanted to take up a card game in the future, I’d do Contract Bridge. I don’t really care for the premise of Duplicate Bridge. I would probably learn to play normal, four handed pinochle too. I bet that would also be fun.
In any event, since I only played three handed pinochle and never 4 handed, the rules would be slightly different. For obvious reasons, three handed pinochle has some nuanced house rules to make it doable. No idea what those are. But I suppose my best friend’s mom would know, since she’s the one that came up with the modified rules.
Bridge has a bigger marketing problem than we do. Amazing how quickly the game fell out of favor, considering that it was far more popular than chess pre-Fischer and probably through the 1970s. Not only am I old enough to belong to AARP, I am old enough (57) to remember small-town people playing some serious duplicate once a week. (They met at the same time as the chess club.)
Our friends at the U.S. Chess Trust are taking the “staving off dementia” marketing angle seriously. (It’s touched on in this article with respect to bridge.) To me, this makes chess seem too much like castor oil: “Play chess so you don’t go senile as quickly.” I play chess because it’s fun.
And, absent some really good clinical studies, I would worry about selling snake oil.
Around here, bridge seems to be pretty popular. I suppose like anything, some geographical areas are more active in a given hobby than other parts of the country. Paducah has a Duplicate Bridge club. Not sure about Murray, KY though. I just know at the senior citizen place, bridge is very popular, but don’t know if it’s Contract Bridge, or Duplicate Bridge. -Not sure if Paducah also has a Contract Bridge club or not.
I did not mean to bash bridge (I briefly played duplicate as a teen, and enjoyed it very much) or bridge culture. Bridge is inherently a more social game than chess, and I think we could learn a lot from our ACBL friends, and from USCF members who participate in both.
I find bridge’s demands on short-term memory annoying. In chess, everything is in front of you. Our game requires much more memory, but the demands are qualitatively different. In chess, the brain needs “RAM” for visualizing future positions and calculating from that point. If I mess up, I can start calculating from scratch, and I’m only limited by the ticking clock. Envisioning possible futures is required in bridge, too, but onle also has to remember the bids, the cards played in each tricks. OTOH, remembering your partnership’s bidding conventions is a bit less memory-taxing than remembering one’s chess repertoire.
One of the great appeals of games like bridge (to Gates, Buffett, et al.) and poker (to many in the chess community) is that these games of skill are more like business & like life in general: player make decisions based on imperfect information, one manages risk (a 55% chance of success is generally OK), and there’s a larger psychological component to play in these games than there is in chess.