Games

Bridge Basics and Bidding Guide

A helpful “cheat sheet” for beginners that stresses thinking about the auction as a conversation (the tempo of rebids) instead of trying to force all hands into a fixed flowchart of responses. Offers some simple hand evaluation principles and bidding guidelines for “natural” bidding (nothing fancy) and SAYC.

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Whiskey

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Many Bridge players lament that three-handed variations lack the real game's complexity. On the other hand, one of the best three-handed card games around—Skat, the German national card game—is filled with arbitrary rules that are off-putting to initiates. Hence Whiskey (from Whist + Skat—say it quickly), which takes some of the best features from each game to solve the three-player dilemma.

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What Makes a Good Card Game?

I have definite ideas about what makes a good card game. My favorite card game, duplicate bridge, meets many of those expectations but requires 4 people to play. Tennis and Whiskey are my attempts to develop games for 2 and 3 players that meet all my standards. What are those standards? Glad you asked…

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Tennis

Each player holds a Forehand of 12 cards. On the table, a Forehand bid is face-up vertically in front of each player, while horizontally under the Forehand bids are face-up Backhand bids. Each player's Backhand is face-down horizontally beside the bids.

Tennis is a plain-trick game in which two players strive to match a bid number of tricks exactly for each of their two hands.

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