Do you see that picture of a whale? It's going to be our secret code. (Okay, maybe it's not so secret.)
This past year I had to read Moby-Dick in my Language Arts / English class. It seemed like a pretty good adventure story about a monster killer whale, but just when I started to get into it, the author, Herman Melville, stopped the story and went on page after page describing every tiny detail of a whaling ship. I zoned out. I never finished the book and had to bluff my way through the test.
The reason I'm telling you this is because I'm about to attempt to explain the basics of bridge. My guess is that there's going to have to be more bridge in this book as well.
I'm not going to try to teach you how to play bridge. There's no way I could do that. I'll just try to explain enough of the basics that if you want, you might be able to understand some of the bridge stuff that happens.
I realize that reading about a bridge game isn't exactly thrilling. No one's going to make a movie out of it. Bridge is like chess. A great chess player moves his pawn up one square, and for the .0001 percent of the population who understand what just happened, it was the football equivalent of intercepting a pass and running it back for a touchdown. But for the rest of us, it was still just a pawn going from a black square to a white one. Or, getting back to bridge, it was Trapp playing the six of diamonds instead of the two of clubs.
Well, there's nothing I can do about that. I'm sorry my seventy-six-year-old blind, diabetic uncle didn't play linebacker for the Chicago Bears.
So here's the deal. Whenever you see the picture of the whale, it means I'm about to go into some detail about bridge. If that makes you zone out, then just skip ahead to the summary box and I'll give you the short version.
There are two parts to a bridge hand, the bidding and the play . For now, I'm just going to explain how the play works.
It's all about taking tricks. Somebody sets a card on the table. Then, going clockwise around the table, the next three people all must play a card of that same suit, in turn. After all four people have played, the person who played the highest card wins the trick.
That person is then on-lead for the next trick. That means he or she chooses any card to play, and once again everyone else has to follow suit .
As I mentioned earlier, one of the four players is the dummy. The dummy hand is set out on the table for everyone to see. When it's the dummy's turn to play, the dummy's partner tells the dummy which card to play. So when Trapp's hand is dummy , Gloria tells me which card to play.
Everyone begins with thirteen cards, which means there are a total of thirteen tricks for each bridge hand. Since Trapp and Gloria are partners, it doesn't matter whether Trapp wins a trick or Gloria wins it. It counts the same.
"What happens if you can't follow suit?" Leslie asked me when I explained this to her.
You have two choices. You can discard, which means you just choose some card in your hand that's no good anyway and basically just throw it away. Or you can win the trick by playing a trump card. Trump cards are like wild cards in poker.
Let's say diamonds are trump. Somebody leads a club, but Trapp doesn't have any clubs left in his hand.
He can win the trick by playing a diamond. Any diamond will do. The 
6 will beat the 
K. That's called trumping or ruffing . Everyone else still has to play a club if they have one.
"Why are diamonds trump?" Leslie asked me.
I just used that as an example. A different suit is trump for each hand. It had to do with the bidding, which I still didn't quite understand.
A person plays a card and the next three people all have to play a card of that same suit. The person who plays the highest card wins the trick. If you can't follow suit , you can either discard or play a trump . There are a total of thirteen tricks in each hand of bridge.