A long time ago when I was still a college student some friends and I used to go to a nearby bridge centre every week to play. We weren’t that good but we played for fun, while there were some stuck-up people there who played just for the master points.

So, one evening, a friend and I were playing in a duplicate bridge tournament. He opened 1NT one hand, while I had only 2 high card points, 6 hearts and a weird distribution. The woman to my left doubled and I went to 4H for some odd reason. The contract got doubled and my partner redoubled!

To make a long story short, we got set by one, but the score sheet shows that every other team on their side make a contract, so we ended up with the most points. They got a little upset and called the judge on us.

The judge told them we did nothing wrong because there’s no rule stopping me from answering with only 2HCP. The look on their face was priceless.

With respect to Blackwood, I can’t recommend Eddie Kantar’s book “Roman Keycard Blackwood: Slam Bidding for the 21st Century” highly enough, but if you don’t have established partners you’ll never get to use it because it’s extremely advanced. (He recommends, for instance, that 4 of a minor in most cases trigger blackwood to save bidding space. And he plays both 1430 and 3014 depending on the circumstances…)

A variation that my friends play is that the winner of the bid also gets to “pick” his partner: He calls out the card name, e.g. “Ace of Spades”, and the person holding that card is now his partner. However, the partner cannot declare himself until the called card is played. This makes for some interesting backstabbing with the bidder trying to figure out which of the 3 is his real partner.

As a former Michigander, I also learned to play euchre. Euchre is practically the state card game in Michigan. I remember working on a construction site one summer where everyone played it at lunch time. It’s simpler than bridge, but nonetheless requires some strategic thinking, and when played right, moves along at a fast clip.

In my college years we lived through our long Michigan winters by playing cribbage and hearts. And, of course, the ubiquitous euchre. I now live in the cheesehead state, and here the locals play a game called sheepshead, which I’ve never heard about until moving here. Wisconsinites seem as passionate about their sheepshead as Michiganders are about euchre.

Thanks for writing about this. Nowadays with gameboys and nintendos and wiis, not to mention freecell and World of Warcraft, we forget about the simple pleasures of sitting around the table face to face with friends and family and playing a card game. (Or one of the classic board games, for that matter.)