Understanding the intricacies of playing duplicate bridge

Contract bridge was an indoor game and a new attraction for me and some other Bengalis like me. The duplicate bridge version was really attractive. Many Bengalis were experts at it and could guess the lay of cards with tremendous ease and accuracy.
It all depended on the bidding of your partner and of the opponents and in trying to interpret the meaning of the bids and what they wanted to convey. Even silence at the bidding conveyed some message.
To begin the bidding, one must necessarily have at least 13 counts in the 13 cards he held – his bid should let the other players at the table understand a rough distribution. That would help the others to make an assessment of how the cards were distributed taking into account his own holdings.

Different conventions were followed – like Goran which depended on the minimum total count in hand and identifying the preferred bid based on the highest number of cards of a particular suit. In case there was no specific suit to bid, one could begin with a No Trump indicating a scattered layout.
Then there was the Precision bid – here one had to memorize different bids based on the distribution like 4-4-4-1, or 5-4-3-1 or 5-5-3-0, 7-5-0-0 etcetera.
Another bid was the One Club bid – it meant a scattered distribution with minimum count and the exact suit would be decided after getting the response of the partner.
Anyway – I and my partner decided on a bid system of our own. We had named it GHOTAL – GHO from Ghose (my name) and TAL (from the name of my partner Talapatra).
When it came to duplicate bridge, there were innovations – namely, an open room and a closed room. A team usually consisted of four members who played each deal with the same set of cards. Only, the declarers in the open room would become defenders in the closed room.
Once the cards were dealt, the set would be duplicated by each player and inserted into a specially designed receptacle and taken to the closed room. While the open room was open to public, the entry in the closed room was restricted to only the persons who directed the game. No ne else was allowed.
By playing with the same set of cards, anomalies regarding bad distribution were eliminated because if a N-S declarer arrives at a certain contract and if the opponents arrive at a better contract in the closed room, obviously it was a plus point for them. The final result would reflect that.(to be continued …)

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