That might seem an odd title, but there's a story attached to this. The story actually took place yesterday evening, so this might be the most up to date blog entry I've posted yet, a fact which is both a source of pride and embarrassment, but hey-ho.Mondays are swimming days, that is, the university's elite swimming team finally have an evening off and they open the floodgates of the pool for free to the rest of the unwashed who can't splash out on a public one. I tend to turn up, swim a kilometre or so trying not to notice how many times I'm being lapped by everyone else, then decide that that is fair exercise and cycle home. Yesterday, this bit went fairly normally, save that temperatures in Nagoya are now consistently over 25ºC and so the pool was pretty full of people escaping the heat.
Also, I've been trying to get back into piano, and have managed to stick at it by teaching myself bits and bobs of music on the free-to-use digital piano at the back of the Foreign Students' Centre. One of the tricks is I think to play what you want, not what you have to, and I've been away from learning the instrument long enough to have a good desire to be fluent in a couple of pieces, so things will all go well hopefully and I'll be able to bang something respectable out before I return to the UK. The best time to practice is of course when everybody has already gone home, and so on Mondays I usually make it after swimming.
Wandering in to the centre and seeing the piano already taken, I figured I could just wait 10 minutes or so and then it would become free. I had barely sat down when I women came around the corner and asked if I'd be interested in joining in her card game. I said why not, and went around the corner to discover a mysterious board (North South East West and other arcane looking coloured markings), a plastic cage of playing cards and four stands full of strangely marked cards that would put the average Taro artist to shame. The other players included two Indian-looking guys, and a petite Japanese girl, all of whom had already heard the rules and understood them several years ago so I was fairly behind from the go.
The woman then helpfully proceded to try and explain it all by means of a printed piece of paper with a grid of numbers and suits on it. This would have been ok, except there were also odd tetris-shaped lines running around and over those number/suit combos, dividing them into strange areas I didn't grasp the importance of. One of the "y axis" resembling bits of the table as it were was the "points", which I think I wanted to get as much of as possible, but there was no obvious way to climb up the table through the tetris to get to the "ultimate trump" or "7 no-trump" or "7 spade" or whichever was the goal of the whole thing.
We each got 13 cards, which we were meant to count and then arrange in some certain order, and even my card-holding posture was sternly corrected. From 13 cards, you were then meant to work out how many points you had, from the system Ace is 4, King 3, Queen 2, Jack 1. Once you'd worked that out, the game would begin from the person whose direction on the board or coloured markings had "dealer" next to it on the cage with the cards in. Hm. With no real goal in sight and no real actual playing strategy, we moved on to the "Bitting Stage", which I couldn't tell if it was a misspelling of biting or betting.
This was the start of my doubts as to my proficiency for the game. If you didn't have 13 points, then you would take from your card-holder the triangular green "pass" card and put it in front of you, this was simple, and all three other players did so. However, if you did have 13 points (I had 14) then you counted the number of cards of any one suit that you held, and then if you had 5 or more of some then you could take a "1" card of that suit from your card holder thing instead. I did so, having plenty of spades and I declared "1 spade", whatever that was meant to mean. At least I was somewhere on the mythical tetris-based score card.
My partner then put down a "2 spade", which I was told meant he had anything from 6-9 points. I failed to see the relevance of that, along with the relevance of the NSEW directional thing, the card cage and the still baffling stand full of different tokens. And how on earth he'd got 2 and I'd only had 1 befuddled me, especially seeing as he didn't have 13 to begin with. I was assured this was good (I still didn't really know what I was aiming for) and we did two more goes around where everybody passed. "This is defensive play" I was assured, though defending from what exactly I had no idea.
At that point my partner (I keep saying partner, the guy directly across from me who I didn't know) then lay down all his cards neatly on the table and we had to put all the strange tokens from the first bit back in the holder, as if it had all been for nothing. The game then basically became Hearts, with some arbitrary card being trumps, and I had to play both for myself and also tell the guy across from me exactly what to do. Also, for some unexplained reason you consult the colours on the card cage and decide who gets the honour of putting a card face down on the table and then being told to turn it over (eh?). Every time I tried to play Hearts the woman corrected me, saying that I should already know what cards everybody has because of the first round, which I couldn't remember. How that helps you win at Hearts was even more confusing, and thankfully soon all the cards were used and the wins/losses for the rounds where counted.
At that point, it was revealed that although I'd declared "1 spade" I was actually up somewhere in 4 spade, and in a different tetris area on the scoring card, but because I'd done badly at the Hearts bit I was back down to 2 spades. This failed to strike me as in any way significant because I still didn't know what the hell that meant. Regardless, the card cage was replaced with a different one with different colours and the game began anew. I was then asked how I was faring - I said I didn't understand and I didn't really know what the blazes was going on. She made the point that it was like a novel - you start off reading and don't know how it goes but the pieces fall together later on, and why shouldn't I play it because the Royal Family Windsor do. She thus invited me with a flyer to the rest of her group's recruitment drive about the university campus, and it was only at this point that I discovered that the game I was trying to play was called Contact Bridge, something I'd seen next to the chess puzzles in the Times and paid very little attention to. It wasn't looking likely I would in future much either - one game had been far too confusing for me, and it seemed to have not only kicked down the "Keep It Simple Stupid" rule as far as steamrollering it then pegging it out over a termites' nest.
In the next game, I didn't have 13 points, so I passed, as did my partner. However, on the second round he said "Oblivion" or something I didn't quite catch which suddenly meant his cards were worth something different and the 13+ rule didn't apply. This also meant I had to do something they assumed I'd know, but by this point the piano was gathering cobwebs with lack of use and I made my excuses and left before my head exploded.
Thank you kind woman for trying, it was a valuable experience, and I'm sure my misunderstanding of your world-class explanation at the start let me down. Thank you for bearing with my faulterings and misunderstandings at every turn, but I must turn down your offer, and leave Bridge to the readers of the Times and people who might actually stand a chance of understanding the multi-tiered rule system.
The cost of the incomprehensible cards, cage and taro-esque card rack would probably be prohibitive too.
No comments:
Post a Comment