My favorite game in high school and college, which I played twice a week, at one of the clubs in Bucharest, until 1983, when sometimes in the fall Elena Ceausescu issued an order to close all clubs and remove all mentions of bridge, from all media (we used to have weekly articles published with games analysis). The (un)funny way I found out about this was by my going with my partner to play, one night, and finding the club closed, with absolutely no trace of tables or other items we used to have, up until the session of a few days earlier. After having waited for a while, someone came by and we asked what happened, to which the answer was "There isn't and never was such a thing [bridge club] here! This is a chess club! What are you guys talking about?". Calling late in the night, from my house, the (ex)admin of the bridge club, his answer was very clear: "Don't call again, and don't mention this in public". And that was the end of bridge clubs in Romania (until after 1989). After this we resorted to "mini-clubs", at friends' houses, with up to 4-6 tables, and duplicating like in real tournaments ...
If you need a group of people that get together regularly and communicate using legal words to convey additional information not directly notable; bridge players are the way to go
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Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, outlawed bridge, popular with the intelligentsia, and shut down clubs where the card game was played. “They were worried that when too many intelligent people got together, it could easily develop into something else,” mathematician Mircea Mihu said.
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My guess, authoritarian communist regimes do not take kindly to any private gathering spots for the general public. People were expected to go to work, go home, keep their mouths closed.
In other news, the board game, wargame, TCG, and roleplaying space continues to grow, and local game stores are becoming difficult to find space to play in.
I'm the author. What a weird surprise to see it at 4 am on Hacker News.
If you play bridge on BBO you might be interested in my BBO Helper browser extension. It's popular with strong players and streamers (yes, there are bridge streamers!), but there is functionality to benefit players of all levels.
The last evening bridge game at the Soledad Club was held April 7, 2016 about a year after I wrote the referenced article, when it hit the five table break even point.
The pandemic was hard on bridge. About half of the ACBL members made the transition to online play, primarily BBO. This looks like a sea change. Players are returning to f2f play but the ACBL lists only 1,855 bridge clubs today; there were 2,721 in 2019, a decline of 32%. Players are also returning to the tournaments but table counts are only 50–80% of pre-pandemic. Matt Baylow has been carefully tracking the situation:
I've run many of the smaller (sectional) tournaments and thus know the many fixed expenses. Even a 20% decline in table count will affect the viability, choice of venue, or card fees. The bigger tournaments (regionals and nationals) depend on room night guarantees made to the host hotel in exchange for using their convention space; I'm not sure how that is shaking out.
I wonder if the pastimes in the USA that are most at risk are, on average, ones where you cannot use your phone and get exciting photos or video to post on your social media. After all, people are still meeting in groups to do things like hiking or cosplay, where they can present a glamorous image to other people via social media.
I think it’s mostly the decline in people coming over to people’s houses. Bridge as a game relied heavily on kitchen bridge and it just isn’t that common for most people to have people over every week for a game anymore. There is also the fact that the rules of the game are fairly complex and many people take weekly lessons for months in order to understand the basics of how to play.
I doubt this is the cause. Certain hobbies just grow and shrink. You could get plenty of social media photos photos of lawn bowls for example, but that’s still an aging audience.
Badminton is a bit too far from tennis for my liking (as is ping pong), so I never got into it.
As for the others, padel is far far far more athletic than pickleball (and paddle tennis for that matter), and I would argue even more so than tennis. I grew up playing tennis and I love it, but padel is more finesse and also scratched that itch of learning a whole new sport. I learned it in the UK 3-5 years ago, and I do very much miss it. Literally I think there is one court in all of New England, it is crazy how much of a not-thing it is considering it was invented in Mexico.
What confuses me is there are more old people than there used to be. So in theory "older people stuff" should be thriving. But lots of hobbies / activities / associations are percieved as dying off as elderly members are not replaced. I wonder why.
It's almost like there's another dynamic where each generation is resistant to the pastimes of the previous one, as they make the participants feel old, so they feel the need to invent new ones.
It would be interesting to compare Florida residents with those elsewhere on the east coast to see if they are actually preserving more of these things than we think.
It’s more generational than age specific. It’s not like you turn 70 and now have a burning desire to play croquet. I have no interest in cars but retired boomers can seem to talk about nothing else.
Poker is much more appealing in terms of video presentation though. It’s easy to setup a high tension situation the user understands and make it fun to watch. The card play is more complex in bridge and you’re likely to have some people not understand what’s going on at all if you try and create a tense moment.
I have no interest in bridge, because the rules appear to be designed to maximize cheating. Even if you're using a bidding screen, there's no practical way to close all information side channels during in-person play. And bidding screens do nothing to enforce an even tempo, with this being left to subjective judgement. Regardless of whether it happens or not, cheating is so easy compared to other tabletop games that I would always suspect it, which would stop me from enjoying the game.
Playing for fun, this isn't relevant. If winning is so important to you that you will cheat your friends, you're a jerk, and won't have friends for long.
Part of the game is not to close the side channels of information. conventions for calling are very much part of the game. calling 1 Club vs 1 No Trump is a purposeful signal.
Its a fun game to play if you don't take it too seriously
I get that, but the reality is that people who take the game too seriously have long been doing this. Just because reality is not legal doesn't change the fact that it is reality. This is why not taking it all too seriously is so important.
As I say, when you play against people doing this you can use it as a tell. Of course you can get angry and bang on about the rules as well.
it is not about liking, and in my circle we swap partners and play with whomever is there, but I have played against competitive pairs before and it is clear it is happening. reality is how it is, not how you want it to be. this is not a hill worth dying on and this is why I will never take the game too seriously
It's not more important but it is in my view (and most others'?) better than canasta (or at least deeper/more strategic/more interesting). I also play Set, but they don't scratch the same itch (any more than Set is a substitute for Twilight Struggle, or either are for Galaxy Truckers).
Apart from the over-lengthy process of learning enough of a system to actually play, Bridge is a fabulous game, and one which is best where there are decent-sized clubs of competent people to play with/against. That's fine for now, at least in bigger places in England, but most of the feeder routes to these clubs have dried up: weekly kitchen table cards is fairly rare, it's not played in schools, and nearly all the university clubs have gone. We run decent teaching sessions but in most places that's not enough to keep up with current players' deaths. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Go is a fabulous game (and AlphaGo is a wondrous software—I read the first technical paper immediately). But it's another thing I'd have to do online. Seattle had a go center in the 1990s that still seems to be around. San Diego had a few players who met up in Hillcrest or Carlsbad, both an annoying drive away. Who knows if there are any go players in Salt Lake? My one go playing friend lives a time zone away. It's far easier to find f2f bridge than f2f go.
In the early days of Amazon, a call center employee pointed me to a deal on go set shipped directly from Japan. Beautiful slate and shell stones. I haven't played a dozen games on it. I almost feel unworthy of owning it as a perhaps 12 kyu player.
