A post recently made the rounds on hacker news claiming that
you should teach your kids poker, not chess.
The comments on that post go through a lot of the reasons why poker is a bad game to teach your
children, but I felt that I was well suited to opine on this topic, and explain why duplicate
bridge is the best game for practicing the life skills involved in business and programming,
compared to all of the alternatives.

I am a passionate player of strategy games, but never a professional player at any. I played chess
as a child, ultimately studying to the point where I can play at ~1500 play strength today.
In high school, I was a passionate Magic: the Gathering player. I played a lot at the competitive level
and also became a level 2 Magic Judge for a brief time. In college, I started to seriously play bridge
and poker. When I turned 21, I made money playing Texas Hold’em and Pot Limit Omaha (the latter of which
I enjoyed more, but had fewer players). In college, I played bridge with the college club twice a week,
and became decent at the game. Today, I am mostly a bridge player, but I still play chess, Magic, and
poker once in a while. I believe that bridge is the best game for learning life skills, and that it is
a great game to play as an amateur.

The Game of Bridge

Bridge is unfortunately associated with an aging population of players and is a lot less “cool” than
chess or poker. However, there is a small community of young players that are both friendly and
competitive, hopefully the benginning of a renaissance for the game.

Bridge is played with four players, two teams of two, using a standard deck of cards. Each player sits
across from their teammate. On each hand, the entire deck is dealt out, and then the game goes through
two phases: bidding and playing.

During the bidding phase, players call out public bids to determine the
contract, exchanging information about their hands through the limited information of a number and a
suit (“one spade” is a bridge bid). Information exchange occurs during the bidding phase using agreements
about the meaning of each bid called bidding conventions. Partnerships can come up with their own agreement
or use one of a few common bidding conventions, like Standard American, 2-over-1, and ACOL. Learning bidding
conventions is like learning chess openings: you need to spend time learning one of them.

During the playing phase, one player from the partnership that won the bidding places their hand face up on
the table, and the other player from that partnership plays a
trick-taking game (similar to hearts or spades) against
the opposing pair to try to take as many tricks as possible. The person playing the contract is called
the “declarer,” while the other two players are “defenders” (the player whose hand is face-up is the “dummy”).
The playing phase is then scored based on whether the declarer has made the number of tricks promised in the
contract. Taking as many tricks as promised (or more) is called “making the contract,” and offers rewards
that depend on the level of the contract and the number of tricks taken, while taking fewer tricks is “going
down.” The defending side is rewarded for making you go down. Playing the hand is often subtle and challenging,
regardless of whether you are defending or declaring, and every trick matters regardless of whether you are
expecting to take 10 tricks or 2.

The Benefits of Bridge

Managing Information

Information management is central to bridge. During the bidding phase, you and your partner determine what is
important to share with each other to determine a contract. During the playing phase, you have to work with the
fact that two other hands are not publicly known.
Probability comes into play here: understanding
distributions of cards and possible hands that opponents can have will allow you to figure out how to play for
the maximum number of tricks. The bidding and playing phases are all about deriving the maximum value you can
from the limited information you have, much like life.

Planning a Line

Like chess, bridge play often involves thinking several tricks ahead and planning your line of play. However,
you have to plan for contingencies and plan to mitigate the effects of the unknown information. Becaus