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What is bridge? Page 3
There are some differences between tournament bridge and rubber bridge in regard to technicalities and strategy. Except at the first table, you will not shuffle and deal the cards. The cards come to you in a tray, called a 'board' and you must put the cards back in the correct slot after the board has been played. The board is marked N, E, S and W, and must be placed properly on the table. The board also states which side is vulnerable and who is the dealer. During the play, the cards are not thrown into the middle of the table. Each player keeps the cards in front of them, turning them face down after the trick is over. You may examine the trick just played only while your card remains face up. Tricks won are placed vertically, tricks lost horizontally. After the hand is over, you can see at a glance how many tricks have been won and how many lost.
SCORING
Each board in tournament bridge is scored independently. In rubber bridge if you make a partscore you have an advantage for the next deal, but in tournament bridge you do not carry forward any scores. You enter the score for the hand played, and on the next board both sides start from zero again.
As each deal is totally unrelated to what happened on the previous deal, there are significant scoring differences in tournament bridge:
(1) Honours do not count (unless otherwise stated by the tournament rules).
(2) For bidding and making a partscore, add 50 to the trick total.
(3) For bidding and making a game not vulnerable, add 300 to the trick total.
(4) For bidding and making a game vulnerable, add 500 to the trick total.
The result you obtain on the board is entered on the 'travelling score sheet' at the back of the board. You may not look at that until the hand is over, since it contains a record of the hand and also how other pairs fared on the board. Your score on each board is compared with the scores of every other pair that played the board. If you are North-South, your real opponents are all the other North-South pairs, not the particular E-W pair you play each time. On each board, a certain number of match-points is awarded (usually one less than the number of pairs who play the board). If 15 pairs play a board, the best score receives 14 match-points, a 'top', the next best score receives 13 and so on down to the worst score which receives 0, a 'bottom'. An average score would receive 7 match-points.
The scoring is done once for the N-S pairs and then for the E-W pairs. Obviously, if a N-S pair scores a top, the corresponding E-W pair against whom they played the board gets a bottom. Each pair's points over all the boards are totalled and the pair with the highest number of match-points wins.