New to bridge? I'll walks you through your very first hand — no experience needed. In a few minutes you'll learn the four key things every bridge player needs to know: how tricks work, what trumps are, how the auction decides the trump suit, and how to play out a hand as declarer. By the end, you'll know enough to play your first real hand of bridge.
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Hi everybody, this is for bridge beginners. Bridge is played by four players in two partnerships. Our partner is sitting at the top of the table in the North seat. Our opponents are sitting East and West and we are in the South seat. Each player is dealt 13 cards from a 52 card deck and you can see our cards at the bottom of the screen.
Bridge is a trick-taking game. You may be familiar with some other trick-taking games like 500, euchre, spades, there are lots of others. Just to be sure though, let's see what a trick is.
Each player in clockwise rotation plays a card. West has led the ♣5.
North plays the ♣J, east plays the ♦A and south plays the ♥4. And that's a trick.
The cards are ranked from the top. Ace, King, Queen, Jack, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two. The highest card of the suit led normally wins the trick.
West has led the ♣5, north has played the ♣J, the JC is higher than the ♣5. East plays the ♦A. The Ace is the highest card in a suit but the ♦A is not the same suit that was led. West led the ♣5, therefore so far the ♣J is winning. South played the ♥4.
Sometimes there is a boss suit called the trump suit. That suit changes from hand to hand and we'll go over that in just a moment. So just imagine hearts were trumps on this hand. In that case the ♥4 would win the trick. Even though the ♣J was higher than the ♣5 which was led. ♦A is higher but that's not the suit led. ♥4 wins the trick because it is a trump.
Okay, back to the hand.
Before any tricks are played there is an auction where players bid for the right to name the trump suit.
You can also bid no trumps which means on the hand there is no trump suit and if you don't want to say anything you can pass. You can see north has passed, East has bid 1♦ so East wants diamonds to be the trump suit.
Now look at all those hearts in our hand! If we can get hearts to be the trump suit we're going to get a lot of tricks. So we'll have to bid something higher than one diamond and it looks like we're going to have to bid 2♥ because 2♥ is higher than 1♦.
Good news though, during the auction the suits have a rank. Clubs are the lowest, then diamonds, then hearts, then spades, then no trumps. Because hearts are a higher ranking suit than diamonds we only have to bid 1♥ on this hand. After there have been three passes in a row the auction finishes.
We bid hearts first so we become what's called the 'declarer'. We need to win one trick, because we bid 1♥, plus another six. It's always the number you bid plus another six which tells you how many tricks you need to win.
The player to the left of the declarer, that means West on this hand, plays the first card. West has led the ♦J. Now something strange happens.
The next player after that first player has led the jack of diamonds is called the dummy and the dummy puts all their cards face up on the table. Declarer, that's us, gets to choose what cards to play from the dummy and from our own hand.
I'll play the ♦2. East plays the ♦A. The ♦A is winning so far.
I would like to play a heart because hearts are trumps but I'm not allowed to. There's a rule in bridge which says we have to 'follow suit' if we can. That means whatever the lead was, which was a diamond in this case, we have to play a diamond if we've got one.
I'm going to have to follow suit with a diamond. East won that trick with the ace of diamonds. So east plays the first card to the next trick.
That's how it goes until all 13 tricks have been played.
There's more to learn. There's bidding systems. There's techniques to help you win more tricks. But you know enough now that you could go ahead and play this hand.