Until fairly recently, I was teaching a youngster who plays chess for the UK junior team.
How do you rebuff the Chess supremo's attack on Bridger
I remember an occasion when his dad came to my house to collect him. At some point, I mentioned the game of Bridge – I was suggesting that his kid should give it a go…
“Yea, but Bridge is a game of luck”, he sneered.
My reply was not particularly intelligent… I suppose I was very surprised by the reaction and had not primed myself with a suitably strong rebuff.
I was expecting something like,
“Hmm… Tell me more; sounds interesting.”
But then I often find that very intelligent or intellectual individuals needs must take the high ground by default. Out of habit they will disguise ignorance with an impatient belittling. Being offensive is rarely the intention but then, one must get irritable with others if one’s brain is like a vault of impressive information and hyper activity.
So… What do you think would be a disarming reply? What should I have said?
‘It is not a game of luck’? – This defensive reply is too weak a response. I want something stronger.
You could start by saying what Bridge has that Chess has not – For example, Bridge involves deductive communication between opponents and partner thereby creating a more dynamic and complex set of alternative tactics and strategies. But to Chess fanatics, these points can make Bridge seem the weaker game… there is less purity of thought and logic.
Is Bridge more strategic than Chess? Well that depends. I think you could argue the case for either Bridge or Chess. Of course, the truth is that Bridge simply IS more strategic, but try telling that to a Chess player.
The right response is to aggressively attack the Chess player’s achilles heel.
Being a bit small minded, I thought I should do a bit of research and find some quotes from clever people who might have a useful retort for me to commit to memory.
For example, “Chess is mental torture” was said by the grandest of masters, Garry Kasparov. There… from the horse’s mouth.
But the next quote is much better. All Bridge players should commit the following quote by George Bernard Shaw to memory:
Chess is “a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.”
Alternatively, one could mis-quote Benjamin Franklin:
“The Game of Chess is [not] merely an idle amusement.” I like this mis-quote, because it is so daft it is bound to irritate a Chess player into mumbling confusion.
The following is the most intellectual of quotes by Albert Einstein that the Bridge player can use as a weapon:
“Chess holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer.” ‘Hmm. Take that nasty Chess player’.
H.G. Wells obviously was rubbish at chess. There are several quotes by him worth remembering:
Chess is “the least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life.” The very idea of using the word excrescence is good enough for me to put this particular quote at the top of my rebuff list.
Perhaps H.G. Wells should have the final word:
Chess, “is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.”
Of course, as always, you get the final word… Leave your best rebuff below in the comments section.
Chess is merely chess. Bridge after all is BRIDGE, CONTRACT BRIDGE, of course.
I’m disappointed in Mr. Einstein, whose birthday–March 14–I happen to share. Makes him sound like a pompous ass and I don’t believe he was at all pompous about his braininess. Ditto Wells showing off his vocabulary with that excrescence word.
When people want to demolish something (like chess or bridge) their comment should be pointed, witty, lighthearted–not excessively serious.
What could you say in response to his sneering,
“Yeah, but bridge is a game of luck”
How about,
“So’s life–bridge is life, chess is to bridge as bowling is to a tennis match.”
To be fair, the Shaw and Ben Franklin comments could just as well be tossed off about bridge. Not so that second comment of Wells–there is ALWAYS happiness in playing bridge!
It’s surely a bit rude to “aggressively attack” and pointless to deny that bridge is a game of some luck. But you could similarly argue that chess is a game of luck. Either the first move conveys an advantage or a disadvantage—it’s a hard computational problem to decide which but one must be true! So the winner is pre-ordained by who draws the pawn for the starting move: pure luck. I think a big difference is that a silly mistake in Bridge loses one hand, in Chess the whole match.
Mark,
As an expert tournament chessplayer AND a master in bridge I love both games but for different reasons. Both games are first and foremost stragetic and secondarily tactical. Both are deliciously challenging for one’s intellect.
Now, how to answer an inane statement like “but bridge is a game of luck”. . . I’d simply put him in his place by observing,
“Then you haven’t heard of duplicate bridge?”
(Let him ponder that for a while) Then offer,
“The bridge that you are referring to is rubber bridge, not duplicate. It’s like confusing checkers with chess.”
Hopefully his ego won’t be too involved in the exchange and he’ll want to explore more carefully the merits of bridge.
Rod, your measured response was most like the answer I actually gave. As I spoke of the merits of duplicate bridge, I saw my Chess ‘opponent’s’ eyes glaze over with disinterest. It is for this reason, that I felt I needed a more robust one-liner to put such a comment down.
I think, your suggestion
‘The bridge that you are referring to is “rubber bridge”, “not duplicate bridge”‘
Exactly Rod. Although I am not an expert Chess Player. Both games are games for thinkers. I love Spades and Hearts but they are not games for strategic thinking.
I find this post to be most helpful. There was a question on Quora: “Is it better to think like a go player, a chess player, or a poker player?” http://www.quora.com/Is-it-better-to-think-like-a-Go-player-a-Chess-player-or-a-Poker-player The problem is, of course, I think bridge is best! bridge has partnership, communication, along with the intellectual merits the other games have. I think poker is a terrible game to edify yourself with since it relies entirely on gambling and a kill-or-be-killed attitude. It’s a shame that practically every time I talk to someone about bridge I get this answer: “That’s an old ladies’ game.” Even though people like to play euchre, go figure. (I live in Northeastern USA, which is why they answer that way and still play euchre)
Kevin Larsen recently posted..Defense in Bridge: A List of the Top Bridge Defense Books
Thanks for the link Kevin… it’s an excellent post to visit if you want to read great comments about the merits of Chess, Go, and Poker
Those are really powerful quotes to say against a chess player. Now, I have an idea of what to say to my brother. Sometimes, you just got to accept that what you know and have is not always the best. Yeah!
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The winner is pre-ordained by who draws the pawn for the starting move: pure luck. I think a big difference is that a silly mistake in Bridge loses one hand, in Chess the whole match. Thanks that you’ve shared
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“The winner is pre-ordained by who draws the pawn for the starting move: pure luck.”
Is this your retort to irritate?
Chess for me is one of the great games that can enhance your thinking… I love this game, it makes me think deeply and it helps me develop patience.
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Um Perry,
In chess the winner is NOT preordained by who draws the white pawn unless it’s two life masters who play flawlessly and even then the game would end in a draw. I usually give my opponent the white pieces so they can’t claim that they lost because of playing black. Chess (like bridge) is a game where one strives for perfect play, however during the course of play mistakes, however slight are made. It is the exploiting of those mistakes that wins the game.
I’m glad you corrected Perry. It’s true. I guess chess is a different type of game. If you want to sweat it out for 3 hours against one person, trying not to make one mistake, chess is better. In duplicate bridge you don’t want to make mistakes either, but at least it’s not all concentrated on one long, stressful game at a time.
Kevin Larsen recently posted..Defense in Bridge: A List of the Top Bridge Defense Books
I guess chess is a different type of game. If you want to sweat it out for 3 hours against one person, trying not to make one mistake, chess is better.
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strangely the worm can turn in Chess
This may sound a little bit of lame, but I will just answer the guy this way: “I will not try to influence your belief, but I guess what you need is to play the game.”
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I call things like that as remarks of the uninitiated. I always come across people who argue about which is the better sport or game; another scenario is one who questions the “sense” behind the game.
The best opinion here is simply live and let live.
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Nice article.. Those quotes are really good, I enjoyed reading the entire post. I also love playing chess so much, I love everything here, the comments were also awesome, Thanks for posting!
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It was an interesting post. I enjoy reading the entire post. Thanks for sharing.
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Chess is one of the interesting sports, it needs more thinking and strategy in order to win game. I enjoyed reading this post. Thanks much for sharing.
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I guess Einstein has a point in his quote. This is because there are certain moves to be “memorized” and “practiced” to be able to successfully implement a certain strategy in a match.
On another note, he made the remark when a match can take hours and even days. The game has evolved a lot from then.
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Even today chess games take hours, matches still last days. . . It’s just a different experience with the emphasis more on individual play than bridge’s emphasis on team or partner play. Again both are excellent was to stetch the mind and stave off altzheimers. LOL
I love chess as it involves many different skills such as memorization, concentration, strategic thinking and visual-spatial intelligence. A game can last for days or minutes depending on the players preferences and every game contains unique variations.
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Both chess and bridge are great games, and players of either who denigrate the other most likely speak from ignorance.
Chess is (arguably) the ultimate game of complete information. The winner is the one who can outthink the opponent, pure and simple. There is nothing unknown except the future moves the opponent will make.
Bridge, on the other hand, gets my vote for the ultimate game of incomplete information (with apologies to poker and backgammon). The luck in the game stems from the incomplete information characteristic, and (contrary to common mistaken belief) this luck is not eliminated in duplicate bridge, which removes only the card-holding luck. The aspect of incomplete information makes bridge FAR more complex than chess, because the need to attempt to construct the entire deal through limited information forces one to use complex probability-based analysis. This is wholly unnecessary in chess, where “all” that is required is to form a plan of play successful against all reasonable opposing moves and strategies (which is also very difficult, but requires the ability to analyze very deeply in linear, rather than somewhat deeply in non-linear, fashion).
To denigrate bridge as “a game of luck” is to do the same to the fields of actuarial science, economic forecasting, or options trading, all of which rely on the same type of thinking and strategizing. The game of bridge (or poker or backgammon) requires one to take actions that provide the maximum expected outcome or that maximize the probability of winning. In chess, there is no theoretical need to account for probability; any particular move either wins, draws, or loses, and this is THEORETICALLY provable for any position, even for White’s first move. If this is what one means by labeling bridge “a game of luck”, so be it, but I think the comment reveals a deficit of understanding. (By the way – in theory, there is no real difference between chess and tic-tac-toe. Both are theoretically solvable games of complete information. The fascination of chess lies in its extreme complexity that makes it intractable as a pure problem of mathematics, while tic-tac-toe is easily solved and is thus unsuitable as a serious contest.)
Mark: Somehow I had this debate going in one of my classes. A similar argument was put forward that we should debase Chess and show Bridge to be superiour in an effort to market Bridge to school managements. In my opinion, this is a no-win approach. When you do that, you will always find a Chess fan in your audience who will go for your guts and will stop listening to anything more that you may have to say. This argument between the two of you will turn off the others who are listening in. You will walk away empty handed. It is naive to say that we can win an argument against a game that has 600 million players all over the world. On the other hand, we can target what is special about Bridge and publicise that. You may be aware of the medical benefits of the game (If not Google Marion Diamond and Bridge). You also no doubt are aware of the study conducted by Dr Christoper Shaw on Bridge at schools. Let us focus on the positives, after all ours is a Zero Tolerance Game!
Manoj recently posted..MBA Summer Monsoon League – Time is running out – 2 days to go
for sure, bridge is best, spent many years of my life on it
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