The Stanford bridge team advanced to the semifinals in last weekend’s North American Collegiate Bridge Championship in New Orleans, beating out four other teams and finishing the tournament in fourth place.
The team is an informal group of people who play every Tuesday during the school year at Old Union. The team has existed since 1995 and has qualified for nationals almost every year since, according to player Alex Lovejoy, a graduate student in biochemistry. It won the national championship in 1995, 2003 and 2009.
This year, four members represented the team at the championship: Lovejoy, C.J. Jameson ’10, Zizhuo Wang, a graduate student in materials science and engineering, and Miu Wong, who just graduated with a master’s degree in materials science and engineering.
The group qualified for the national championship through an online tournament in February against 27 other teams, including one other from Stanford. Once it had qualified, the team spent the next five months practicing and working out the partnerships, both of which were new.
“We knew we weren’t as good as last year’s team,” Lovejoy said, “but we still expected to make it through qualifying. I certainly wanted to make at least the semifinals, and we did that.”
Bridge is a partnership game, similar to Spades, in which players work with their partners to try to earn “tricks,” or sets of cards. During each hand, one pair is on the “offense” and tries to collect a number of tricks that the team agreed to earlier, while the other is on “defense” and attempts to keep the opposing team from making its goal. Each hand normally takes less than 10 minutes to complete.
Tournament bridge has an extra twist on the rules known as “duplicate bridge,” which is intended to level the playing field and eliminate the luck common in card games. Once a hand is completed between two opposing pairs, the cards are passed to the next table, where two other pairs from each team have to play with the cards their opponents were dealt earlier.
On Saturday, the team made it through round-robin eliminations in third place, advancing to the semifinals. They were defeated on Sunday afternoon by Yale, which had placed first in the round robin. Stanford later lost its third-place match to Harvard.
“It’s sort of a downer to lose twice in one day,” Jameson said. “But making it out of the round robin was pretty exciting. There was some pressure to repeat [last year’s victory], but the teams change every year so you never know who’s favored.”
“There were a few things we could have done better in the Yale match,” Lovejoy added, but “the whole experience was fun, as it always is.”