A winning hand
College bridge clubs deal out new life for old game
When Vijay Bal arrived at Harvard as a freshman three years ago, he found dozens of clubs for nearly every interest, from car racing to comic opera. But not the one he hoped to join: a bridge club. At Princeton University, Dan Recht faced the same deficiency. At Williams College, Jonathan Landsman discovered a dormant club whose members rarely met.
"I was pretty disappointed," said Recht. "But I knew there was interest. I kept walking in on bridge games."
Riding an unlikely resurgence of interest in the game among younger players, all three students have brought back bridge on their campuses. At Harvard, the bridge club mailing list now includes 100 names. Recht offered beginner bridge classes this semester and was stunned when 40 students signed up.
The new clubs reflect a larger youth revival for the century-old card game: Three years ago, the American Contract Bridge League reinstated its college bridge tournament, which had been defunct since the 1970s. The number of college teams competing has doubled, from fewer than 10 in 2002 to almost 20 this year.
Teams from MIT and Dartmouth qualified last weekend for the collegiate finals in New York City, where they will face Carnegie Mellon, Ohio Wesleyan, Stanford, and UCLA.
To some, bridge, with its quaint score sheets, may seem almost laughably low tech in an age of DVDs and iPods. But college players say they are drawn by the game's endless variety, its dependence on skill over luck, its intellectual challenge, and its social aspect.
Many say they came to admire the game by watching more skilled players, as have aficionados of soccer or tennis.
"People made spectacular plays, as if they could see through the backs of cards, and I always wanted to do that," said Jason Chiu, an MIT junior who now plays on the school's tournament team.
For some, college opened up a whole new world of bridge.
"It was nice to figure out it's not just old people," said Allison Smith, a Williams College freshman who learned to play at age 11 from her grandmother.
During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an enthusiast, bridge was a staple of campus recreation.
Interest in the game waned in the 1980s, with theories for the dropoff ranging from the rise of video games to the demise of the close-knit extended family that played games together.
These days, younger people may be learning bridge on the Internet, where many sites let users play for free, without need for a live partner, said Rick Beye, tournament director for the American Contract Bridge League.
But most of the students interviewed for this story said they learned to play bridge the old-fashioned way, sitting side by side with grandparents.
"It's a little strange for people to be emulating their grandparents, I guess," said Landsman, 20, an English and psychology major from Queens, N.Y.
At Williams, as many as 16 or 20 bridge players pack a small dorm lounge every Thursday night.
Games begin around 9 p.m. and don't break up until 1 a.m, Landsman said. He and other students characterized bridge, fondly, as a "nerdy" pursuit, but they also said it seems to be drawing a more diverse crowd lately.
At Harvard, Bal said the club's growth has been driven in part by the interest of students from Europe, where bridge is hugely popular.
Tuesday night bridge club games at MIT take place down the hall from the math majors' lounge, in a pair of classrooms where complex math equations are scrawled across blackboards.
Dozens of graduate students and older Cambridge residents face off across the tables, but undergraduate participation has been growing, especially at weekly classes for beginners, said Chiu, the group's student president.
Most players at MIT appeared deadly serious last week, their tables silent except for the slap and flutter of shuffling. But the game is also attracting players like Dylan Consla, 19, an MIT freshman from Maine who said the social nature of bridge holds more appeal for him than its intellectual challenge.
"I used to play a lot of chess, and that can be stressful, because it's one on one, and very competitive," he said. "I find bridge more fun."
At MIT, a place where newcomers sometimes feel isolated, the bridge club has helped him connect with other people, said Consla, who took a monthlong bridge class with about a dozen students during the school's independent activity period in January.
"Talking strategy is a great way to get to know people," agreed Smith, the Williams freshman, who was happily surprised to find an active bridge club when she arrived on the Williamstown campus last fall from Phoenix.
Smith College sophomore Taylor Heald wasn't so lucky: The bridge club on her Northampton campus is inactive.
But since taking a weeklong beginners' class in January, the Chicago native, who was inspired to learn bridge after inheriting her great-grandmother's playing card collection, is thinking of starting the group up again.
"It's one of my goals," she said. "It's the next thing on my list."
Jenna Russell can be reached at jrussell@globe.com. 