Stanford intellectual vitality essay - Bridge game

Stanford students are widely known to possess a sense of intellectual vitality. Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging.

Floating Bridge is a reinvention of the more popular contract Bridge. Partners are not pre determined but are owners of the card called by the winning bidder and they can choose when to reveal themselves in the game by playing the card the bidder has called for. While purists may scoff at the idea that the game requires lesser skills than Contract Bridge to win, I find this game much more challenging and intellectually engaging as it has sparked an interest in me and has enabled me to learn of how others form decisions. The allure of the game comes from the logical deduction and memory work that the game demands while at the same time the astute the players must possess to mislead their opponents.

Some people may think of it as just a form of entertainment but I see floating bridge not just as a conventional game but as an interesting topic for research. From it, I am able to learn a few valuable lessons in the fine art of risk taking. In a game, I am on a constant prowl of the other players, looking for a twitch in their facial features that betrays a change in emotions which I could leverage on to justify the use of a risky card. Sometimes I am also forced to make tough calls to ignore conventional wisdom and throw out the textbook in an attempt to turnaround a dire situation. In a broader context, I have learnt to make the best out of a given situation and make quick yet prudent decisions based on implicit factors and the behaviours of others through the application of some of these gaming skills in real life.

The idea of bridge as a parallel to everyday life is a captivating thought. In the game and in real life as well, one must strike a delicate balance between one's intellectual to conceive plans and to possess enough emotion intelligence to be able to convince others of their plans and sly deceptions. Also, the game requires people trying to cooperate with strangers in a hastily set up partnership at the start of each new shuffle and to work towards a common goal in that game which is sometimes the situation our daily life throws at us.

A social commentator wrote that bridge was only a seasonal craze which would be gone by next year when it first gained prominence in London near the end of the 19th century. Perhaps the primary inaccuracy of that prediction is that you can rarely use the word "never" when discussing the game. Nothing in the game is fixed; players are thus the sole determinants of the outcome of the game. Just as a bridge game can see the brilliances, boring moves and the bad blunders of its players, our life experience is never defined at either extremes of delight or displeasure. What is most important is to be able to make the best of a situation and maintain a sense of vitality to motivate ourselves with renewed passion and energy to achieve our goals by looking at common everyday things such as the game of bridge in a different light.

Comments are greatly appreciated. Thanks much.

Okay, I've actually played around with regular bridge a bit, and even I found your essay difficult to follow. Those who have never played bridge, and who are unfamiliar with any variant of the game, won't really know what you're talking about. They'll probably understand a lot of your overall points, as you could have written much the same essay about poker, but the specific connection to the game (the whole point of the essay) will tend to get lost. So, I'd suggest spending a bit more time explaining the game of Floating Bridge, preferably interspersing your explanation with the things you've learned from the game, so as to avoid making the first half of the essay seem like an off-topic essay on how to play a particular card game.