Back in the 1990s and into 2001 and early 2002, bridge
players tried hard to make their card game an Olympic sport. Essentially the same effort was made by chess
players. They failed.
A simple question, “Who was right?” gets into a snake pit of
philosophical and moral arguments that rise all the way to the level of whether
reductionism can be relied upon as an absolute.
Is it true that all worth knowing and worth using for making decisions
can be expressed as written language in the form of rules? The argument to exclude bridge and chess
seems to take that position.
Arguments in Favor of
Including Bridge and Chess
Through 1948, military guard duty was included as an Olympic
sport (!). There is an intensive
connection between war and bridge and chess.
Not only are the games analogs of military issues and protocols, but key
personnel in World War II were bridge players or chess players, especially in
the intelligence community. Ely Culbertson himself said that the proposed
United Nations would be useless without a military branch that involved
enforcement. Spy-planner Ian Fleming and
his fictional agent James Bond were both bridge players (read the book Moonraker).
Most sports involve strategic planning and teamwork. These are essential for bridge playing teams.
A sport should have an analog with life in general. Life is something like a footrace. A white collar career is something like a
tennis match. Life, overall, is about
making decisions on incomplete information, the central element of bridge. In life, there is always something important
that is still worth learning. In bridge,
every dedicated player is still learning something new.
Here’s the 2002 Wall Street Journal article dealing with the
failure of bridge to become an Olympic sport:
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