FROM WHIST TO BRIDGE

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 22, 26 January 1924, Page 16

FROM WHIST TO BRIDGE

WILL MA-JONG PROVE TO BE THE SUCCESSOR.

If it be true, as suggested' in some quarters, that Mah-Jong is likely to become the fashionable -game even to the displacement of bridge, then there will be a break in the continuity of our scientific table game, declares a correspondent of the,- " Manchester Guardian." The passage from whist to bridge and from bridge to auction bridge and from auction bridge (if. we admit the later development) to contract bridge has been a steady sequence, -; since bridge in its various forms is merely' a development of whist. One must admit, though, that many devotees of whist would have been horrified by the various conventions aimed at "beating the game" which have been introduced into the most modern forms of bridge. But it may-be said that we have had nearly two centuries of the same game, since it was in 1730 that Lord Folkestone and other prominent persons met in solemn session at the Drown Coffee House in Bedford Row and proceeded, with the help of Hoyle, to introduce the game into " polite society." It cannot be claimed that whist asserted-- itself at once. It was played a good deal from the first, it was introduced at Court, but_ it did not provide sufficient opportunities for taking hug 6 sums for the "bucks " ofHhat or the next generatlon- Yet it made its way steadily, and by the middle of the ■ Victorian era it was firmly established. ,- Bridge has not yet completed thirty years of life in.England, though it was played earlier on the Continent. Perhaps it has not deserved a life as long, as that of whist, the variations in the rules have been too frequent, and, while claiming to be more scientific than wlust, it seems to be developing conventions which are merely methods of signalling in various forms. Possibly also there is a limit to its evolution, the climax has been passed, and so the card-playing world was ready for so complete a revolution as that suggested by the new craze for Mah-Jon" which in its turn, may (or may not) have developments to cover two centuries more