Bridge Adventures: Face To Face Bridge In Taipei

As with some of our other Bridge Adventures posts, we search across the country and international world for interesting games. Today, we report from Taipei, over 7000 miles from New York City, to confirm that face-to-face bridge still exists. I was very fortunate to partner with Honors alumni and Taiwan resident Maggie Huang!

Taipei Bridge Club

If you happen to be in Taiwan itching to play bridge, head to the Chinese Taipei Contract Bridge Association’s International Bridge Center. They play at 1:30pm on Wed, Fri, and Saturday, as well an evening session Wed. There was no lunch buffet, or any snacks for that matter. Fortunately, card fees are about $5.50 USD, and $2 for “members” or students 26 and under. With such low prices, you can craft your own lunch buffet from the nearby 7-11, or the numerous food establishments across the street.

Face-To-Face Bridge

We played 13 rounds of 2 boards, with one sitout. Unlike ACBL and JCBL in Japan, they don’t use BridgeMates for scoring – it’s a tablet about the size of an iPad mini. They also have seemingly no stratification. All 14 tables were in one big open game, and no one seemed to care about masterpoints.

How Did It Feel?

Amazing. After touching cards and bidding boxes for the first time in 6 months, I’m confident physical clubs will make a triumphant return. The thrill of the game came rushing back, and I definitely drew strange looks from partner and opponents taking a photo of the moment.

I prefer we don’t migrate to tablets or weird technology substitutes at the club. Remember our old friend the Stop card? I even had a chance to use it twice: once before making a weak jump bid, and once for fun because my RHO was about to open out of turn. Try doing that on BBO!

One last observation. Taiwan is famous for popularizing strong club systems, but we only ran into one precision pair in the session (the very first round, too bad we hadn’t discussed psycho-suction). Maggie assures me there were others lurking around.

How To Get There

It’s hard to find, so your best bet as an English speaker will be to type the address into Uber. 106臺北市大安區忠孝東路三段217巷7弄7號B1. It ‘s also not immediately obvious you are in the right place unless you can read the characters outside – the first English signs and bridge graphics appear on the banner at the basement level.

Is It Safe?

As of 9/8/2020, the island of 23 million people has only officially confirmed 494 cases of Covid-19 and 7 deaths since the outbreak. Unfortunately, entry is quite restricted and so far, bridge visas are not a thing. Even those who can legally come will need to undergo a strict mandatory 14-day quarantine.

While visiting Asia regularly is not a practical solution to our bridge cravings, we can remain inspired that the game is alive and well. One day, it will be safe again to play face-to-face bridge in New York City. When the time comes, we will cheer the reopening of our physical clubs, while retaining All For One and the great convenience of online play.