You would be amazed at the number of people (rubber bridge players and non-players) who are unaware that duplicate bridge exists. They know bridge is a game of skill, but believe that if you don’t get the cards you have little chance of winning.
Many years ago I was one of those people. I turned up at my first bridge club with a partner and two packs of cards. I was introduced to a duplicate board—for I didn’t know such a thing existed. I soon realised that this simple device meant that every table in the room would play the same deals over the evening and our score would be compared, not with our opponents, but with those playing our way who held the same cards as we did. The luck of the deal was, therefore, eliminated, making bridge mainly a game of skill. In addition, we could discuss the hands afterwards with friends by comparing our scorecards.
I was immediately enthralled and wished I had joined a bridge club many years earlier. Indeed, after one game of duplicate I found rubber bridge played at home, etc., to be quite tame in comparison. Duplicate is also more social; within a matter of months you will have played against (and are on speaking terms with) everyone in your club. Nowadays, with bridgemates, computer-dealt hands, printouts, and detailed results on the club website, duplicate offers horizons we could never have dreamt about in the early days. So I introduce my beginners to a suitable duplicate bridge club as early as possible in their first year and, with any luck, they are hooked for life.
Harold Vanderbilt invented Contract Bridge in 1925, and duplicate bridge as we now know it flourished a few years later. However, they simply acquired the mechanics of duplicate from duplicate whist. Hence, to find out who really invented duplicate, you have to go back many years earlier to the game of whist.
Whist was played for 150 years before duplicate whist was even considered—that’s a long time. Then in 1857 ‘Cavendish’ organised a two-table game of duplicate whist and this experiment showed that whist could become a game of skill instead of mainly luck. The big problem was reproducing the hands as the cards were thrown into the middle of the table and collected as tricks, as still happens in rubber bridge today. The cards, therefore, had to be dealt and recorded by the players before play, then the hands reconstructed after play, ready for the next table. This was not very practical, so duplicate whist never really got anywhe
Move on 31 years to Glasgow in 1888, when James Allison invented the ‘automatic hand register’. This sounds like a machine, but it simply meant the cards were kept apart and pointed to partner if you won the trick and laid side-on if you lost.
Every duplicate bridge club all over the world still does this today. It is so simple that it seems incredible that in 180 years of whist, with millions of games played, no one had ever thought of it. But for Allison, duplicate whist and then duplicate bridge might never have happened at all—bridge would still have been played, but there would be no duplicate bridge clubs or tournaments as we know them today.
However, new ideas, no matter how good, don’t always catch on. Allison himself didn’t do much to promote his brilliant invention, but fortunately, someone else did.
In the spring of 1888, the following paragraph appeared in the London Field:
“A match at whist was played in Glasgow between teams of the Carleton and Wanderer’s Clubs on April 16th, when a new system of duplicate play, the invention of Mr. James Allison, was tested.”
This was read by another Scotsman, John Mitchell, who had emigrated to America. Mitchell immediately saw its potential; he started a duplicate whist club in Chicago and invented his famous ‘Mitchell movements’ for teams, pairs and individuals, which are still in use today.
In Allison’s original method, though, the cards, after being played, remained on the table and all the players moved. All that was needed was for someone to hit on the idea of moving the cards instead of the players—and in 1891, the first duplicate board was patented, called the Kalamazoo tray. The one shown (in the next column) is made of wood and is well over 100 years old.
