After a Breakup, I Needed a Game I Could Master
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Last fall, I started playing dice in bars. Mostly, a game called Threes, where the goal is to get the lowest score after rolling five dice, keeping at least one dice each roll, and adding up your points. Zero points if you roll a three. The first time I scored a zero—rolling three after three after three—I screamed at the top of my lungs. So did the friend who was with me, as did a bunch of strangers. I felt the warm glow of witnessing improbability.
My friend Devon first bought baby blue dice and carried them around with her. When you play dice in bars, you often play with strangers. This is kind of the point. It’s more fun than sitting around politely on a bar stool, chatting only with the people you came with. The second the dice start rolling, anything can happen.
In June of 2022, I had ended a relationship that had lasted ten years, and Devon gave me my own set. The dice were a symbol: I was single for the first time since my early 20s. Carrying dice, my evenings and weekends were now subject to chance in more than one way. Early in my new dating life, a man in a Carhartt jacket said to me in the backroom of a bar: I like how you don’t seem to be playing games. Sitting with a person that I met by clicking a few buttons on my phone, I thought, Isn't that exactly what this is? Hinge felt like roulette: whose profiles you saw and who you went on dates with seemed arbitrary. People were making decisions based on availability and mood at any given moment, rather than anything strategic.
One night, playing dice with Devon at Clandestino in the Lower East Side, I started talking about games of chance with Joe, a lawyer playing with us. Some of the earliest dice were made of materials like shells, teeth, sticks, and fruit pits, and were usually two-sided. These dice had uneven shapes, and the archaeologist Warren DeBoer argued that playing dice is not only a game of chance, but one of expertise—how you throw the dice matters a great deal.
I liked Threes because it wasn’t purely luck, I explained to Joe between rolls. There was some skill involved, if you consider choice to be a skill. If you had two turns left, a score of three, and you roll a one and a two—should you keep them both and settle for a decent score? Or keep the one and roll again, with the hope of getting a three?
Joe, who I had met by chance, said I should read Man, Play, and Games by French sociologist Roger Caillois. I did. Caillois proposed that there are four types of games: agôn, games of skill; alea, games of chance; mimicry, games of simulation; and ilinx, games of vertigo, like spinning or getting on a rollercoaster. While agôn is about discipline and perseverance, alea (Latin for dice) is a game of destiny.
For me, newly single, life had taken on an alea-ic quality. In the book, The Taming of Chance, Ian Hacking writes about a shift in the 19th century away from a deterministic universe where everything could be explained by its causes toward one where some events could not. In a deterministic world, even the outcome of a coin flip could be predicted with enough information about how the coins were tossed. If the world appeared chaotic, it was because of ignorance, not actual chaos.
By embracing probability, “a space was cleared for chance,” Hacking wrote. The flip of a coin had no predetermined outcome. After a breakup, comes a similar transformation. The universal laws of your partnership that explained your actions, whereabouts, and feelings, lose authority. You realize that maybe those laws were not so universal in the first place. Actually, “the world is irreducibly chancy,” as Hacking wrote.
This was thrilling at first but come winter, the chanciness of online dating was wearing off, and dice along with it. By February, I had grown weary of alea, of luck. The novelty of an endless stream of random dates was wearing thin, and I was craving a game that I could master, a re-commitment to skill, to agôn. This, in part, is what brought me to bridge.
I started reading the New York Times bridge column also by chance. One night, on a date, a bartender mixed us Manhattans and asked if I had ever heard of a column in the paper dedicated to describing bridge games. The column hadn’t run in seven years, but he sent me an email with links to it. I stopped going on dates with that guy, but I continued to read the archives of the bridge column.
I didn’t know how to play bridge, and for the bridge-naive, the writing about it reads like romantic, absurdist poetry. “It shows slam interest but with no heart control, because you did not control-bid (cue-bid) four hearts,” wrote Phillip Alder, the final Times bridge columnist in a typical offering. One of my favorite columns closes: “When in a slam, since you cannot afford (m)any losers, count winners.”
When the column ended, in 2015, more than two thousand people wrote to Margaret Sullivan, then the New York Times’ Public Editor, to complain, pledge their devotion, or pay their respects to the column.
I decided this was the game I wanted to pursue. It had the social element of dice, because you needed a partner, yet it relied more on skill than luck. A study on bridge from 2020, confirmed this, calling it a “mind-sport,” a game “primarily based on intellectual rather than physical skill.”
“A passion for bridge is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t share it,” David Owen wrote in The New Yorker, in 2007. “One attraction is the sense of endlessly unfolding complexity: the more you learn, the less you feel you know.”
During the depression and war years, bridge hit something of a stride, as millions of couples played bridge together. Bridge has even led to heartbreak. In the 1920s, a woman in Chicago sued her husband for divorce because of a poor bridge move, and in Kansas City in 1929, Myrtle Bennett shot and killed her husband to death when he put down the wrong cards. Bloodshed be damned, by the 1960s and ‘70s, 44 percent of Americans played bridge.
I was hooked, too. I went to England for a work conference and looked up whether the Times of London still had a bridge column. What luck! They did. A couple of cold emails to their bridge columnist Andrew Robson later, and I had plans to play my first game at Robson’s bridge club in Parsons Green, a residential neighborhood about 30 minutes by train from Buckingham Palace.
I brought along an intriguing bridge partner, a friend of a friend, who I had met in New York in January. We shared a number of specific interests: labyrinths, dice, utopian societies. He also had a partner—not a bridge partner, a romantic one. “I can’t start something with you,” he said to me as he left the city. Bad luck, I had thought. Bad timing. Then, some different luck: we would be in London at the same time, months later. I asked him if he wanted to play bridge with me.
When we arrived the club was deserted, a class had just ended. Robson, a lanky man with angular facial features ushered us to one of the dozens of tables set up for cards. His partner, Nick, joined, and Robson handed me the deck to deal. You need four people to play bridge. The cards are divided evenly amongst the players, 13 each, and the goal of the game is to to get a certain number of “tricks,” or to win a number of rounds.
The first part of bridge is called bidding or “the auction”—and it’s when you and your partner use code and signaling to describe the cards in your hand. The goal is to make a contract for a certain number of tricks you’re going to win between the two of you, and which suit will be the trump suit—the suit that beats out all other suits. Whoever wins the bidding is called “the declarer,” and their partner puts their cards down on the table and is called “the dummy.” They do nothing for the rest of the game, except observe. Then, the game is played as a card from each hand is played and tricks are won and lost.
Bridge has a dictionary-length amount of jargon, lingo, and strategy but above all, “it’s a partnership game, that’s the most important thing about it,” Robson told us. Artificial intelligence, which can beat humans in chess or Go, can play bridge—but it cannot do the bidding portion of the game.
My partner and I were new friends, and newer bridge players. There was a quiet intensity coming from behind his round glasses as he surveyed his cards, occasionally glancing up at me with a meaningful smile. He had learned the rules bridge a few days before, just so he could play with me. I tried to focus on Robson’s directions, and not our feet nearly touching under the table.
We didn’t know the unspoken language of bidding—what certain choices meant about indicating to each other the cards we were holding. Yet we managed to win our last game. Robson claimed he was dealt a bad hand that round. In duplicate bridge, or competitive bridge, the entire room is dealt the same hand—reducing the impact of luck. We were playing “rubber bridge,” bridge that is still somewhat subject to the luck of the draw.
In bridge, when you make a bid, you’re making a prediction—or a promise—for how you’ll perform in the game. By bidding “two spades,” I’m saying that spades will be the trump suit, and that I will win two tricks more than six: eight.
As a single person, I realized I had met others who I could easily make a bid that our exchange would last a couple dates above average before it fizzled out. Or that there will be certain qualities of our connection that win out over others; trump suits. But it still felt ultimately like a guess. For instance, I might have bid at one point that I would still be with my ex. Now I was playing bridge with a near-stranger in London, with no promise of what we might be to each other in the future. It was clear to me I wanted more than a friendship, but I wasn’t sure what game we were playing.
Robson looked over my bridge partner’s hand, and offered some advice. “You’ve got two quite decent options here,” he told him. “One of them is to lead with heart, because you're pretty good in hearts, and also the dummy has got only one rubbishy heart. It looks like there may be some future for you in hearts.”
A few days later, I was adjusting to the heavy humid Florida air from the cool mist of London when I rang the doorbell of Phillip Alder, the New York Times bridge columnist. There were signs that a bridge aficionado lived inside. A statue of men hunched over a table playing cards was to my left, and the glass doors were embossed with playing cards.
Alder lives near Jupiter, Florida, close to Palm Beach. He welcomed me into his home’s cool entryway with a deep voice and a drawling British accent, which he’s held onto despite many years in the US. Alder started writing the bridge column in 2005 after lengthy friendships with the previous columnists. “Bridge, of all the card games, by far has the least luck involved,” Alder said to me, when I asked him his thoughts about chance. “It’s the most skillful game.”
We sat at a small table near a window facing a back patio. My partner was Sarah, a middle-aged blonde woman who took bridge lessons from Alder. Alder paired up with Frani, who played with him at nearby bridge clubs. There was little teaching; Alder dealt and we immediately started the game.
Though it was my second time playing, I was more confused than my first. I couldn’t understand Sarah’s cues, and with each card I played, I was wracked with doubt. I didn’t play very well, and Sarah and I lost again and again.
Books for beginners at bridge are 200 pages long, Alder assured me. You need multiple lessons just to start crawling, let alone walk or run. When he taught beginner’s bridge at the Harvard Club in New York, he told his classes that even if they saw him every week for two hours for the next year, their play would still be “appallingly bad.”
We stopped playing and Alder poured us glasses of white wine, and put out cheese and crackers. Bridge is more than just learning the rules, he told me. “The biggest plus of the game, it’s a social interaction with somebody else,” he said. “Also the biggest problem of the game: you have to get on with your partner.”
I thought of my bridge partner from London, and wondered what he was doing. We had decided it was best not to communicate too much while he figured a few things out. I couldn’t help but feel I didn’t have as much fun, or play as well, because the social dynamics had changed with who I was playing with. Despite all my studying, the lesson was clear: skill alone wasn’t enough.
“You can have two really good players and it doesn’t quite work,” Robson had told us in London. “I always thought that bridge is 30 percent individual A and their skill, 30 percent individual B, and 40 percent the interaction between the two.”
I sometimes view the end of my last relationship as a failure of skill. Maybe we relied too much on alea, not enough on agôn, to keep the game going. All games have rules that supplant the typical rules of ordinary life, Caillois wrote. These rules are “precise, arbitrary, unexceptionable.” To play Threes or bridge, you must adhere to the rules, or you’re not playing the game. The number three equals zero in Threes, the Ace is the highest card in bridge, the declarer’s partner must be the dummy. To resist these rules means you’re no longer playing Threes or Bridge, you’re playing nothing. Relationships acquire their own set of rules, and maybe one or both of us stopped playing by them as a way of ending the game.
In dating, I found that people regard the game differently: some play it as a skill game, and others as luck. Some of my friends tumble from relationship to relationship, letting luck take the wheel, driving them from spark to lucky spark, following the roll of the dice. Others more methodically deal the cards, considering their bids.
Dice can be a relief, to hand over more control to chance. It was for me, when I was first single. When we play a game of alea, we are participating in the hope for a miracle. It’s why games of chance continue to prosper. Bridge is more brutal: your flaws are on full display, yet so are your skills. What both games offer is a clear indication of what rules you are playing by. In life, luck and skill are confused. “In games, the role of merit or chance is clear and indisputable,” Caillois wrote. “In one way or another, one escapes the real world and creates another.”
We’re not so fortunate in relationships. There are countries in which games of chance are illegal or subject to regulation, but games of skill are not—the distinction takes on a technical and official importance. I had entered the world of both extremes, through dice and bridge, yet I can’t say if I was regulating my own life, if I would treat dating as a form of gambling.
The phrase “lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” exists in some form in multiple languages—German, French, Russian, Spanish— and the saying can be interpreted a number of ways. It might be that a person can only be lucky in one domain of their life at a time. If the deck or cards are being kind, then your love life might be suffering. Or it could mean that by putting too much attention on playing games, other parts of your life, like love, will wither from lack of attention.
A couple months after we played bridge in London, and I played in Florida, my bridge partner told me he was separated— available for something more than cards. This month, a year or so after my dice days, I sat in the passenger seat while watching my bridge partner, now my boyfriend, drive us north into New England to meet his family.
Some basic bridge math shows that there are 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands that can be dealt. Why did I fall for this person, and not any of the others I had met while single? It wasn’t a matter of skill. There was some unnameable chancy quality, like the chemistry that emerges from two great bridge partners that is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t predict how it will turn out in bridge, or in love. In the book How to Play Bridge With Your Spouse … And Survive! Roselyn Teukolsky wrote that, “I always thought my husband and I would be champions. Sadly, though, it’s a game that forces you to accept your limitations.”
Caillois wrote that games could be, and often were, combined. Agôn plus alea is a game where you use your skills in the face of what chance throws your way. I can tell that the rules of play of my new relationship are different than the last. And my forays into games where one presides over the other, first dice, and then bridge, have made me realize that actually, one needs the other.
What might be most important is the feeling of being lucky. Research shows that when people believe they are lucky, their skill often increases. If you tell people to putt a golf ball, and tell some of them the ball is lucky, those people will perform better. Students who had lucky charms remember more on memory tests when they’re allowed to keep their charms with them. People who believe that they are inherently lucky, and not just fleetingly lucky, are more motivated, and willing to persist at difficult tasks.
I still carry my dice in my purse, though they get much less use now. My friend Devon says that as she’s shaking the dice in her hands, she can sometimes feel the exact moment to let go. A sensation will come over her, and she’ll know she’s about to get lucky. I’ve seen it happen. I don’t know if she’s very lucky, or very skillful, but when the threes appear, it doesn’t matter. She collects her winnings, we put down new bets, and get ready to roll again.
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