The favorite pastime of tycoons and powerbrokers had a complicated evolution. Anyone for a round of Ruff and Honors?

The gods of india rolled dice. The original spectators for the Olympics were the deities on Mount Olympus. For power titans of our generation – Deng Xiaoping, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, not to mention numerous Hong Kong tycoons – the game of choice is the challenging, cerebral and addictive game called bridge. But why do we call it bridge and where did the game originate?

Heading back into history, one is tempted to conclude that some ancient Chinese card game is bridge’s predecessor; after all, both paper and playing cards were Chinese inventions. But the furthest we can trace the game back is to medieval France and a game called trumps (played with tarot cards), which evolved into “Ruff and Honors.” A similar game was played in Turkey when British soldiers, sailors, traders and clergy were traveling the globe building an empire. Part of the cultural exchange included cards, and by the 16th century, the clergy and nobility took the game back home. They called it “whist.”

Every culture that played whist modified it. But how and when it finally got the name “bridge” remains a mystery. Was it during the Crimean War, when British troops in Istanbul strolled across the picturesque Galata Bridge every day to drink beer and play cards in bars and coffee houses across the harbor from their garrison? That’s one popular theory. But in neighboring Russia, members of the diplomatic corps were playing a card game called biritch, or Russian whist. Loosely translated, biritch means “an announcer of some news or event,” and in bridge one does announce the final contract.

In 1890, bridge was introduced to the United States and it soon displaced whist as the world’s most popular card game. In 1904, the auction principle was introduced: players bid in a competitive auction to decide the contract and declarer.

Popularizing a sport or game often requires a larger-than-life aficionado, and in the US bridge had not one but three. In 1925, Harold S Vanderbilt, America’s richest man at the time, took a cruise on the SS Finland with three fellow auction bridge enthusiasts. It was there Vanderbilt invented what we now call contract bridge by coming up with a structured set of rules, principles, treatments and an extraordinary scoring system. (Vanderbilt’s yachts were pretty famous too: he won the America’s Cup three times.)

But the man who put bridge in the American consciousness – and commercialized it – was Ely Culbertson, an organizer, player and extravagant showman. He founded a magazine called The Bridge World in 1929 and his books on bridge were best sellers. Culbertson built a network of teachers and organized competitions across the US. He also manufactured and sold bridge supplies, including Kem playing cards. He sold enough cards to end up living in a 45-room mansion in Connecticut.

Another aficionado, Charles Goren, was dubbed the “King of the Aces” in a Time magazine cover story in 1958. He wrote two hugely successful books, Contract Bridge Complete and Point Count Bidding. His system, called “Standard American” is the most widely played system in the history of the game. Goren won 34 national championships and earned a world championship title when the US team won the inaugural Bermuda Bowl in 1950.

As bridge players grew in numbers, two important organizations emerged: the ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) for players in North America, followed by the WBF (World Bridge Federation) for the international bridge community. The WBF consists of eight zonal organizations, including the Pacific Asia Bridge Federation. Its charter is to hold tournaments, establish rules and to encourage participation at all levels of proficiency and experience. Vanderbilt was the first honorary member of the WBF.

When someone says they play bridge, they mean contract bridge, the game codified by Vanderbilt. If someone says they are playing in clubs and tournaments with eight or more players, they are playing contract bridge with duplicate scoring, where the same deals are replayed by different sets of players. Duplicate bridge is purely a measure of skill because you are rated as to how well you played the hand as compared to the others; luck plays no part. Rubber bridge is the informal social form of contract bridge for four players and has a significantly different form of scoring. Avid gamblers prefer rubber bridge because the scoring system doesn’t penalize over-bidders or under-bidders; and if you are lucky enough to hold more aces and kings during the game you have a slight edge over your opponents.

Bridge is inexpensive, social and gratifying to people who enjoy stretching their minds.

Statisticians estimate that a player won’t be dealt the same hand in 685 billion games. And although it can’t be denied that bridge is a game – one played by an estimated 100 million people in 130 countries – it’s also known as a “mind sport,” along with Go, chess and draughts, as demonstrated by this month’s Mind Sports Games in Beijing, the first such event of its kind.

“It’s deliciously simple in the rules,” Bill Gates says of the game, “but deliciously complex in doing it well.”