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, » next