Quick Essay: Bidding

After the development of the modern trump suit, bidding was the next biggest addition to card games that has led to many great games and expanded possibilities especially for trick-taking games. The great game that has created such possibilities is Ombre, a game not played as often today but its influence resonates every time a contract is bid.

This article will detail with the ways contracts are bid, along with a short traipse through ways trumps are chosen.

Since the creation of the Tarot deck, the idea of a suit that is more powerful than the rest has resonated to the people. 78 cards is a costly affair so players have emulated the same power by randomly assigning a suit that will take the role of the trump suit. This is usually done by turining a card up, otherwise someone does the deed of choosing the suit of privilege based on the information he has.

Games of the latter type tended to create heirarchies of suit choice that affect the points at stake, usually as a multiplier or a base score indicator. Preference of suits are also in the bids themselves, implying a bid of a value renders those below it impossible.

In the context of Tarot games without bidding, dealer tends to get privileges, usually in the form of drawing extra cards into his hand and the subsequent discards counting into his pile. Bidding games eventually came into the scene, and the bidder only needs to win the majority of points, usually alone. Contracts usually differ in how restricted the soloist can play, from reduced talon privileges to giving the opposing team a headstart in points. We're tackling the whole Tarot subject as while it took in a good amount of influences, some elaborations only seem to have stuck in such games, we'll revisit these later.

Games of such sort came to be a bit later on the Tarot timeline, thanks to the game of Ombre, a plain-trick game where players bid for the opportunity to win more tricks than the other players, and the bids mainly differ in whether the soloist can exchange cards from the talon.

The later game of Quadrille then gave rise to changing alliances depending on a called card, the holder's identity a secret. This bidding carried on to games such as whist, where bidding categories turned from trying to win tricks a specific way as in Boston, to bidding for a specific number of tricks, as the game that will eventually become Bridge has.

The above section, but less messy

The goal of a contractor is to fulfil a contract, while defenders try to set it. As simple as that sounds, an asymmetry must take place, with the contractor given some advantage over the defenders in some cases; defenders have their strength in numbers.

Now a quick delineation between bids and feats. Some games require a bid to be made, but along with the contract a number of feats can be announced. A bid contract is the main game that the bidder must play and accomplish. Feats are extra contracts that are played along with the main game but are settled independently and do not affect the nature of the bid.

In some cases feats take place when the condition itself is met, whether or not it is announced, this usually affects the bonus. After the tricks are played, the bid is first assessed then the feats, the latter either affecting the main bid or working independent of it.

Bids in these games can be categorized on how precise the bid can be. Early bids were simply a bid to become the soloist who must now take the majority of points while the remaining players team up against him. The first elaborations are how much default advantages the soloist can surrender in exchange for a chance at a higher value game. In early talon games this meant that the highest bid is reneging the possibility of improving his hand by exchanging cards. 

Preference of suits have appeared in some games usually as a multiplier of a contract. A game of a specific suit as trump sets the value of a contract if won or lost. In games suchas Preference or Skat bidding of this kind means that the available suit games for the bidder shrinks with each higher bid.

For Whist, the change from randomly choosing the trump suit to the ability to select it has given way to interesting complications arising from the naturally simple means of selection. 

From giving the suit declarer contractor responsibilities the next step came in the form of bidding, in this case a responsibility to win the majority of tricks given the previlege of naming the trump suit. Later on the contracts became more precise, from more elaborate contracts to specific minimums to win.

Regarding feats, these extra contracts are announced in conjunction with a bid and affect scores either independently or affecting the bid's score. Achieving or failing feats do not affect the status of the bid, but in some cases involves more scores than the bid itself.

A more novel development is exact bidding, wherein an exact value must be wagered and scores depend on whether the goal is hit or not, with varying degrees of leeway.