With some players in their 70s and opponents young enough to be their grandchildren, age is just a number for bridge competitors engaged in a battle of wits at the Asian Games.
Masood Mazhar was born in the final months of World War II and before the partition of India and Pakistan, while Taiwan’s Chen Kuan-hsuan is just 23.
“My father used to play so I’ve been playing all my life,” said the 78-year-old Mazhar, competing for Pakistan.
Photo: AFP
People have enjoyed variations of bridge for centuries, but the tactical card game is a relatively new discipline at the Asian Games, only becoming a medal event in 2018.
Players sit in fours at square tables, working in pairs to win as many “tricks” as they can in each round.
After all these decades, the game never gets old for Mazhar, who said he began entering competitions in the mid-1980s.
“You learn every day. Every board, you learn, you never get the same thing again ever,” he said, referring to the hands of cards players get dealt each game. “Everything is new every time — it’s an adventure.”
Bridge is usually associated with older generations and the majority of players at the Games are older than 40.
Chen wants to change all that.
She played with her university’s bridge club and at youth tournaments before graduating into the World Team Championships and now the Asian Games.
“I seek self-fulfillment through bridge competitions,” she said.
She said that bridge players must “maintain good relations with your teammates and partner ... and use logic and inference to complete each move and each calculation” — a challenge she loves.
“I hope that by competing I can draw the attention of more young people, not just the ones who already play bridge,” she said.
Mazhar said the problem is that young people simply do not have time to get into bridge these days.
“If you really want to play good bridge, you have to give a lot of time, and that means you have to practice at least three to four hours a day,” he said.
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