Auction bridge

Auction bridge is a trick-taking card game played with a standard fifty-two card deck ranked ace high, and it was the dominant form of bridge before Harold Vanderbilt's 1925 refinements produced modern contract bridge. The game is first recorded as being played at Bath, England around 1904, a date corroborated by a January 1905 letter to The Times from Oswald Crawfurd describing its recent emergence. Three or four players sit clockwise and bid, as in contract bridge, to name a trump suit or no-trump contract; the bidding and card play follow essentially the same mechanics later inherited by contract bridge, though scoring differs, requiring thirty points below the line for game with only odd tricks counting toward it. Auction bridge itself displaced whist and earlier bridge variants in fashionable play, and in the United States it also overtook the game known as five hundred through the 1920s, before contract bridge in turn eclipsed auction bridge.