This is why you should play Bridge to become a great leader

War games are addictive and while some of the games like “Age of Empires” are commended for encouraging the youth to think more strategically, a vast majority of these games contain violence, which may have adverse effects on the psyche of the young.

Therefore, many parents encourage their wards to invest more time in mastering strategic board games like Chess instead of video games. But, war veterans like Gen. Dwight Eisenhower point out that “No board game can replicate the conditions of the battlefield or the manoeuvres of geo-strategy”. What then is a viable alternative to the war video games?

Bridge, the most popular card game in the world (played by an estimated 60+ million players) teaches you more about strategy and war than any other game can; even more than Chess.

Bridge is considered more of a strategic game than chess because unlike chess, Bridge is a team game and depends considerably on the subtleties of communication.

Interestingly, these communications (when players call out to their teams/allies while bidding or playing a significant card) may or may not necessarily be the truth. So the players have a choice – to tell the truth or deceive their opponents.

Consequently, every message the player sends needs to be ‘decoded’ correctly by his/her allies and incorrectly by their foes. Remember, unlike in chess where the opponent’s counters are visible, in bridge, a player’s cards are visible only to her/him. This corroborates much more closely with battles and wars where propaganda, feints and outright deceit is used in equal measure to outfox and out-manoeuvre the enemy.

Compare this to chess where machines have long beaten human players (IBM scored a priceless PR coup when it used its super-computer named Deep Blue to beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s). While it did seem improbable at the time, the fact is that it wasn’t difficult for a computer capable of making billions of calculations each second by analysing its opponent’s moves. But the same is not possible with Bridge because computers cannot distinguish between truth and lies (eventually of course, I expect artificial intelligence to remove this disparity).

History records great generals and leaders as bridge players. America’s Gen. Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower, who went on to become America’s 34th President from 1953 to 1961 was an avid bridge player. One of his compatriots, Gen. Alfred Gruenther, subsequently the NATO Commander, also shouldered the responsibility of being the president of the World Bridge Federation for many years.

President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and a World War I veteran John Foster Dulles was so passionate about the game that in addition to being one of the President’s bridge partners, he encouraged the state department to conduct bridge tournaments across US embassies and consulates the world over. Closer home, Deng Xiaoping, the builder of modern China, was an avid bridge player who, it is said, even had a private railroad car for his games. One of India’s finest soldiers, Sam Manekshaw, the ‘first Indian Army officer to be promoted to Field Marshall’ was a bridge player as was his friend and colleague Lt Gen JFR Jacob, the man who, along with the Field Marshal, played a larger than life role during the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971.

I will quote arguably the world’s greatest war leader and strategist – the legendary Chinese military general Sun Tzu. His philosophy on leadership is immortalised in his widely influential book, The Art of War. His take on ‘deception’ forms one of his fundamental philosophies on leadership where he says, “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” I’m quite sure, he would’ve made an incredible Bridge player.

(The article is authored by Kiran Nadar, Director, HCL Corporation and an internationally renowned Bridge player and Captain of Team Formidables)

(Image: Reuters)