Board (bridge)

Rectangular aluminum board.

In duplicate bridge, a board is an item of equipment that holds one deal, or one deck of 52 cards distributed in four hands of 13 cards each. The design permits the entire deal of four hands to be passed, carried or stacked securely with the cards hidden from view. That is vital in duplicate bridge where the same deal is played by all contestants and so the composition of each hand must be preserved during and after each play of each deal. First used in 1891, then called "trays", boards have evolved in shape, size and material to the more common rectangular shape illustrated; most are now made of plastic replacing metal (usually aluminum) and leather. Many designs include some device on the back side which can hold a paper score sheet.

Leather or pliable plastic wallet-style board.

The boards are normally marked with some vital data.

• Board number – (a sequence beginning with '1') identifies the deal and helps to order the play of multiple deals;
• Compass directions – used to match the four hands to the four players at a table;
• Dealer – designates which player is the "dealer"; in duplicate bridge, the only purpose is to designate whose turn it is to make the first call of the auction;
• Vulnerability – (perhaps represented by color code; see the figure) designates which of the two partnerships are vulnerable: neither, North–South, West–East, or both.

Colloquially, the term board may refer to one deal plus its bidding and play. ("Do you remember Board 1?")

When bridge is played online, there are no physical boards, nor physical cards, but the software emulates all of the features of duplicate boards and the unit of the game is commonly called a board.

Set of boards

Stacked boards with cards inserted.

A set of boards for duplicate bridge normally contains 16 boards or a greater multiple of four. (The actual number of boards used in a particular session depends on the conditions of contest, the number of contestants, and perhaps other factors.) The dealer and vulnerability markings are standardized for each board number, utilizing all the permutations. The dealer is rotated clockwise in subsequent boards. Four combinations of vulnerabilities also change, but they are also shifted circularly after every 4 boards. Thus, a set of 16 boards has the following markings:

Board	Dealer	Vul.		Board	Dealer	Vul.		Board	Dealer	Vul.		Board	Dealer	Vul.
1	N	None		5	N	N-S		9	N	E-W		13	N	All
2	E	N-S		6	E	E-W		10	E	All		14	E	None
3	S	E-W		7	S	All		11	S	None		15	S	N-S
4	W	All		8	W	None		12	W	N-S		16	W	E-W

The scheme is repeated in the subsequent sets of 16 (i.e. boards 17-32, 33-48 etc).

Pockets

A board contains four pockets, each designed to hold thirteen playing cards. At the beginning of a session, the cards are distributed to the pockets in one of several ways:

1. Shuffle and play – a player at the first table to receive the board removes the cards from all four pockets, shuffles, cuts, deals them into four piles, and puts one pile into each pocket. It does not matter which player prepares which board. Usually, each table receives a number of boards and the players will prepare the different boards simultaneously.
2. Predealt – the sponsoring agency has prearranged the cards in the boards, and the boards are given to the players "ready to play".
3. Computer dealt – a number of boards are delivered to each table with the instruction to "sort into suits". A player takes each board and sorts the cards into suits and (usually) by rank, and places one suit face up in each pocket. Hand records are distributed to each table showing which cards are to be dealt to each hand. (Such hand records are usually prepared in advance by a computer program using a pseudorandom number generator.) The players cooperate in dealing the cards according to the hand record and placing the correct cards in each pocket. Of course, these boards will be passed to another table and never be played by the players preparing them.

No matter how the boards are prepared, they are not shuffled again during the session, and the cards in all pockets are kept face-down. Sometimes, at the end of a session or the beginning of a new session, a card or cards will be placed in the board face-up. This indicates that the board has not yet been prepared for the new session.

Apart from the cards, on pairs tournaments the board also carries a traveling sheet — a paper form where competitors at each table enter their scores. The board may contain a dedicated pocket for the traveling sheet, or it can be placed atop of one card pocket (usually, North's, since North-South pairs are responsible for filling it in).

Play

Play of each board proceeds as follows:

• The north player positions the board in the center of the table (perhaps at the top of a stack of boards).
• Each player removes the cards from the pocket in front of her.
• Each player counts her cards before looking at any card face. The director is summoned if any player does not have exactly thirteen cards.

The direction of each played card indicates winning side.

• The players look at their cards (without showing any card face to any other player at the table) and optionally arrange them according to personal preference.
• The player designated as the dealer on the board makes the first call.
• The bidding is completed and play proceeds.
• To play to a trick, each player shows a card face or places a card face up on the table in front of her. The cards belonging to two different players are never mixed together as they are in rubber bridge.
• After four cards are played to a trick, each player turns her card face down and places it in a row in front of her, overlapping left to right. If her side won the trick, it is placed straight up (facing your partner); otherwise, it is laid sideways (facing your opponents). This is used to determine how many tricks each side has won at any time.
• After the play, the scoring is agreed, and then each player gathers her own cards, shuffles them (with themselves only), and replaces them in the board pocket from which they came. The shuffle ensures that the next player can make no inference from the ordering of the cards in her pocket.