Perhaps befitting their use in so many magicians’ stage acts, the origins of the playing card are mysterious. Historians agree that they were invented in China before spreading to the Islamic world with the Moguls, but how they arrived in Europe is less clear. Some experts claim that they were imported by the Saracens in the 12th-century; others that they were introduced by Venetian traders two hundred years later.

The roots of modern bridge are far more easily traced. The game derives from whist, rudimentary versions of which were popular in Britain in the early 16th-century. In whist, two pairs of players are each dealt thirteen cards from a 52-card deck and attempt to score as many tricks as possible. There was no auction to determine the trump suit as there is in modern bridge and the scoring was vastly simpler, but an enthusiasm for the game was nonetheless seen as a sign of breeding and intelligence. As Edgar Allen Poe wrote in his famous short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue of 1841, “the best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind”.

In the 1880s a pamphlet was published in Britain on Russian Whist, or biritch, which was apparently popular in Russia, Turkey and Greece. The OED claims that biritch provided us with the origin of the word ‘bridge’, although an apocryphal story suggests that the game’s name referred to an actual bridge across the Bosphorous, beyond the span of which was a café frequented by card players.

By the end of the 19th-century, bridge whist had replaced whist as the most popular card game in Britain, although it was rarely played in people’s homes, having a reputation among the late Victorians as a game for inveterate gamblers. By the turn of the century bridge had evolved once again, becoming auction bridge and requiring players to bid in a competitive auction to determine which suit would be trumps, an innovation introduced by a group of bored British civil servants living in India. This notion that a declarer may score towards the game only for those tricks which he has contracted to win was to become a fundamental principle of the modern game.

Another offshoot of auction bridge was the French game plafond, which required each partnership to state the number of tricks that they were going to take. It was while playing a rubber of plafond on a transatlantic cruise in 1925 that the millionaire railroad tycoon Harold Vanderbilt introduced scoring bonuses. Vanderbilt formalised his new rules, one of which was that a partnership had to commit to a contract of achieving a certain number of tricks or face a scoring penalty. Within a few years this new contract bridge became ubiquitous: the first World Championships took place in 1937 and were followed in 1960 by the first team Olympiad. The International Olympic Committee even recognised Bridge as a sport in 2002, although it has yet to be admitted into the Olympic Games.

Yet Bridge’s global popularity was not shared by everyone. In 1949, Chairman Mao tried to ban the game, which he saw as too refined and bourgeois. Plenty of other world leaders have been fans, though; Churchill and Thatcher were both bridge players, while Microsoft magnate Bill Gates, introduced to the game by his friend Warren Buffett, is such a keen player that he regularly pays for personal tutorials with top professionals.