The Hangzhou Qi-Yuan Hall is in contrast to some other venue on the ongoing Asian Games. It is a towering skyscraper greater than 100 toes excessive, within the metropolis centre, and may be simply mistaken for simply one other company constructing inside a concrete jungle.

But that is the venue that homes the thoughts sports activities – Chess, Go, Xiangqi and bridge. From the twelfth flooring of the constructing, the athletes, who seem nicely into their 50s and 60s, get down the carry and step exterior the constructing to mild up their cigarettes in between periods.

“Most of the bridge players smoke,” says Pakistan workforce’s Farukkh Liaqat, as he takes a puff from his vape. “It’s long hours of play from morning 9 until 8 or 9 p.m. It’s just like coffee or tea for us, and helps us concentrate during long sessions.” The Qi-Yuan corridor is the one venue the place there may be an out of doors ashtray proper on the technical official’s exit door, and it seems to be the busiest spot within the venue.

This exercise normally occurs all through the day because the gamers bask in what they name are ‘game of percentages’, ‘anti-percentage options’, ‘permutations and combinations’ and ‘working with incomplete information’.

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Bridge is a 4 vs 4 ‘trick-taking card game’. ‘Easily the greatest source of enjoyment that four people can have with a pack of cards’ is how the official web site of the World Bridge organisation chooses to explain the game.

The sport begins with two gamers from every workforce sitting at some extent of a compass, the place the north performs the south, and the east performs the west. The gamers then kind their playing cards by rank and go well with spades, hearts, diamonds and golf equipment from the 13 playing cards they every obtain.

Opponents are separated by a wall with a gap under for dealing playing cards to one another. The sport is damaged down into two phases: bidding and play, and the target of the sport is to make methods and bidding to make contracts.

At 2 p.m. on Friday, Indian workforce’s Sandeep Thakral takes out a paper from his bag and writes down notes earlier than passing it on to his opponent from Hong Kong throughout one of many periods of the ultimate of the boys’s workforce occasion. Sandeep then carries the bag round all over the place that comprises the system notes, the place they doc their system and technique of play on a bit of paper. The system notes are then made out there for the opponents to undergo. The sport doesn’t encourage spectators within the area and is performed in near-silence with simply three different officers within the room.

And if this wasn’t complicated sufficient, gamers have a restricted authorized vocabulary by means of which they’ll talk with their companions.

To medal on the Asian Games, a workforce wants to sit down on the desk for at least ‘90 gruelling hours’ within the house of 10 days. The Indian workforce of Sandeep, Jaggy Shivdasani, Raju Tolani, Rajeshwar Tewari, Sumit Mukherjee and Ajay Prabhkar Khare did simply that to come back away with a maiden Asian Games silver medal on the workforce occasion on Friday.

This group of males, who’re aged between 45 and 65, have major jobs, which embody software program consultancy, and journey enterprise. There is a chartered accountant, a senior supervisor at HCL, the CEO of an organization and only one skilled bridge participant. “I am 49 years old, and I am the youngest,” laughs Sandeep. “We have two who are 65, two who are 57-58 and two above 50.”

Bridge gamers normally don’t sport the quintessential athletic determine, marked by a sculpted physique or six-pack abs. It is amongst a couple of sports activities the place the athlete appears identical to anybody else, with a extra lifelike bodily manifestation of ageing. Pakistan’s Masood Mazhar is 78 years previous, a full 69 years older than the youngest participant (Phillippines skateboarder Mazel Paris Alegado), making him the oldest participant on the Hangzhou Asian Games. One bridge athlete was wheeled out of the venue as a result of she had bother along with her backbone.

“Unfortunately, bridge players [from our generation] tend to have a bad lifestyle,” says Sandeep, who gained silver right here within the males’s workforce occasion. “It’s long hours of play… then long hours of analysis at the end of the day. If you lived with the bridge team, you would find us discussing what we did very late into the night. It has very little physical activity. And all of that gets associated with smoke and liquor…(laughs).”

Sandeep claims the prize cash to play in bridge doesn’t cowl their bills when enjoying tournaments. So why do they put themselves by means of the rigour?

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“The most important thing is the mental satisfaction. It’s all about the mind. It’s about the satisfaction you get when you solve a puzzle, especially one that doesn’t have enough clues. The joy of finishing a cryptic crossword, the mental thrill you get out of it, is something else. It’s not the journey, it’s the result,” says Sandeep, who has been enjoying the game for 31 years.

The sport doesn’t have {many professional} gamers within the nation, and it’s largely ardour and sacrifice which take a few of them this far.

“It was hard in the early days,” says Sandeep, who began enjoying bridge in 1992, proper after he acquired married. “It’s onerous to grasp what sort of dedication this sport requires and what number of days you might be travelling in a 12 months. Bridge is just not [something] with which you may make a residing in India. For most of us, it’s one thing that you simply do or make time for it.

“You compromise on other things [like] business or family to be able to do this. There was a time when I was out for more than 250 days a year for bridge and work combined. It’s tough with young kids and a business to run. All your vacation or your work gets planned around a tournament schedule.”

The 2018 Asian Games was the primary version when bridge was launched in a serious multi-nation occasion. Initially, there was reluctance for bridge to be added to the Asiad programme due to card video games’ affiliation with playing. While the game is now a part of the second-biggest multi-sport occasion for a second successive match, Sandeep says it’s nonetheless an enormous taboo in India.

“It’s unfortunate to see that Chess is so popular in India, but bridge which is more or as fascinating as Chess, is struggling for social acceptance. It’s fascinating because of the complexities,” says Sandeep, who started enjoying chess throughout his childhood earlier than switching to bridge.

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“How is it that we produce chess prodigies every few years but [we do] not have a Go prodigy or people who dedicate their lives to bridge?” he asks. “You will have parents who go all over the world with young chess players from the age of 10. I am where I am [Asian Games] and my wife would not even let my own kids learn bridge. That’s a tough hurdle to cross. With time hopefully, things are slow, but hopefully they are changing,” he says.

For Sandeep, who opted to remain in India to pursue his ambition of enjoying bridge on the highest stage, successful an Asian Games silver medal is a red-letter day for him.

“This has been a dream. It is what we all gave everything up for,” he says. “I studied at IIT Bombay. While my friends moved abroad, I chose to stay, and I wanted to play bridge and play for India. Hopefully, in the next few years before my bridge life ends, we will be able to make a mark on the world stage.”