In the space of three years Floris Tulner has come a long way: from learning bridge at the kitchen table with his parents-in-law to participating in the European Universities Mind Sports Championship 2019 in Budapest. This international 'athlete' thinks more students can follow his example, provided they love card games and are prepared to invest a serious amount of their time.

“Bridge is a game in which you need to play the detective and solve a problem. There's certain information you don't have and you have to try and get it by using a coded language, that's the bidding process. After the bidding, you try to make the number of tricks (win the number of rounds) that you have said you would during the bidding. Every game is interesting and you learn new things every time.”

Floris thinks bridge is a fair game. "A bunch of you take turns playing the game with the same hand of cards and then you compare your scores. That's why you always keep your cards separate after you've played them; you keep them on your own pile. The pack of cards isn't shuffled, instead your set of cards is passed to another player to use.” This way of playing does mean you have to join a club to play bridge and that the game is not often played at home.

The members of a bridge club tend to be older people - which is only natural when most people take it up later in life, or even after they retire. Floris doesn't have a problem with this: “With my girlfriend I'm a member of BC70 in Eindhoven and there and at tournaments people are always really happy to see us. Bridge players like to see young people joining in. They sometimes start talking about their grandchildren, who are our age, but mostly they prefer to talk about the game.”

Spades

Math student Floris was used to playing card games. “At study association GEWIS we often play Spades and sometimes a Dutch game called 'rikken' that is similar to Solo Whist.” He joined the Dutch Bridge Association (NBB) before he joined a club. “Through the NNB we had the chance to take part in youth training camps. After that, we were invited to take part in the European Universities Mind Sports Championship 2019 in Budapest. But first we had to meet some requirements: we had to put together our own team of four and at least two people had to be studying at the same university. And we had to write a plan to promote bridge to young people. Fontys student Tim van den Essen and I formed a team with two econometrics students from Tilburg University.”

The plan they came up with was to run a bridge course at both universities. The course in Tilburg is already running, Floris tells us.