Not your grandma's game: Why you should be playing bridge.

J-P Voillequé
http://voilleque.com/

Legal beagle, cook, and gentleman's gentleman, J-P is a perennial proposer for Ignite Portland. Interested in everything, he nonetheless strives to focus on work culture, intellectual property, corporate law, and learning as play.

There are 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 possible deals in contract bridge. If that's not enough to get your coder brain racing, consider this: bridge is a universal language (with regional dialects!), creates conversation, and is one of the deepest things you can do with a deck of cards. Naturally recession-proof, bridge teaches logic, improves memory, and involves snacks.

And despite what you may have heard, the basics are easy. One-minute-four-slides easy.

Join the legion of Portland techies who play bridge. (The legion currently has a membership of one, so there's ample opportunity for leadership roles!)