Posted 6/17/2015.

A favorite topic among duplicate bridge players is just who’s to blame for a  particular screw-up.  Bridge is a somewhate unique sport in that it requires two players per side, and both players in a partnership contribute to success or failure.  A really good player can make up for many (but not all) mistakes by a weaker player, but winning partnerships require that both players minimize their mistakes. Most established (and  all successful) partnerships have developed a way of handling the blame issue in a way that doesn’t degrade or destroy the partnership.  One pair that I know describes this process  as ‘blame management’.  The idea, so they say (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) is to bid in a way that ensures that any blame for mistakes will fall on one’s partner rather than oneself.  This incentivizes each partner to bid as correctly as possible given the partnership agreement (their convention card) and the particular circumstances at the time.  Having ‘a bright idea’ and ‘going off piste’ might work, but if it doesn’t the blame will fall squarely on  the errant partner (and even if it  does work, it might incur significant blame for not adhering strictly to the partnership agreement).

I liked this idea of ‘blame management’ so much that I have tried to incorporate it into my own partnerships; I try to  get the idea of blame management out in the open early on, so my partner is (hopefully) comfortable with the idea of assigning blame in an open and humorous way, rather than letting issues fester.  Lately I have started describing this as ‘moving the blame chip from one side of the table to the other’, and that got me thinking that maybe I could use my engineering and 3D printing capabilities to fabricate an actual, physical ‘Blame Chip’.

I started this project as I do almost all my new projects – researching on the internet with Google.  I found card and pip images, and then I found a set of zip files with 3D models of all the various card elements.  From this I extracted the 4 pips I needed (clubs, hearts, spades, diamonds), and arranged them circularly around the word ‘BLAME’, as shown in the following screenshot.

TinkerCad design for the Duplicate Bridge Blame Chip

Then I printed it on my MicroCenter 3D Pro 3D printer, using blue and white (the two colors I had on the machine at the time).  Here are some photos of the result.

3D printed version of the ‘Duplicate Bridge Blame Chip’. The chip laying on the pen is actually two chips glued together to form a 2-sided chip.

The items that come off the printer are blank on the reverse side, so to get a real 2-sided ‘poker chip’ style item, I simply printed two chips and glued them together.  In the photo above, the chip leaning on the pen is a 2-sided version, while the others are single-sided.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, as the sudden appearance of a real, physical ‘blame’ chip at the table may have unintended (read ‘disastrous’) consequences.  My wife has suggested these might make great bridge party favors, and I may try giving some of these away to established partnerships before I get too ambitious. Also, I will probably try printing some with white pips on a red background to see how they look.

Frank