Trust is an important thing for a partnership – especially a bridge partnership.

If you intend on sharing the same team with another bridge player, you have to trust their bidding, their ethics, and their play enough to do so.

If you don’t play from the same mindset, expect your game to be all over the place – and not as well co-ordinated as it could be.

Would you like to increase your abilities as a partnership, whether your game happens face-to-face or online?

Trust exercises help.

These are small things you can do with your bridge partner to learn how to co-ordinate better. Now, some of them might seem unusual – but bizarre can sometimes help you to play your bridge games outside the box.

Here are 3 bizarre trust exercises for improving your bridge partnership.

1. Guessing the zener cards

If you aren’t familiar with the concept, Zener cards is a simple deck originally designed by J.B. Rhine to test supposed psychic ability.

There’s probably zero chance that either you (or your bridge partner) are psychic. But using Zener cards is a great way to get you and your bridge partner to play a game that’s naturally more in tune.

Just a few times per week, guess the card. Alternate, and guess again.

If you want to remove the guessing aspect, change it to a memory game. Which three cards did your partner give you to remember last week, for example?

Zener cards can be a surprising amount of fun.

More than this, they can make you co-ordinate better – and used right, they can lead to bettering your memory.

2. Competing at first-person shooters

First-person shooter games might not seem like the most constructive pastime in the world to a great deal of bridge players – but there’s enough research supporting reaction-based gaming and why it’s good for the mind.

The average first-person shooter game is known to improve reaction time, and in some cases, has been successfully used as an aid to post-traumatic stress treatment.

Does it have anything to do with bridge?

Just like bridge, an FPS-game helps build the mind – and in some cases, can teach you and your partner how to co-ordinate your play in a fast-paced strategic environment.

Join your partner in a first-person shooter, and you might play much better bridge for it.

Not sure where to start? Popular titles include the Battlefield-series, Unreal Tournament, or Call Of Duty – and there are many, many more.

3. Duplicate crosswords

While I assume that most readers are familiar with duplicate bridge, the duplicate crossword I would like to suggest here for potentially the first time ever – and for bridge partners, of course

Choose a suitable crossword on a regular basis, and time how long it takes you to solve it (or how long it takes you to give it up). If crosswords aren’t your thing, try similar puzzles like Sudoku.

Send the same crossword to your partner, and match up your scores when both are done.

It usually doesn’t take long to get a competition going between partners.