Bridge whist

Bridge Whist and Straight Bridge are retronyms coined to distinguish the earliest form of Bridge that was played from 1890 in Paris from latter forms of Bridge which included bidding.^[1]

Bridge Whist was a form of Russian Whist known as Biritch or Britch around the Eastern Mediterranean, where instead of a simple auction as in Yeralash, Dealer declared a trump suit or NT and played their partner's hand as Dummy.

The earliest rules for Biritch were published in 1886 in England by John Collinson, a railway engineer and financier who played the game in Constantinople with Russian Emigres in the 1880s. The form of Bridge played in Paris the 1890s that quickly replaced Whist in clubs of New York and England was the same as Collinson's, except that 1NT was 12 points a trick instead of Ten.