Post-pizza yesterday played Albatross for a while, and I joined in because I was feeling too stubborn to let the fact that I'm useless at it put me off.

For those who haven't encountered it, Albatross is a Camgeek-local whist/bridge variant which evolved during an attempt to extend bridge to more than four players. Partnerships aren't fixed: the bidding phase can choose any two players to be in a partnership against all the others, and then the play is largely traditional whistalike and the contract is either made or it isn't. I'm not a bridge player because the bidding's so impenetrable, but the Albatross bidding lacks all the really complex system stuff and is just about manageable to my poor little brain.

I've always found Albatross a bit depressing, because splitting a 52-card pack between (as it was last night) six or seven players tends to leave you with very poor hands a lot of the time, since there just aren't that many high cards to go round. So it was to my own great surprise that in last night's session I was dealt two hands actually worth bidding on, and in one of those hands I ended up in a moderately ambitious contract and actually made it, which made a nice change and I really enjoyed playing.

I think I'm gradually starting to deal with my major problem with whist variants, which is that I spent a lot of my schooldays playing Hearts-type games in which you're always trying not to win tricks, so the tactics you'd use when you want to win tricks are largely alien to me. But I'm slowly beginning to get my head round them…