Letter to the Editor
Neuropathological diagnosis of tumour and bridge card game. Some personal remarks and considerations (Letter to the Editor)

The process of making neuropathological diagnosis based on a tissue sample taken by a neurosurgeon may be envisaged as a kind of “bidding” resembling very much the one in the bridge card game. What makes both seemingly incomparable processes in fact conceptually very much close to each other? I will try to explain but first, though bridge is rather a popular game, I would like to present just the basic features and rules of the game in a simplified way to make my point and this text comprehensible to those that do not know the game. Bridge is the card game where two pairs of players are competing (each pair is a team). Two members of each pair sit at opposite sides of a square table. To win the game, the pair has to collect a predefined number of points (100). The first phase of the game after each new deal of cards is called “bidding”. During bidding, which is a form of an auction, the players, seeing only the cards of their own, in a formalized way of symbolic communication (so called a bidding system) try to achieve the best possible (optimal) “bid” in relation to the value (or “power”) of the cards they have received in a particular deal. The final “bid” ('the contract') that is the result of bidding, denotes the number of tricks a given pair of players hopes to win. The next phase is a play the outcome of which clears whether the bid was truly optimal, or in other words, whether the number of tricks matches the level of the contract achieved in the bidding phase.
I hope that this somewhat oversimplified description of the bridge card game will suffice to understand my thesis that bridge and neuropathological diagnosis of tumour have lots in common if one makes an assumption that making the neuropathological diagnosis is a form of a bidding and the following course of disease is a kind of “play” that may prove or (sometimes unfortunately) disprove our “bid”, i.e. the diagnosis. It turns out that analogies between the formal conditions and rules of reasoning and the conduct in both so incomparable activities as a card game and the tumour diagnosing are surprisingly significant.
Firstly: Like in bridge, the neuropathologist “plays in a pair”. It is first of all a pair with a neurosurgeon. In this pair (also like in bridge) each of them does not see each other’s cards. In the case of a neurosurgeon “the value of the cards”...


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