  Contract bridge occupies nowadays a position of great prestige being,
together with chess, the only mind games officially recognized by the
International Olympic Committee. In the present paper an innovative method for
assessing the total performance of bridge- players' belonging to groups of
special interest(e.g. different bridge clubs during a tournament, men and
women, new and old players, etc) is introduced, which is based on principles of
fuzzy logic. For this, the cohorts under assessment are represented as fuzzy
subsets of a set of linguistic labels characterizing their performance and the
centroid defuzzification method is used to convert the fuzzy data collected
from the game to a crisp number. This new method of assessment could be used
informally as a complement of the official bridge-scoring methods for
statistical and other obvious reasons. Two real applications related to
simultaneous tournaments with pre-dealt boards, organized by the Hellenic
Bridge Federation, are also presented, illustrating the importance of our
results in practice.
