I have been in the function suite of Glasgow's Radisson Hotel when the behaviour has been brash, raucous and alcohol-fuelled - and loved every minute.

Last week I walked in to find nearly 200 people seated at tables not uttering a word to the person beside them or opposite them. It was like wandering into a wedding reception where someone had just delivered a particularly rude joke about the bride, and no one knew what to say.

This, though, was not some deep family divide where everyone had fallen out, but the Commonwealth Nations Bridge Championship - a little known addition to the Commonwealth Games where every four years bridge players from the Commonwealth countries follow their sportsmen to the city that hosts the Games, to play cards.

Mention bridge, and many people might think of languid dinner parties before the war when couples would play a few hands of bridge while red-faced gentlemen splashed soda from a soda siphon into their whisky. My own card skills as a youth never made it past three-card brag and shoot ponnies - shoot pontoon to give it its full name. The nearest I got to bridge was whist, a similar trick-taking card game, but without the bidding on how many tricks you and your partner are going to take, which is what bridge is.

Or at least I think that is what bridge is. They are the friendliest of people the bridge fanatics - when they are not actually playing of course - and they tried their best to explain the game to me, although I am still bamboozled.

Steve Bailey, who showed me round the bridge championships in Glasgow, says estimates put the number of bridge players in Britain at between half a million and three million. Numbers are difficult to be accurate about because many play without being members of bridge clubs. The clubs still exist, dotted around Glasgow, with up to 200 members each who will meet up once or twice a week to play.

Then there are the online games, which link players around the world. "My partner last week was a guy in Honolulu," a Whitecraigs bridge player tells me. He goes online when he has an hour to spare because there are thousands of games being played globally via computer 24 hours a day.

You do not have to speak the same language as it is all down to the cards. Talking of these old dinner parties, the rules of bridge were put together by American railways billionaire Harold Vanderbilt, a champion yachtsman who had time to spare while taking his yacht through the Panama Canal.

Nowadays you do not need a dinner suit to play bridge. Just an active mind to calculate what tricks you are likely to take with your hand while absorbing the bids of your partner opposite and the other two players. Sounds a bit like chess, I tell Steve Bailey.

"Better than chess," he replied. "Chess always starts at the exact same position in every game, but bridge is always different as you are dealt a different hand each time." Or you might not be dealt a hand. The game I tiptoed into at the Radisson function suite was duplicate bridge, where the four hands dealt at a table are carefully collected in a plastic tray, kept in the same position, and passed on to the next table for the next four players to play out, and so on around the room of 40 or so tables. That way you can't blame a poor hand for losing, as the hand is going to be played on all forty tables so it will soon be apparent who has the skills to play it correctly.

As leading Scottish player Stephen Peterkin, who started playing at university, puts it: "Every hand you play is a little puzzle for seven or eight minutes, and I like puzzles."

All this is done in silence. Even the bidding is done by holding up plastic cards so you cannot be accused of having a secret code with your partner. You might have seen televised poker where gold-chain jangling, sunglass-wearing, loudmouths try to put off opponents with their incessant chatter. Not at bridge, where a general remark about the weather or how busy the traffic was, might be acceptable, but little more. A couple of Polish chaps at a Glasgow club who were chatting in Polish were quietly asked if they could stick to English just in case they were discussing their hands.

The chat comes after the game, however, when the hands are dissected and analysed, where every card played can be brought up and partners gently suggest a different course of action could have been taken.

One warning: think carefully before husbands play with their wives as partners. Many a marriage has been put under strain by partners accusing the other of poor play. Or even worse. Myrtle Bennet in Kansas shot dead her husband during a game of bridge. Shot four times, and hit him twice, yet was acquitted. The joke is told the judge let her off when she explained what her husband had bid during the game.

In another room is the main knockout championships involving teams representing the Commonwealth countries. The games are beamed into another room where spectators can pour over the cards being played. What's happening, I ask. A cheerful chap tells me: "West led the jack of clubs and declarer put up dummy's ace, felling the king. A heart to the six and ten confirmed the worst, and West continued with the nine of clubs." Now I know that is English, and I wrote it down faithfully, but what it means, I can't help you with.

"But don't be put off," says Steve. "Your local bridge club will have beginners classes. Go along and you will soon pick it up." Tempting, as the obsession of the bridge players I met is intoxicating. It just needs a televised bridge tournament to make it take off like poker. Give it the catchy title Turning Tricks and TV will snap it up.