I’ve been playing a lot of bridge lately — the card game, that is — on my tablet in bed at night. It’s a good way to wind down, and it’s also less depressing than Twitter, which is basically the pit of Sarlacc at this point: You get thrown into it and you’re digested alive for 1,000 years.

As much as I like bridge, though, I’ll never be more than a dilettante.

The game seems easy when you first learn, and I learned at the feet of my husband’s elderly grandmothers, sweet ladies who handed me the olives from their martinis and shrugged when someone made a mistake. Our fourth was often my husband’s cousin, a precocious 12-year-old who’d wander from the beach in Michigan into the family cottage in search of snacks and entertainment.

“I smell a bridge game!” he’d announce with a grin. Soon, we would be passing around a bowl of pretzels and laughing.

It was, in short, not the most competitive environment, and it gave me the mistaken impression that bridge is fun. I’ve been chasing that same feeling ever since. A couple of years ago, I tried to play with some actual, real-life serious bridge players.

“Oh, I know how to play bridge!” I announced, so sweetly naive.

Within 10 minutes, my partner was gaping at me in disbelief.

“Just because I bid clubs doesn’t mean I was strong in clubs,” she ground out. “You should have bid spades if you had a strong heart suit. Since you bid three clubs, you must have a stopper in diamonds.”

I did not, dear reader, have a stopper in diamonds, and since then, I’ve been a bit skittish about playing with humans who are any good at the game. Robots, however, are fine.

It’s impossible to disappoint a computer. I mean, the bridge game on my tablet does have this annoying habit of telling me how many tricks it would have taken if it had played my cards for me, which feels a little braggy, but otherwise it’s all good.

The computer is happy to teach me, over and over, no matter how many times I forget, what to bid after a Cappelletti, and never tires of explaining how to show how many aces I have in response to a Blackwood.

There will be, admittedly, brief snafus in which my digital partner will go from one spade directly to five diamonds, only to reveal a hand with only three cards, the highest of which is a jack, in the suit. But we all make mistakes, even AI bridge partners, and it’s worth the tradeoff for a lack of judgment.

To be really good at bridge, like the kind of person who reads and understands the newspaper bridge column, you need Rain Man-like memory skills where you can, at any point in the hand, recall exactly which of the 52 cards were played so far and who played each one. I can barely remember what day of the week it is, let alone construct a mental spreadsheet of every card and its relative position.

It’s enough to make me wish I could occasionally be the dummy.

“Isn’t that a bad word, Mom?” my son asked when he heard me refer to the extra hand I had to play.

“Not when it comes to bridge,” I answered. His forehead wrinkled, and I realized he thought I meant bridge as in a bridge, as in “A Bridge Too Far.”

Now that is a movie about bridges.

I once walked in on my husband watching “A Bridge Too Far.”

“How is it?” I asked.

“Eh,” he shrugged. “It’s hard to get too invested. The title kind of gives away the ending. It’s not called ‘A Bridge Within Reach.'”

That, though, is what I’ve found with my tablet: Bridge within reach.

As it turns out, that’s good enough bridge for me. I don’t need to have perfect recall to enjoy the game, and the computer doesn’t seem to mind, either.

Just remind me one more time, partner: What’s a Jordan NT again?

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

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