Trump Cards and Strudel at the Manhattan Bridge Club

Soon after the buffet of cold cuts and chicken salad is cleared, the matinee begins.

In a vanilla-hued office space high above Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, the players bang on tables, shush the chatter and stare one another down fiercely, all while cracking Neil Simonesque asides.

This is the Manhattan Bridge Club, the longest-running play on the West Side.

“I call it Bridge and a Show,” Lindsey Weinger, 35, said during a break in the game on a recent Tuesday afternoon. “If you want to compete, play online. You come here for the show.”

Brian and Flo Mahony certainly have their act down, a rare married couple who play as partners. “We met in prison,” Mr. Mahony, 76, deadpanned.

“We’re attached at the hip,” Ms. Mahony, also 76, added. They ran an employment service together, hiked the Himalayas three times. They are tennis partners. “We’ve been together over 50 years but only married 33,” she said.

“We didn’t want to rush into it,” Mr. Mahony explained. “Why ruin a good thing?”

The Manhattan Bridge Club, now in its 37th year (its 9th in its current location), follows the same adage. It advertises itself as the nation’s fifth-largest bridge club, playing host to 1,500 players a week, some coming multiple times for tournaments and classes. This club has no members, but players pay $25 for a three-hour weekday afternoon tournament, with lunch and brain food like Bugles, strudel, dried prunes and Oreos.

“It’s a beautiful summer day, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” Mark Hyman, 59, said as he finished lunch with club friends.

Mr. Hyman, from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, drove a taxi for most of his life, a job he loved, until his brother-in-law, he said, made him join the family’s kosher butcher business. That lasted four long years. “At least I composed songs about it,” Mr. Hyman said.

Then he learned bridge. He became an instructor on the Queen Elizabeth 2, and now teaches at the club. Mr. Hyman’s bridge partner for the last seven years is Ruth Fennessy Moss, who just finished writing a musical about Frederick Douglass. They won the open tournament that day.

The weekday crowd skews toward the retired and the flexibly scheduled: psychiatrists, civil engineers, lawyers, rabbis, boogie boarders and Peace Corps veterans. Evening games tend to draw a younger set.

On this Tuesday, though, many of the young players were off competing in Las Vegas, said Justin Blanchard, 24. Sotto voce, he confessed his mother was a champion player at the Honors Bridge Center across town.

Others see it differently. “The East Side one is all the fancy ladies with the face-lifts and the ‘whatever’ bags in style,” one woman said, begging for anonymity so as not to appear catty. “The West Side club, if you look around, there’s a lot of grungy people — but a lot of them are scientists and authors. There are a lot of personalities here.”

For some, the club has become a second family.

“I got pregnant here,” Lauren Carajohn, 43, said.

“It’s in the cards,” her partner, Mel Schoenfeld, 70, a psychiatrist, quipped.

Her fertility doctor advised her to quit her job as a trusts and estates lawyer and pick up a hobby. She got pregnant soon after she joined the club. In her sixth month, she passed out from dehydration during a tournament, and the director did something rare for her: he stopped the game.

Nicholas and Alexander, her twins, are 5 months old now. “I call them my Bridge Babies,” Ms. Carajohn said. She returned the minute she could.

“Everything happened here,” she said.