NEXT month Ireland hosts not one but two great contests between America and Europe. Before the two continents go head-to-head in the Ryder Cup golf competition at the K Club, they will engage in hand-to-hand combat in a bridge match sponsored by the American investor Warren Buffett, one of the world's richest men.
The card game may not attract as big an audience as the golf, but the event will be run in a similar format. Twelve players will represent each continent and perform in pairs.
There will be no prize money at stake. Instead, the teams will be competing for the Warren Buffett Cup, which will now become a biennial event staged just before the Ryder Cup and in the same country.
Buffett, who became a keen bridge player after befriending Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, lent his support to the event after being contacted by Irish and British bridge players who wanted a tournament to run alongside the golf.
His new championship revives a tradition of transatlantic games held in the 1930s, which pulled in huge crowds and rivalled other sporting events in popularity.
The hope is the tournament will again make bridge a spectator sport, and the games are to be shown live on the internet.
Commenting on the competition Buffet said: "I spend 12 hours a week - a little over 10% of my waking hours - playing the game. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get by on less sleep in order to work in a few more hands.
"It's an honour to be associated with the Transatlantic Challenge featuring 24 of the best players in the world."
The Contract Bridge Association of Ireland (CBAI), which has 35,000 registered players, will host the event in Templeogue, Dublin, three days before the golf tournament in Kildare. The European team includes Tom Hanlon and Hugh McGann, two Irish players, and Norberto Bocchi and Giorgio Duboin, the current world champions.
Paul Porteous of the CBAI said: "There is quite an amount of synergy between golf and bridge. There is hardly a golf club that doesn't have a bridge association. The Buffett cup means we now have an opportunity to put bridge on a world stage."
Buffett travels the world for bridge competitions, where he is sometimes partnered by Gates. It was during the world championships played in Verona, Italy, last June that Buffett pledged $31 billion (24 billion) to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As one of bridge's best-known players, Buffett has been happy to act as an ambassador for the game, which would be generally regarded as intellectual and only for older people. In an interview with Forbes Magazine in 1997, the billionaire said: "It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every 10 minutes. In the stock market you don't base your decisions on what the market is doing but on what you think is rational. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time."
It is estimated that 100,000 Irish people play bridge at least once a week. The growing popularity of the game has been helped by its association with enthusiasts such as Gates and Omar Sharif, the actor.
"It's not a spectator sport, and anyone who plays bridge will tell you that," said Porteous. "But if someone like Omar Sharif shows up, that brings in a crowd. Now people are starting to see that bridge is a sport which attracts all people. It unites people of all ages and abilities at one table at one time and keeps the intellect active."
Buffett is the second wealthiest man in the world, according to the annual list of the world's rich compiled by Forbes Magazine. In addition to playing games with his friends and business associates, he regularly plays bridge online.
In an interview on American television, he said he would happily pay $5m a year for the right to play bridge 12 hours a day online with his friends.
Gates and Buffett have created a 780,520 fund for school bridge programmes in America and regularly travel to junior tournaments to encourage young people to take up the game.
"It's a great mental game," said Gates at an event in Nebraska this month. "It forces you to concentrate and learn how to build partnerships." Buffett told the same audience that his concentration was so strong when he played bridge he would not notice if naked women walked past.
Andrew Kilpatrick, Buffett's biographer, noted that he played bridge with a deck of cards inscribed with "make cheques payable to Warren Buffett". He is once reported to have said: "I wouldn't mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge."