r/bridge

I would love to know how people are reacting to BBO's ugly change in policy, forcing you to pay-to-play.

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Hi! I have a group of 4 people who live in Columbia County NY, close to the Western Mass border (close-ish to Lenox, Great Barrington, etc). We are looking for a private instructor. We are all complete beginners. Also open to a private instructor who is virtual. Thank you!

What is “Social” duplicate Bridge? It is almost the same as sanctioned duplicate Bridge games (sanctioned by The ACBL, which awards master points) and which are are hosted by your local Bridge club and there are sectional regional and national tournaments also.

However, a “social” duplicate game doesn’t award master points, and there are far fewer procedural rules. The emphasis here is on having fun, playing good Bridge, making friends and the level of competition is strictly up to you.

Who would be interested in this type of duplicate Bridge? A person who has been playing casual Bridge and wants to test their skills in a game where success doesn’t depend on whether you get good cards or not.

The other category of people would be “been there done that”, played sanctioned duplicate Bridge and loved it, but now they’re older and less competitive or didn’t love it because their fellow competitors tended to be more focused on making sure that you follow the procedural rules than on having fun.

We have been running a duplicate game here in Palm Desert, California for the last several years. At the height of the season, we get 11 tables and everyone goes home with a smile on their face. We use duplicate boards, duplicate, bidding boxes, and a software app called Dupscore that allows us to input our scores at the table after each hand. It also tallies up the results and keeps running year long total points earned by each player, as well as several different analyses of each game.

If you are interested in more information on this, please feel free to make comments.

Bridge is complex because it's several skills stacked on top of each other. The mechanism of the game, the ‘playing for tricks’, is fairly simple but bidding is a coded language with inference, declarer play is its own logic puzzle and, most difficult, defense is this problem card play, signaling and timing coupled with inference that can’t really be shared with one’s partner.

It's like trying to learn chess, poker and ballroom dance at the same time.

There is a temptation to work at learning and using many conventions, as if possession of facts is the key to success. In trying very hard - and mostly failing – to become a good bridge player, I’ve come to believe that the most important skill and the most difficult to acquire is judgement. Not the mechanics of bids or card play, but that feel for how to weigh what one sees and how to think about what is right and when to use any of those bits of knowledge.

Trying to gain experience and learn only by learning conventions and playing is a bit like learning to box by finding a ring, putting on gloves and climbing in.

In the last few weeks, I have begun taking individual lessons in an atypical manner. Rather than playing with my teacher as partner, he logs onto a bridge site with three robots as players and shares his screen with me. We bid and play hands, I ask questions ad lib and I am able to understand how he thinks about every puzzle that appears, from making inferences about opponents’ and partner’s hands from the bids to actual card play.

He emphasizes counting and, so far, I am enjoying this experience and feeling quite a bit more comfortable in planning both declarer play and defense.

I'm taking a beginner bridge course offered by the local bridge club in town. They play / teach 2/1, but I'm getting super confused and would like to supplement the lessons by reading beginner books, watching videos, and ideally practicing bidding & playing bridge against bots. Unfortunately everything I've found teaches the American Standard system. Can anyone recommend resources that teach the 2 / 1 system? Thx!