dermoth

Thank you all very much for your responses. All highly informative, and I shall be following them up in good time, but for the moment, I'm mildly ecstatic with the "How To Play Bridge" doodad in the Windows version of BBO. Particular thanks for this! Only if you'll be my partner. :)

Hello! I'm attempting to learn how to play this fascinating game, but I find myself a touch overwhelmed by the complexities of it, and I was hoping to get some advice on... various questions. I feel I should state at this point that I'm an expert poker player (having played professionally or semi-pro for five years), as well as a pretty useful backgammon and Scrabble player; your standard highly competitive games-obsessed sort, in short. I'm sure I have a good chance of being a pretty good bridge player, too, but I'm having some trouble overcoming the initial "utterly clueless" stage. All help would be greatly appreciated, but, specifically; 1. I see a lot of bad poker players, every day. Obviously, they're always welcome at a poker table, but I suspect that my incompetent Bridge play will not be so warmly received on BBO. I see the "relaxed" games lobby, but just how relaxed is it? If I blunder onto a table and bid (and play) like a chimp, will I make lots of enemies? 2. I've discovered a couple of online resources for beginners; the Durham University pages are quite good, but I could definitely use more. Any links to helpful content aimed at novices would be warmly received. (I have lots of expert-level material; my parents were experts, and I have inherited a lot of literature on the subject, but it may as well be written in Esperanto for all the use it is to me. I also have a bunch of A4 pages of my father's system notes. Again, incomprehensible - a link to a glossary of Bridge terms/notation would be particularly useful here). Thanks in advance!