Beginner Looking for Guidance

[Tapek]

Hi all,

 

I'm pretty new to bridge, only been playing for about 8 months. I would really like to improve my game however at the moment I'm a bit lost about how I should go about it. I play at a small club (4-5 tables) once a week and trying to get a partnership going with another newer member. I know there is a lot of different ideas about bridge a lot of which I don't think I need to focus on just yet. What I am hoping for is if some people on here could give me some ideas so I might structure some kind of learning plan, or get a few ideas on what topics, concepts I should be focusing my time on to get better.

 

Any suggestions appreciated.

[vuroth]

Hmm, not sure I'm the best to offer advice, but here goes.

 

If you're playing at a club, see if they offer courses. If you'd like to play more on BBO, try joining the BIL (Beginner/Intermediate Lounge), and attend some of the courses/teaching sessions they offer.

 

Maybe a decent book or two to get you started?

 

For general advice, play slowly, count everything you can (trumps, high card points around the table, all 4 suits if you can). When bidding, play a simple system until you're comfortable with it (and know where the system seems to have problems). Really focus on the concept that every bid REFINES the previous bid, making your hand (or your partner's) more clear. Try to focus on what's going on around the table - try to guess people's hands - you'll find you'll get better in time at using the clues from bididng and play.

 

If I could narrow it down to just one thing, it would be this - count.

[Stephen Tu]

It depends on how best you individually learn.

 

Personally I prefer reading books (library or bookstore), they are cheapest and most thorough, if you choose the right authors they give accurate information and will bring your level up very quickly if you study the material and practice. Unlike some bridge teachers and partners who will unfortunately pass along stuff they learned incorrectly as gospel which can hamper your development. For a beginner I recommend Eddie Kantar's "Bridge for Dummies", and anything by Bill Root. Also "Card Play Technique" by Mollo & Gardner. Later on after you advance, look into more of Kantar's books, also Mike Lawrence, Hugh Kelsey, Terence Reese.

 

There is a lot of good software available from bridgebase also, http://bbi.bridgebase.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi

They are mostly the same material as the author's books, quite a bit more expensive, but some people learn better when they can interact and play the cards one at a time.

 

Some people don't like books/software, do better with a teacher, ask around at your club if they have group lessons available, try to find out which teachers are considered good.

 

The things to focus on most at the beginning are declarer play & defense. For bidding, focus on learning basic bidding principles, hand evaluation + meanings of natural bids in core sequences without & with competition, not conventions. Conventions focus on only a few essential ones (takeout/negative doubles, stayman, maybe jacoby transfers, strong artificial 2c opener, weak 2s), learn them thoroughly, quality not quantity.

[MattieShoe]

ACBL Learn to Play Bridge

 

Free software for learning bridge. If you've been playing for 8 months, the earlier parts will be too basic. Still, lots of good stuff in there.

[HeavyDluxe]

For a beginner I recommend Eddie Kantar's "Bridge for Dummies", and anything by Bill Root.

Hmmmm... Does "Bridge For Dummies" use four or five-card majors? I seem to remember the edition I have using four. Not a huge deal, but most ppl on BBO in the US will assume you're playing five.

 

FWIW, I really like Bill Root's books as well. And I think "ABCs of Bridge" is a great alternative/compliment to Kantar's book.

 

Warren's (vuroth) comments are dead on. Take your time, think, and start learning to count.

 

Above all, enjoy it. Both the highs and inevitable lows. :)

[Stephen Tu]

Hmmmm... Does "Bridge For Dummies" use four or five-card majors? I seem to remember the edition I have using four. Not a huge deal, but most ppl on BBO in the US will assume you're playing five.

 

Five card majors. You might be confusing it with some old classic like "Five Weeks to Winning Bridge", by Sheinwold, which is 4-cd majors (still great book for card play practice).

 

FWIW, I really like Bill Root's books as well. And I think "ABCs of Bridge" is a great alternative/compliment to Kantar's book

I forgot to mention that Root's books (until you get to Modern Bridge Conventions) do have a few anachronisms to be aware of-- strong two openings, forcing jump raises (rather than limit), penalty doubles of overcalls (rather than negative).

 

Also Modern Bridge Conventions (not so modern anymore being 30+ years old), though excellent, way more thorough than most other convention books, and still totally playable IMO, does present treatments that are different from current majority modern practice, though it does mention alternatives in the text or the glossary in the back in most instances (e.g. fourth suit forcing, but usually invitational, not to game, with second round jumps forcing, while most players play it the opposite, with 4th suit game forcing, jumps invitational).

 

Root's "How to play a bridge hand" and "how to defend a bridge hand" I think are the absolute best on their topic for beginner/intermediates and will never get outdated.

[Lobowolf]

I'm a fan of Harry Lampert's "The Fun Way to Serious Bridge" as a learning resource for new players.

[Tapek]

Thanks for the replies and the recommendations for books. I'll also have a look into this BBO/BIL area also.

 

Quick question about buying books in australia, are there any good sources of books that i could purchase online, or it is best to just use amazon?

[helene_t]

I think books, software and (if you are lucky to have a good teacher at your local club) teaching are the ways to learn bidding. Of course, playing (whether on BBO or at the club) is the fun part of it and also essential to learning cardplay and the social and psychological aspects of the game, but in my experience playing at the club or at BBO does not contribute to learning to bid. Beware of lessons from the self-proclaimed experts at the club or at BBO. They will tell you a lot of nonsense. (I don't pretend to be an expert so you can trust me!)

 

Jack is great software for practicing both bidding and play. BridgeMaster is great for play.

 

If you are going for North American bidding standards, Bridge for Dummies is the best place to start of those books I have read. Once you finish with that one I would go for Lawrence's books w.r.t. bidding. As for cardplay I like Kelsey myself.

[Stephen Tu]

Quick question about buying books in australia, are there any good sources of books that i could purchase online, or it is best to just use amazon?

 

www.postfree.cc is based in Australia.

 

Hunt, price compare vs. Amazon. www.baronbarclay.com is the U.S. bridge book specialist, contact them for shipping rates.

[Mbodell]

In my opinion there are a number of things to do (not mutually exclusive):

 

1. Play a lot of hands. Play at the club more often if you can. Go to local and non-local tournaments if you can. Finally, play online (with robots and/or other players). The more hands you play (in general) the more you will learn.

 

2. Form one or more long term partnerships. Long term partnerships afford one the opportunity to talk things over with partners and get better at style and more advance partner communication (especially on defense) and also add a sounding board. There are at least 3 types of partnerships. One, where you are the more junior player and your partner is more experienced and mentors you and helps tell you the answers or can help give you the answer to what you should have done. Two, where you are the more senior player and help mentor the junior player and help answer their questions. Three, where both players are about equally experienced and bounce ideas off each other and learn together. All 3 types of partnerships can help you learn, but as a beginner probably the first style (play with a more experienced player) is the most valuable if you can find one or more experienced players you respect. But over the long term the third type (learn with your peer) may be the most rewarding. One caveat is to be careful when playing with a more experienced player that you distinguish between what they teach you that is standard and true with everyone versus what they teach you that is their own ideas.

 

3. Learn how to play the hand as declarer. Declarer play doesn't involve the team aspect so it is easy to practice and improve on your own (unlike bidding and defense which is harder). There are books that can help, forum posts on bbo also help, but I'd strongly recommend the bridge master 2000 software program from bbo. It is excellent at teaching you declarer play as long as you really use it and work on the problems and don't just give up and watch the movies.

 

4. Evaluate some (or all) of the hands you play. Look at the hand record and matchpoints for hands you played. Pay special attentions to hands you went wrong. Try to figure out if it was a play issue, a bidding issue, or just being unlucky. In doing this it can be useful to use the long term partners you developed in 2 above, but you can also just consult with other people (post hands where you aren't sure on bbo forums if you want help). Make sure when you look to evaluate these hands you concentrate mostly on what you can do on each hand. Don't turn it into an assign the blame on how stupid your partner was. Otherwise you might see some hand where partner switched to clubs to your nothing instead of diamonds to your AK and stop analyzing by merely blaming partner. When in reality maybe it was (also or mostly even) your fault for not cashing the ♦K earlier and/or playing a different spot to give a different suit preference to make partner's lives easier.

 

5. Play some more hands.

 

6. Have fun!

[P_Marlowe]

The above is really good advice.

 

#1 I want to stress - Have fun.

 

#2 I want to stress - Form a regular long time partnership.

 

#3 I want to stress - Find a mentor to ask, but also - stick with one mentor,

ignoring advice coming from other sources, contradicting the mentor.

You may still ask your mentor about the other stuff, maybe he can tell

you the reason, for his opinion.

In the end, lots of answers are heavily style depend, and some styles

mesh well, and some dont.

In general it is better to stick with one style, over time you will adapt.

his style to a style, that suits you best.

And if it comes to ignoring advice (even if it comes from players, who

are better than your mentor), this includes advice coming from BBF,

... with the sole exception of advice coming from me B)

 

With kind regards

Marlowe

[pdmunro]

Disclosure: When I started learning bridge, I just wanted to learn to a level where I didn't feel embarassed. So I am not about to tell you the steps to becoming a champion - I am simply describing some of the steps I took to achieve a level that I am happy with.

 

Some of my stages

 

It took me approximately 2 years to learn simple Standard American. I took classes on Monday nights and played on Wednesday nights. I think you have to play at least 2 nights a week in order to remember your bidding system.

 

I had to give it away for 1 year while I finished writing up my PhD.

 

I had a opportunity for about 3 years to play about 4 or 5 nights a week. Some of this was in people's homes. This occurred when I went to St Louis, Missouri to work. Those are some of happiest memories.

 

When I returned to Australia, I was back to playing once a week for a few years. I have found that the amount of bridge I can get to play has always depended on my work commitments.

 

Now I play nearly every night online. I am still happy to use a basic bidding system. The interest for me is in trying to work out who has what cards and bidding and playing accordingly.

 

My preferred arena of play at the moment is the Robot Matchpoint Tournaments on BBO. I especially like checking what bidding and play earned most points on a deal, particularly those deals where I didn't do so well. All that info is available by going to http://www.bridgebase.com/myhands/index.php

[Trinidad]

Follow Stephen Tu's advice, and probably even more extreme. Use only two bidding conventions: Stayman and takeout doubles of their opening bid. Learn this system, together with a partner. (Read the same book, follow the same bridge course, etc.) And learn it well. A common bridge wisdom: It is better to play a bad system that you understand than a good system that you don't understand. (And, of course, this simple system is not the best around, otherwise they wouldn't have invented those complex ones.)

 

Second advice: Play this system and just stick to it. Have a lot of fun. That way, you will learn how to bid naturally and you will learn how to play. If you will do this -and you have a little bit of talent- you will start winning at the beginner's night of your local bridge club.

 

You will experience what hands are difficult to handle in the bidding. After 2-3 years, you will have a list of 'problem situations'. At that point come back here, together with your partner (or turn somewhere else) for advice on how to solve those problems. Expand your system with some 'new technology'.

 

You and your partner will have to understand (and live with the fact) that at that point, you will not win the beginner's night anymore. After all, now you will have to master this new technology and that will come with errors, lots of them. But after you have mastered that, you are ready to play on the regular nights (and win).

 

Rik

[zheddh]

You will experience what hands are difficult to handle in the bidding. After 2-3 years, you will have a list of 'problem situations'.

Isn't 2-3 years rather too long to move on to a system more complicated than stayman and takeout doubles?

[Trinidad]

You will experience what hands are difficult to handle in the bidding. After 2-3 years, you will have a list of 'problem situations'.

Isn't 2-3 years rather too long to move on to a system more complicated than stayman and takeout doubles?

No. If anything, it is too short.

 

In hindsight, I wished I stayed all natural a little longer. It was just that I couldn't bear it anymore.

 

My partner and I knew that opponents were able to solve certain problems. We also knew how they did it and basically how these conventions worked. The point is that you also need to be able to change a part of your system. Introducing a convention is one thing, but how does it influence the rest of your bidding?

 

Let's just look at something relatively simple (it's even considered standard on BBO): Jacoby transfers. When you want to incorporate Jacoby transfers into your system, you are modifying part of your 1NT structure. Not only will you need to see that from now on we will bid hands with 5 hearts by bidding 2♦. You will also need to understand the follow ups. How do you bid with exactly 5 cards? What do you do with 6 or more? How do you bid invitational hands? How do you bid game hands? Essentially transfer bids allow for two descriptions after each other (2♦ (5+ hearts)-2♥ (nothing); further description). That requires another way of thinking about bidding. You need to be ready to take that next step.

 

If you are not ready to take that step, you will not understand Jacoby transfers. Look around at BBO and see how many players misbid in Jacoby transfer sequences (e.g. routinely bid 1NT-2♦; 2♥-4♥ on a balanced hand with exactly 5 hearts).

 

I will absolutely not tell these players that they are not allowed to play Jacoby transfers or anything like that. But for their bridge results, as well as for teh development of their bridge career, it would have been better if they had never taken up Jacoby transfers, or would have postponed playing them until they fully understood how they worked.

 

Just to give this posting some perspective. I am not at all opposed to conventions. As a matter of fact, I am still playing with the same partner that I learned bridge with. Nowadays, we play an artificial strong club system with lots of gadgets everywhere. The full system book is over 300 pages thick. If my convention crazy partner and system freak I say that you should wait with the introduction of conventions, if you want to become a decent player, then we probably have a reason for that.

 

Rik

[suokko]

I guess I took non-standard route to learn bridge and I think it might help many to understand what might work better for some people.

 

First of all I randomly noticed bridge in zone.msn.com after playing hearts, spades, chess etc in the site.

First I of course just went to table and tried to understand the game. Of course no luck here because bridge is way too complex just to pick up even if software restricts the choices. After one failed hand in bridge table I went to look for basic info that was easy to find from msn.com. There was nice instruction of 2 pages how to play bridge.

 

After that I just played for fun about 6 months without reading anything or forming any long partnerships. In this period I learned all the basic card play techniques the hard but fun way.

 

Next step was starting to search the web for some bridge info. I found some sites describing a lot of conventions which I started learning. This of course improved a lot my understanding of biding. Before this I just made some random bids and ended to some 7+ card fit or NT to play in (usually in game level of course). Bad luck was that I didn't find any sites that would have had extensive info about declarer play or defense which slowed my card play development a lot. I continued playing at zone for next 2 years learning some new conventions all the time.

 

Then there came a lucky day when I happened to kibitz a Danish bbo member teasing zone "experts" with some basic biding problems that they didn't know. I happened just to go to watch him and try to learn. He gave me link to bbo. Of course I moved to bbo because level of play was so much better at bbo. This resulted me to speed up my learning speed.

 

It took me about 3 and half year (one year in bbo) from learning the basic to go to play my first club games. I just accidentally picked a Finn to ask where I could play live bridge. I was here again very lucky because I formed my first regular partnership with guy who I asked about live bridge (even tough we never played at club because he lived in another town). When I went to club I was immediately addicted to live bridge. I also now learned a lot of more because I got my first bridge book to read from the library in the club. From reading the books I learned a lot of advanced declarer plays and better defensive play.

 

Same time my online source improved a lot because I found sites like Richard Pavlicek's and Daniel Neill's bridge sites. These are in my option the best sources of accurate and high quality bridge information.

 

So my bridge addiction was huge at this time and I probably learned most by just playing a lot of hands. (~1k per month range) Also I used sometime to analyze hands in teaching table after playing something in bbo. Teaching table has been one the greatest learning tools for me. It is so much easier to learn when can play all 4 ands double dummy and get reliable double dummy analyze from GIB.

 

Playing in zone at begin was very good because everybody where very polite and not so much after good results. Even relaxed bridge club is not as friendly and polite place in bbo. The competitiveness and rude comments in bridge tables is probably the largest reason that new players are stopping to play early. Bridge is just too much to learn in short time and many still assume that everything should be known immediately.

 

Summery:

• * play a lot and enjoy playing (online and live bridge)
  * read good books/websites
  * play some more hands
  * analyze the hands that you have played. (Was there better lead? Should I have seen the better lead? etc)
  * play sometimes with good players (You learn a lot of little details which you might not notice without)
  * bigger live tournaments can wait for later when you are confident enough
  

[G_R__E_G]

I've never seen better advice on learning/improving than what Fred had to say in this post from some time ago:

 

http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?sho...=0entry173393

 

(Actually the whole thread is interesting, but this post in particular)

[y66]

Yeah, that post Greg mentioned is pure gold.

[EricK]

Whether you ask for advice or not, the chances are that if you play a lot of bridge you will receive a lot of advice - either directly with people telling you how you should have bid or played, or indirectly eg when oppoenents discuss hands with each other in post mortems.

 

So I have some meta-advice for you - be careful who you accept advice from.

 

It is true of bridge, as it is with most other walks of life, that most people are just not very good at it, and their advice is worthless if you want to progress far. In fact, it is often worse than worthless, because every bad habit you get into, is one which you will have to get out of if you want to improve.

 

Obviously you are now left with the problem of determining whose advice is worth listening to. And if you only play at a small club it is possible that none of the other players fits that bill. But here on the forums there are a number of players whose advice is worth listening to. So if you do get some advice from someone which sounds plausible, it is probably worth asking the guys here whether it is good advice or not. That way you may eventually determine which of the people in your circle, if any, are worth listening to.

[Jlall]

Play a lot + have someone who is better than you that you can talk to about the hands you play.

 

Focus on your card play almost exclusively when studying books etc. Studying double dummy problems is also very useful.

[Tapek]

Well I'm already very impressed with this forum. Thanks very much for all of you that have taken the time to post out excellent replies. There are a few books at our club so i'll see whats available there.

 

As for playing on BBO i've always avoided it because it seemed that people just played a hand and left and there was always a juggling about of players between one hand and the next. Also I'm not sure how to find that BIL that was mentioned earlier.

 

It's good to have found a place with people interested play and share knowledge. I like bridge more then poker but I have had a lot more people to discuss poker with so that has kept me thinking of more poker then bridge but with people to talk to about this game now i can see that going to change.

[Winstonm]

Drink like a phish and use recreational drugs often and heavily. Drop out of school as necessary.

[Lobowolf]

Drink like a phish and use recreational drugs often and heavily. Drop out of school as necessary.

Winston, he's got to walk before he can run.

[G_R__E_G]

Well I'm already very impressed with this forum.

Stick around for awhile - you'll have plenty of opportunities to be disappointed too. :-)