Compliments to Hrothgar

[fred]

With this said and done, judging from your post, it seems as if you would prefer a playing environment in which eveyone is playing the same bidding system. I've seen any number of attempts to establish restricted tournaments in which everyone was required to play a single, simple system. There was the original Standard American Yellow Card, Classic Bridge, all sorts of collosal flops...

 

These attempts failed for a very simple reason - Lot of people want to restrict the convention, but all of them want to ban the stuff that the other folks play...

You sure that's why they failed? A couple of other theories that are more credible to me:

 

1) The ACBL did not stick with these events long enough or promote them well enough so that they achieved "critical mass".

 

2) The "big name players" didn't play in these events. If they had then these events would have gained instant credibility and more people would have tried them.

 

I personally think that an invitational "Stayman and Blackwood only" tournament that offered substantial cash prizes would attract a very strong field for sure (the pros are all whores - they will go where the money is). However, I also think that such an event would be a lot of fun to play in, and, if promoted properly, could do wonders in terms of making social players more interested in duplicate. If the promoters did a really good job, they might even manage to attract a whole bunch of new players to bridge.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[pbleighton]

"I personally think that an invitational "Stayman and Blackwood only" tournament that offered substantial cash prizes would attract a very strong field for sure (the pros are all whores - they will go where the money is). However, I also think that such an event would be a lot of fun to play in, and, if promoted properly, could do wonders in terms of making social players more interested in duplicate. If the promoters did a really good job, they might even manage to attract a whole bunch of new players to bridge."

 

Nah, no Stayman, no Blackwood, cue bids are natural, and doubles are penalty.

 

And all openings guarantee 4+ cards.

 

Peter

[mike777]

]

Odd Comment.

 

I've always advocated that players should have the option to establish whatever type of playing environment that they want.

Players always have the option for any kind of playing environment, outside of ACBL or WBF.

 

Within ACBL or WBF auspices. leadership must maintain ultimate control or else chaos reigns. Changing that leadership or influencing their decision making is welcomed.

[hrothgar]

You sure that's why they failed? A couple of other theories that are more credible to me:

 

1) The ACBL did not stick with these events long enough or promote them well enough so that they achieved "critical mass".

 

2) The "big name players" didn't play in these events. If they had then these events would have gained instant credibility and more people would have tried them.

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." - Niccolo Michiavelli

 

For better or worse, the ACBL has an established pool of bridge players, set in their ways and wedded to their toys. In my experience, these players HATE to have to give up their toys... Both "Classic" Bridge and the ACBL's "SAYC" only tournaments would force players to change their current behaviour. As such, I don't see much chance of success...

 

Its possible that large cash payouts might change players behaviour. With this said and done, I think that this would be a hard sell. First of all, you need to figure out where the prize should come from...

 

Last I heard, large tournaments with established pedigrees such as the Macallan and the Cap Gemini were running into increased difficulties retaining their sponsors.

 

Increasing the size of entry fees is another option, however, this makes it more difficult to attract players.

 

Having the National organization subsidize the events is a final possibility, however, some people already believe that that ACBL organizational structure has an unfortunately habit of twisting the regulations to meet the requirements of certain well placed pros... It could be argued that creating large cash prizes was a mechanism to extract as much cash as possible from the membership before the coming crash. At the very least, I think that it would be dangerous to give such an appearance.

 

I readily admit, if I could wave my magic wand and start everything over again from scratch I'd try to create a standardized bidding system: Said bidding system would serve three key functions:

 

1. The bidding system would form the foundation of the "bidding" bridge curriculeum.

2. The bidding system would form the foundation for the alert structure

3. It would be very easy to form "restricted" events in which the only permited system were "XYZ"

 

I see enormous benefits in adopting this type of system. With this said and done, the trick, as always, is how to get there from here...

[luke warm]

From my perspective, the major "task" facing the ACBL CEO is positioning the organization for the inevitable hard landing when the membership crashes in a few years. I think that major costing measures and organizational changes are necessary.

 

I'd also very much like to see more efforts by the ACBL to encourage the development of electronic bridge. I genuinely believe that the ACBL's decision to sponsor "Learn to Play Bridge" was one of the best decisions that they have made in recent decades. I would VERY much like to see the organization making efforts to use computerized playing environments for the organization's major events. (The Vanderbilt, the Reisinger, that sort of thing)

 

With this said and done, I don't think that any bureocracy has ever presided over its own demise. I have little doubt that that any such application would be met with amusement or perhaps pity.

i find this post to be logical, but mainly i find it to be true... none of the posts that follow even attempt to show where it is in error

[fred]

Its possible that large cash payouts might change players behaviour. With this said and done, I think that this would be a hard sell. First of all, you need to figure out where the prize should come from...

 

Last I heard, large tournaments with established pedigrees such as the Macallan and the Cap Gemini were running into increased difficulties retaining their sponsors.

Corporate sponsors are the answer in my opinion, despite the fact that, as you point out, quality sponsors like Cap Gemini and Macallan have pulled out of sponsoring bridge tournaments in recent years.

 

The sales pitch should go something like this:

 

"Bridge has a much wider following than many of the sports and games that currently attract serious money from major corporate sponsors, but 99% of bridge players have no interest in following the game as it is currently played at its highest levels. The reason is that "average players" do not understand the bidding methods played by the world's leading players.

 

The rules of our tournament will be structured so that only the very most basic bidding systems and conventions are allowed. The millions of social players out there will thus be able to follow the tournament since the bidding will make sense to them.

 

Furthermore, our we will edit out boring hands and long delays for thought during our TV coverage, have excellent graphics, provide interviews with some of the more colorful characters from the world of bridge, and have Bob Hamman and Vanna White as co-hosts. The generous cash prizes will help to make the tournament more interesting and dramatic for the viewer.

 

The net effect will be a production that has to potential to draw a huge audience who will see your logo all over the place and be grateful for the part your company played in making this tournament possible.

 

We need $500,000 to get this off the ground. You spend less than that every month to provide free coffee for your employees."

 

Would any major corporations be interested? I can't say for sure, but if you get the right team of people together to run the event, it certainly seems possible to me.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[hrothgar]

The sales pitch should go something like this:

 

....

Here's the first question that I would ask:

 

Given the extent to which you would need to redefine the game in the hopes of supporting the viewing audience, why are you using Bridge as a starting point?

 

Bridge is one of a family of "trick-based" card game. Several of these games require the same level of skill in declarer play and defense but feature dramatically simplified bidding. Spades is one prominant example...

 

Equally significant: You claim that there is an large potential audience of bridge players who would be interested in watching this TV program. Right now, Yahoo Games has 923 players logged in to their "Bridge" site but 3,500 playing Spades. [i'm not going sum player base across all online game sites, however, I'm willing to bet that Spades is significantly more popular than bridge]

 

In short, if we wanted to back this type of venture, wouldn't Spades represent a more logical foundation for such an effort?

[hrothgar]

Furthermore, our we will edit out boring hands and long delays for thought during our TV coverage, have excellent graphics, provide interviews with some of the more colorful characters from the world of bridge, and have Bob Hamman and Vanna White as co-hosts. The generous cash prizes will help to make the tournament more interesting and dramatic for the viewer.

I've always been very skeptical regarding broadcasting "Bridge" through traditional media channels such as television. As I noted in another post there are a number of other cards games that are much better suited [pun intentional] for Television.

 

Case in point: Televised Texas Hold'em Poker is enjoying a fair amount of success. However, Hold'Em is an incredibly simplistic game. Equally significant, the major skills required to succeed at Hold'Em are social, not technical. The key to success at Hold'Em is learning to recognize tells and betting patterns, NOT deciding when to exercise a squeeze as opposed to an end play. I find it interesting to note that

 

1. These soft social skills seem most apporpriate to television. Its VERY hard to care about a "tell" if you can't see it.

 

2. These same skills are actively denigrated in bridge if not banned in bridge (I can't recall the number of times that people comment that "We're playing Bridge, not Poker")

 

What I find truly bizarre is the following observation:

 

Right now, Online VuGraph's provide us with an outstanding tool to watch bridge matches. We don't get live video feeds or Vanna White, but we do get to actually focus on the hands that are being played. The single biggest shortcoming with the existing VuGraph is the limited number of matches that can be broadcast at any given time. Today broadcasting VuGraph's requires that BBO provide data entry specialists to physically record pieces of pasteboard being shuffled arround a table. I have suggested several times in the past that major events like he Vanderbilt and the Bermuda Bowl should be contested using an electronic playing environment. This transition would permit an organization like BBO to broadcast these events in their entirity. Equally significant authors like Eric Kokish would be able to produce much more comprehensive works after the event.

 

These suggestions never seem to go very far. Many people are skeptical that the Pro's would every be willing to make such an arduous transition.. Imagine the imposition of suggesting that Pro's play bridge on computers rather than with cards. How silly it is to think that these individuals might consider minor changes in the playing environment in hopes of promoting the game. This type of plan isn't as sexy as TELEVISED BRIDGE. More importantly, its not designed arround large cash prizes for the winners.

 

At the same time, it can be implemented at a reasonable price using available technology. It does not require partnership with traditional media outlets. And most importantly, it would provide significant benefits to the existing user base.

 

From my perspective, organizations like the ACBL need to focus on the needs of its members rather than worrying about catering to the whims of the pros...

[fred]

The sales pitch should go something like this:

 

....

Here's the first question that I would ask:

 

Given the extent to which you would need to redefine the game in the hopes of supporting the viewing audience, why are you using Bridge as a starting point?

 

Bridge is one of a family of "trick-based" card game. Several of these games require the same level of skill in declarer play and defense but feature dramatically simplified bidding. Spades is one prominant example...

 

Equally significant: You claim that there is an large potential audience of bridge players who would be interested in watching this TV program. Right now, Yahoo Games has 923 players logged in to their "Bridge" site but 3,500 playing Spades. [i'm not going sum player base across all online game sites, however, I'm willing to bet that Spades is significantly more popular than bridge]

 

In short, if we wanted to back this type of venture, wouldn't Spades represent a more logical foundation for such an effort?

I don't see it as "redefining the game". I see it as presenting a version of the game that 10s of millions of people understand and enjoy. Furthermore, I am of the opinion that most of the world's leading players would truly enjoy playing in the sort of tournament I describe.

 

I agree that online spades is more popular than online bridge, but I don't think this implies that spades is more popular than bridge. Even if spades is more popular than bridge, that doesn't imply that a bridge production can't be successful.

 

Try counting the number of people who will play duplicate bridge in clubs in North America today and compare with the number of people who will play spades in clubs today (if there even are spades clubs). I bet bridge wins easily (and by a much bigger ratio than spades wins if you count online players).

 

I don't know much about spades and I could be totally wrong about the following, but I suspect that bridge has several advantages even if it is not as popular as spades:

 

- Bridge has a rich history of championships, characters, stories, and scandals. To the best of my knowledge spades does not. Being able to include information about such things in a TV show makes the production more interesting.

 

- The world's leading bridge players are well-established and many of these people are colorful and interesting characters. To the best of my knowledge the same cannot be said for spades.

 

- Non-bridge players think of bridge as a popular, serious, and challenging game. Non-spades players (if they have even heard of spades) do not think of spades in the same way.

 

- I think there are a lot more books, magazines, clubs, and tournaments for bridge than there are for spades. If you walk into a book store you will find books on how to play bridge. I doubt you will find books on how to play spades. If you go to the YMCA you can sign up for a course on how to play bridge, but I bet they don't offer any spades classes. Bridge gets mentioned in the press from time to time, but I have never seen an article about spades...

 

So no, I do not think that spades would make a more logical foundation (and even if a spades venture could be successful that doesn't mean that a bridge venture is a waste of time - perhaps the bridge population is smaller, but represents a more attractive demographic for some potential sponsors).

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[ducky_rh]

There's a simple reason why Yahoo bridge has a small following, which you'd know if you ever played there. There are no ratings nor scores kept. Each hand stands on its own. So players bid and bid and bid and will never pass, because there is nothing to punish poor play or reward good. Then when they win the auction and see that they cannot make the hand, they simply depart the table, again, with impunity. So Yahoo bridge will repulse even the casual bridge player very quickly.

[hotShot]

Has anyone ever seen "snooker" or "darts" broadcasts? Even golf does not have to much action. We had a very succesful chess "show" for a while. I think there is a market for bridge in TV even if it's small.

 

It would not hurt if we could see a picture of the players at a vugraph.

It's nice to take a look at the champions. But for a TV show, we would need a different type of comments. The players moderating should know the hands in advance do that they can prepare bidding and play the stars might make.

Commentators could prepare diagramms to point out different playing stategies, e.g. finesse versus sqeeze, and add information about percentages if available.

You could even interrupt the play explaning what problem defence of offence have to solve. At vugraph you see all hands, that makes it a lot easier to bid and play, if you just show one players hand, you can discuss the information legaly available to the player, and speculate what a good move would be from his side.

Believe me, if you get some TV people on it, they will take a few interesting boards, interview a few player, show a little of the tournament area, and it will be interesting for somthing like 30-60 minutes. It won't make prime time, but I'm sure one could find a spot.

 

The question is: What group is your target ?

[fred]

Has anyone ever seen "snooker" or "darts" broadcasts? Even golf does not have to much action. We had a very succesful chess "show" for a while. I think there is a market for bridge in TV even if it's small.

 

It would not hurt if we could see a picture of the players at a vugraph.

It's nice to take a look at the champions. But for a TV show, we would need a different type of comments. The players moderating should know the hands in advance do that they can prepare bidding and play the stars might make.

Commentators could prepare diagramms to point out different playing stategies, e.g. finesse versus sqeeze, and add information about percentages if available.

You could even interrupt the play explaning what problem defence of offence have to solve. At vugraph you see all hands, that makes it a lot easier to bid and play, if you just show one players hand, you can discuss the information legaly available to the player, and speculate what a good move would be from his side.

Believe me, if you get some TV people on it, they will take a few interesting boards, interview a few player, show a little of the tournament area, and it will be interesting for somthing like 30-60 minutes. It won't make prime time, but I'm sure one could find a spot.

 

The question is: What group is your target ?

I agree that for bridge to be successful on TV it would have to be heavily edited (and therefore not live).

 

Your target audience is, at a minimum, anyone who already plays bridge. It might also be possible to interest people who play other card games, people who would like to learn to play bridge, people who have friends who play bridge, and even some random channel-surfers.

 

My wife was introduced to bridge by watching reruns of Championship Bridge (a very old TV show in the 50s that was hosted by Charles Goren). She played other card games at the time, but she had never even thought of learning bridge until she started watching this show.

 

Fred Gitelman

Bridge Base Inc.

www.bridgebase.com

[hotShot]

We had a medicine show about aging a few month ago, and some neurologist promoted bridge as means to keept mentally fit.

[Rain]

Has anyone ever seen "snooker" or "darts" broadcasts? Even golf does not have to much action. We had a very succesful chess "show" for a while. I think there is a market for bridge in TV even if it's small.

 

It would not hurt if we could see a picture of the players at a vugraph.

It's nice to take a look at the champions. But for a TV show, we would need a different type of comments. The players moderating should know the hands in advance do that they can prepare bidding and play the stars might make.

Commentators could prepare diagramms to point out different playing stategies, e.g. finesse versus sqeeze, and add information about percentages if available.

You could even interrupt the play explaning what problem defence of offence have to solve. At vugraph you see all hands, that makes it a lot easier to bid and play, if you just show one players hand, you can discuss the information legaly available to the player, and speculate what a good move would be from his side.

Believe me, if you get some TV people on it, they will take a few interesting boards, interview a few player, show a little of the tournament area, and it will be interesting for somthing like 30-60 minutes. It won't make prime time, but I'm sure one could find a spot.

 

The question is: What group is your target ?

Bah! Sports like curling, even football, they have no action at all! Take football, most popular game in the world. Just a bunch of people running about kicking 1 ball to and fro, and everyone cheers when they near a goalpost. What kind of action is that?

 

This is analogical to maybe watching bridge players shuffle cards. Put them on table, face down, and shuffle shuffle shuffle. Pick up cards and once in a while declarer pulls off a triple squeeze and can excitedly throw himself in the air and turn a somersault?

 

Its just hype! You don't need action, you need the media to drum up hype. You need telegenic personalities who can throw catchy one-liners in the air. You need commentators who can do the same. If commentating gets too technical and goes into esoteria, you lose 99% of your targeted audience and goes back to square one.

 

It is also true that bridge needs a younger face. We need to operate superficially to attract the superficials :-s Get people like Gavin Wolpert to promote bridge. Looks + money...get corporate sponsership.

 

I don't know why I'm rambling, but my point is ACBL or WBF or whatever needs to sponser a movie starring a sauve brad pitt playing bridge and getting many beautiful women because of it.

 

:-s

[pbleighton]

"I don't know why I'm rambling, but my point is ACBL or WBF or whatever needs to sponser a movie starring a sauve brad pitt playing bridge and getting many beautiful women because of it."

 

Fantasy movies are doing quite well these days.

 

Peter

[Jangvik]

You need telegenic personalities who can throw catchy one-liners in the air. You need commentators who can do the same.

Right on spot.

 

This game needs characters that stands out. These players does not need to be world class at all. I believe, for example, that the most famous bridge player outside the bridge world is Bill Gates. We need more people like that.

[Elianna]

Don't forget about Omar Sharif. He's a bit less controversial.

[ArcLight]

Spades

 

1) Books - Master Spades by Steve Fleishman is the bible of Spades books. He has another less advanced book Spades for Winners.

How not to Lose at Spades by Jon Galt Strichman is also a good beginner/intermediate book. The Joe Andrews book is more of an introductory book.

 

2) Websites - www.masterspades.com

Its chock full of great articles and very well done animated Rate your Game tests.

 

3) Spades Players - Spades is far simpler than Bridge and tends to be popular with less serious players, and also less educated ones. For example, it’s very popular in prison. This doesn't mean it’s a bad game, just that the typical Spades player is probably a couple of notches below the typical Bridge player both economically and in intellect. Talk about Zero Tolerance at Bridge, nasty comments at Spades games is very common, almost the norm.

 

4) There have been some attempts to organize Spades, and to introduce Duplicate Spades. I think a cigarette company sponsored a tournament (perhaps Phillip Morris?), and may have a yearly event.

Duplicate Spades was offered on e-bridge but didn't take off. At its heyday it would have perhaps 24 players at most at a time (several sessions a week).

 

5) I think Spades requires far less skill than Bridge. Because you have an open dummy hand, you can draw all sorts of inferences, send/read signals, and use the bidding. Spades has 1 round of bidding, Spades are always trump, and signals are much tougher to interpret. So Spades is less of a deductive reasoning game. However, Spades does have an interesting strategy aspect, bagging, and bidding a risky nil. One thing that hurts Spades as a skill game is the over valuing of the nil bid (at 100 points), and the existence of the Blind nil (aka Double nil). If you are playing a stronger pair and losing, just bid the blind nil. If it makes you win, if not, you were going to lose anyway.

 

6) Supposedly, on line cheating is not uncommon in Spades games. This is what numerous people have posted in some of the Spades chat groups. I've certainly encountered some strange play during some duplicate games. In some of the rated leagues it was hard to get "up games" (where you could improve your standing) because the teams/players at the top could avoid (evade) playing you.

 

 

PS - I got started in bridge through a Spades player who showed me "Learn to Play Bridge".

[hrothgar]

5) I think Spades requires far less skill than Bridge.  Because you have an open dummy hand, you can draw all sorts of inferences, send/read signals, and use the bidding.  Spades has 1 round of bidding, Spades are always trump, and signals are much tougher to interpret.    So Spades is less of a deductive reasoning game.

Must say that this doesn't really make much sense...

 

I thought that wanted that minimized complex bidding. I would think that simplfying the auction and allowing players to focus purely on the card play and defense would exactly what you wanted. Equally significant, I don't understand why signaling is so more difficult to interprete...

 

I almost sounds as if you are saying that you want a more complex game so long as the complexity is restricted to those aspects that you personally like.

 

Of course, I could be underestimating your desire to avoid the "prison" element

[Gerben42]

So why are social players not interested in duplicate? Is it because we actually have agreements about our bidding system or maybe play some conventions that they were previously unaware of? I think not!

 

I think playing duplicate forces these players to think and to be around thinking people who are seriously trying to win. They don't want that.

 

An example:

 

At some point I went to the social bridge room in some other game site. Everything was happy and friendly, but then there was this auction:

1♥ pass 4♥. No doubt in my mind that the 4♥ bidder had opening bid strength and support of course. That's how it is played. But here goes: Because of my hand (which included a loooonnnng ♠ suit) I bid 4♠ and I was basically kicked off the table for taking away their game.

 

Also the same kind of players don't like it if you keep stealing their cards on the roll of a 7 playing settlers instead of rotating the picking between different players. They don't want to play 'make your best move in order to win' but they want to play 'let's be friendly and let's see at some point someone will win but as long as we are playing nicely and so on'.

 

To summarize: This has nothing to do with bidding systems, it has to do with mentality.

[Guest Jlall]

These suggestions never seem to go very far. Many people are skeptical that the Pro's would every be willing to make such an arduous transition.. Imagine the imposition of suggesting that Pro's play bridge on computers rather than with cards. How silly it is to think that these individuals might consider minor changes in the playing environment in hopes of promoting the game.

I would not consider this a minor change and I'm sure others wouldn't either. When you are at the table you can read the opponents better. It is an important part of many people's games.

 

This will sound silly too, but sometimes when you are at the table you just "feel" things...you "know" where certain cards are. Something in the atmosphere. But losing that imo would be a huge disadvantage.

[hrothgar]

It might seem rude, but I'm really not worried if certain Pro's lose some of their table feel. As I noted earlier, my interest is providing an efficient mechanism to broadcast major events to spectators. Preserving "Table feel" really doesn't enter into the equation. And the end the day, some Pro's might be harmed by such a transition. Others would benefit. C'est la Vie Ultimately, Pros are much easier to replace that the fan base - Theres always gonna be someone at the tail of that distribution

 

Please note: The Laws of Bridge are very clear that players aren't allowed to fake "tells". Deliberately hitching with a singleton is a grave impropriety. If the regulations weren't so careful at eliminating such elements from the game, I might have more sympathy with arguments about protecting "table feel".