playing bridge by gut feeling/instinct.

[polarmatt]

Can someone play good bridge solely by playing a ton (like 12 hours a day) and not reading any books on the subject? basically just playing by instinct.

I'm planning on doing this.

[Tramticket]

There is plenty that you need to learn and a lifetime is not long enough to do it by trial and error.

 

Different people have different learning styles. I never went to a single lesson, but I did read a lot. Others find reading books boring, preferring to pick up their bridge knowledge through formal lessons, or through informal interaction with experienced players. There is no right or wrong. Good luck with acquiring your bridge knowledge.

[P_Marlowe]

Can someone play good bridge solely by playing a ton (like 12 hours a day) and not reading any books on the subject? basically just playing by instinct.

I'm planning on doing this.

you need to reflect on your actions.

Instinct needs to be trained. How you do this is ..., your choice, but by instinct means, you

need to have seen a certain thing or something similar before.

Another point: Bridge is a partnership game, and you need to learn the language of your partners,

if you try to play from scratch, chances are high that you end up playing with peoble who know as

much as you, i.e. learning from them is useless.

If you have prior knowledge in other card games, you may survive card play, but even

here, knowing, what the opponents told you / each other in the auction phase will be

relevant at some point, and you will only be able to understand it, if you learned

the language.

[Cyberyeti]

Can someone play good bridge solely by playing a ton (like 12 hours a day) and not reading any books on the subject? basically just playing by instinct.

I'm planning on doing this.

 

You probably can, but what you would need to do is to play with a better partner who will analyse stuff with you after.

 

You would get more value from slightly less playing and more analysis afterwards even if you don't do it with partner.

[The_Badger]

My personal opinion: Playing lots of bridge (as long as you analyse your results - and that is extremely difficult in itself being new to the game) will improve your gut feeling/instinct for the game, but it might only improve your knowledge slightly.

 

How will know if a bidding sequence was right, a lead was correct, a defence was sound, or a declarer play was accurate without expert/tutorial/bridge literature knowledge? The number of times I have seen players self-congratulate themselves on their wonderful bids and plays without actually realising that what they have done is actually incorrect, and they have got lucky due to some error by their opponents, etc.

 

Being a chess player, too, the one thing I learnt very quickly early on was that the games that you lost are more valuable than the games you win.

 

I have been personally tutoring a prizewinning poker player, a friend of mine on here for a couple of years, and while she plays regularly - five times a week or more - and she has good card sense (something I noticed very early on) and is willing to learn new conventions every so often to improve her bidding skills, her overall skill level is still no better than intermediate, in my and her opinion.

 

Good luck with your bridge, and enjoy the game because, for me, that's the most important aspect.

[sfi]

Can someone play good bridge solely by playing a ton (like 12 hours a day) and not reading any books on the subject? basically just playing by instinct.

I'm planning on doing this.

 

It's one way way to learn, but you're only going to become a good player if you're playing against good opponents. Playing random opponents on BBO will do little more than make you competent.

[el mister]

I don't know abar 12 hours a day, but just playing a ton of bridge would make most people good declarers IMHO. And you wouldn't need to take a particularly systematic or analytical approach, just the basic ability to identify and learn from your mistakes. Think of it as the base miles of a fitness program - if you wanted to compete you'd need to add structure, intervals, periodisation etc, but if you don't do any of that and just go out running, you'll still end up pretty fit.

 

Bidding and defence is a different story - the partnership dimension means you can't just learn by osmosis here. Just bidding with your gut would yield little progress, and be a giant waste of time if you're talking about sinking serious hours into it.

[steve2005]

There is a theory that you can become an expert at anything with 10,000 hours of experience.

I think books, lessons and listening to people you can trust will bring quicker results.

[bravejason]

There is a theory that you can become an expert at anything with 10,000 hours of experience.

That is a simplification. Much nearer to the mark is 10k hours of quality practice are needed to become expert.

[bravejason]

Can someone play good bridge solely by playing a ton (like 12 hours a day) and not reading any books on the subject? basically just playing by instinct.

I'm planning on doing this.

 

My opinion is that you can become a mediocre to OK player that way, but that is the upper limit. And it will take you much longer to reach that level of play than if you sought to learn prior knowledge via books and instruction. Essentially, you are undertaking an unstructured approach to learning the game and thus will spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel and spending hours/days learning things that could have otherwise been learned in minutes.

[Stephen Tu]

In theory it could be done, if you have good card feel and an analytical mind. But it would be woefully inefficient. Reading books to me is 100x faster improvement. A beginner who starts out reading 100 hours and playing zero is IMO going to completely obliterate the one who played 100 hours and read zero. Except maybe for a tiny number of natural card play savants who can figure out the techniques on their own.

[gordontd]

My opinion is that you can become a mediocre to OK player that way, but that is the upper limit. And it will take you much longer to reach that level of play than if you sought to learn prior knowledge via books and instruction. Essentially, you are undertaking an unstructured approach to learning the game and thus will spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel and spending hours/days learning things that could have otherwise been learned in minutes.

I'm reminded of Terence Reese's reply to a player who proudly told him they had never read a bridge book - "Yes, I can tell."

[Vampyr]

I learned to bid with a Goren wheel when when I was a child. This was a good route to eventually internalise the concepts thereon,

 

But the system we used was very simple; today's methods are much more complicated. Partners will expect you to play eg Jacoby transfers. You will not be able to do this without either reading about the continuations or discussing them with your partner. This will be true for a lot of areas of bidding.

 

For defence, you have to agree leads and signals with partner. The rest you can learn by experience, but much more quickly if followed by analysis as mentioned above.

 

For declarer play it is important that you learn to use clues from the opponents' bidding or lack thereof, and also from their defence. The former will be aided by their telling you their methods, but ether inferences you can make frump this, and the clues from their defence can be learned by experience. Techniques like endplays and squeezes will take hugely more time without reading and becoming familiar with them.

 

You can, of course, benefit from analysing the hand records by yourself to discover what worked or didn't work and why,, but with no experience you will not know what to look for, or which outcomes were due to skill and which to luck.

[johnu]

Can someone play good bridge solely by playing a ton (like 12 hours a day) and not reading any books on the subject? basically just playing by instinct.

I'm planning on doing this.

 

In case you have noticed, bridge is a partnership game. Unless you are playing with robots, your partner has to be on the same page about bidding and defensive carding. You won't be successful unless you can be a good partner. Even playing with robots, you need to pick the right bids based on the robot bidding system.

 

If you can analyze your bidding and play mistakes, and recognize whether you or partner is at fault for bad results, then maybe. Good players who haven't read many (or any) bridge books generally improve by playing with better players who can mentor them.

[ahydra]

A director at my old club back in the UK and her partner are like that - just playing on instinct rather than counting the hand etc. They are good players, both Grand Masters, but would never get anywhere close to expert level. I think this is quite representative - I'd say one simply can't get to expert level without studying some advanced techniques, particularly in card play, and developing a detailed set of partnership understandings.

 

ahydra

[gszes]

IMHO FORGETABOUTIT Please PLEASE do not waste the time of the people you are going to play with/against trying to get a FEEL for the game. I have no clue how much you think you already know but the amount of information is so huge that even the best programmers in the world have been unable to effectively teach robots how to bid well. Those programmers have the tremendous advantage of KNOWING what is right and they still cannot effectively create programs that successfully mimic decent bidding. I do believe over time you could become an effective declarer and possibly even a fair defender but even then w/o the ability to understand signalling etc. you (and your poor partners) will be at a significant disadvantage. Go to www.BILBRIDGE.com and join the club there. Take advantage of the mountains of information in their library and ask for a FREE mentor who will be happy to get you started with the basics and hopefully give you the passion needed to delve into the more advanced material needed to progress. Enjoy the game and try to avoid taking away the enjoyment of your future partners by being totally clueless for a LONGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG time.

[nige1]

Can someone play good bridge solely by playing a ton (like 12 hours a day) and not reading any books on the subject? basically just playing by instinct. I'm planning on doing this.

We all know successful Bridge-players who seem to have a natural card-sense and say that they've never read a Bridge-book.

 

But it's hard to become a top-expert who can recognize the opportunities for complex squeezes, coups, and endplays, without reading appropriate material. Also it's much easier to develop bidding and defensive rapport with partner, if you base your understandings on mutually accessible literature.

 

Nowadays. however, I think you could just rely on web-content (rather than hard-copy). For exam[le, discussion groups like this.

[The_Badger]

We all know successful Bridge-players who seem to have a natural card-sense and say that they've never read a Bridge-book.

 

But it's hard to become a top-expert who can recognize the opportunities for complex squeezes, coups, and endplays, without reading appropriate material. Also it's much easier to develop bidding and defensive rapport with partner, if you base your understandings on mutually accessible literature.

 

Nowadays. however, I think you could just rely on web-content (rather than hard-copy). For example, discussion groups like this.

 

Nige1's right. There is enough stuff online now that it's possible to become a competent player by using that, but the problem is sifting it to decide what's what, and what's relevant for you.

 

Bridge has a conventional language all of its own. For example (taken from an actual advanced player's profile)

 

5533,invmin,nt15-17/20-22alltrnfs,gerb

w2's,Wjs,2clstr.neg&suppX,dont,unnt

lav.sign,RKC14-03

 

It's similar to learning a foreign language in a way, I suppose. You can get by with parts of it, but being competent enough to be fluent in it probably needs to be learnt in bite-sized chunks, and plenty of bite-sized chunks too. Though many, many players can have a good enough bridge game without being fluent in it and by getting by with parts of it.

[GrahamJson]

My advice is:

 

1/ Keep things simple until you have mastered the basics. Looks S of complex conventions will not make you a good player.

2/ If you are playing on BBO look at your hand records after each session, including your good scores as well as the bad. You may find that you were lucky with some good scores, or maybe the oppo just misplayed. Check that you took the best line and look for any clues that you may have missed (this is easier to do against good players).

3/ Read, read and read again. But again, don't concentrate on conventions, concentrate on hand evaluation, play and defence.

4/ When you have reached a reasonable standard read "Practical bidding and practical play" by Terence Reece. Some of the bidding may not follow modern methods but it is a classic in showing you how to think. It goes into areas that few other books cover, such as what you can deduce from opponents discards.

 

Good luck.

[GrahamJson]

Auto correct has been at it again...Lots of complex conventions...

[Natali_]

I think that by using your intuition and experience for a long time you will come to the finish line on those rules that you can read now. You will spend a lot of time on what you can take faster.

[miamijd]

Sure, it's theoretically possible. Jeff Meckstroth used to claim that the only bridge book he ever read was a portion of "Five Weeks to Winning Bridge." Then again, his parents were decent players back in Columbus and taught him to play as a young pup. Then again, very few of us have as natural a feel for the game as Jeff did and does.

 

Different people learn in different ways. Some people learn best by reading. Some learn best by hearing others talk about something. Some learn best by observing. Some learn best by "doing." Some need a combination of the above.

 

And different phases of the game can be learned differently. You can certainly improve your declarer play by playing tourneys against the robots. Probably your defense, too. But reading is especially good for bidding theory.

 

If I were starting out and wanted to become an excellent player in a short period of time, I would (A) read some basic stuff on bidding and play; (B) play F2F in the toughest games I could find; © play in BBO robot tourneys a lot and (D) then hire a really good teaching pro for a while.

 

Cheers,

mike

[amre_man]

I first learned bridge the way you suggest. I did print out select novice instruction from an online website. And played that way for 15 years, always online. And then I joined the ACBL and played at a local club only to find that I was making select illegal bidding. At the same time I learned about something called a convention card!?!?!?! HA! I had to relearn many conventions that I already 'knew'.

 

Self teaching has its benefits and its limitations. While you can learn much from experimentation and frequent play, you must do minimal reading to verify that you know the appropriate responses for stayman, transfers and the like.

 

If your goal is to learn and improve your game, playing and/or kibbing can only go so far.

 

You also must remember that is a partnership game. It is all about agreeing to selected conventions and which variations thereof you agree to follow.

 

I've now been playing for 25+ years and it is a rare week that goes by that I do not find something else to understand.

 

Good luck!

[maartenxq]

Terence Reese, one of the great writers of the game and expert player in competition and money games, comments on your intention as follows.

 

Ï never read a book. I bid by inspection and play by experience' one of his opponents remarked. Reese: 'I can see'.

 

Maarten Baltussen

[johnu]

Some more popular quotes

 

"He who undertakes to be his own teacher has a fool for a pupil."

 

"Experience is the best teacher, but a fool will learn from no other" - Ben Franklin

 

"Wise men learn by others men’s mistakes; fools by their own."

 

Hmmm, lots of references to "fool" in those quotes. Still, you could be exception and succeed on your own.

 

There's also a famous saying, "Practice makes perfect". In the golf world, the saying is modified along the lines of "practice makes permanent, not perfect". If you aren't practicing the right technique, you are just ingraining bad techniques which make it even harder to get better.