Novice Experiences

[barmar]

Do you prefer young people being rude?

I suspect his point is that it's not so uncommon with old people (rude behavior used to be much more common in bridge), so he doesn't find it surprising.

[aimbot]

I suspect his point is that it's not so uncommon with old people (rude behavior used to be much more common in bridge), so he doesn't find it surprising.

 

Oh wow. This might explain something my partner and I were surprised by. We're both new players (half a year of bridge experience), not exactly young, but young by bridge club standards.

 

A lot of people at the local bridge club seem mean. Not most, but enough that it was a real shock to both of us when we started playing at the club. When we do any other competitive recreational activity (sports, board games of the sort that are popular on boardgamegeek.com, etc.) it's rare to run into people who are jerks right off the bat outside of high-level competitive play. When we go play duplicate, we expect that we'll average one pair a night that tilts and starts haranguing us.

 

In our last club game, we ran into a pair that accused us of cheating (we used a bid that was familiar to them and alerted it properly, the thing that bothered them was that they hadn't heard of the bid before and thought it was against the rules to use a bid they didn't know existed even after we explained the bid). They called the director over, who told them to calm down and that it was fine. They didn't calm down and were so upset that they continued talking about it loudly for the next few boards, even after we'd move on the to next table. They went on and on about how we and the young pair they played before us were mean, loudly enough that both of the pairs they were talking about could hear after we'd rotated. I don't think we were mean, but people almost never think they're mean, so maybe I'm just biased, but I can't believe that the other young pair they're talking about was mean.

 

My partner and I play with a group of friends outside of the local club regularly. Down at the club, I hear a lot of discussions about how bridge is dying out because young people nowadays don't have any attention span. Well, I know a lot of folks who would be considered young at the bridge club who play bridge, they just don't want to play at the club and get told off most nights they play. My partner and I are the only pair in our group who's played at the club more than once. No one else sees the point of heading 30 minutes uptown to play with a bunch of jerks when they can play with nice folks in a home game without commuting so far. To be fair, only 20% of the people we run into are jerks, but that compares poorly to the 0% in a friendly home game or a few percent in other recreational activities we do.