[kenberg]

I learned contract bridge in 1961 by reading Goren's Contract Bridge for Beginners. This brings up several thoughts. I was 22 and in grad school. Something on the order of your target audience.

First, "beginners" is not entirely well-defined. Everyone played cards in Minnesota, even those who thought it a sin. I was a beginning bridge player but not a beginning card player. Taking tricks, trump suit, leads, playing in turn all made sense. There is primitive bidding in games such as 500.

Next: I played cards, whether hearts, poker or bridge, with friends at someone's house. I didn't know a thing about clubs, tournaments, duplicate, etc and when I learned of their existence I didn't care.

I recall Goren saying something like "Bridge was explained to me as a game where you have to follow suit if you can, if not you can trump" . Not a bad first line.

I like the idea of just playing out some hands without bidding. Maybe begin with notrump. Tell them to take as many tricks as they can. Then play some more hands, setting a certain number of tricks as the goal. After that, the idea of bidding to a makable contract will make sense, and scoring can be introduced to show why you want to contract for 9, or 12, tricks at no trump when the chances are decent that you can take 9, or 12.

Bidding as a language enabling progressive revelation of each other's hands was a new concept. Once that made sense, a few artificial calls such as Stayman and Blackwood were not really that difficult to grasp.


Check back to see if what you say conveys what you mean. A more experienced player told me not to underlead kings. OK, sounds weird but he is (from where I stood) the expert. So the next time that I chose to lead a suit with a king in it I led the king. It is with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement that I relate this, but it's a true story.

I hope you enjoy the experience.

[Free]

If you want to keep them at the table I think you should definitely focus on the play, but not too much to avoid them hating the bidding phase later on.

Something very important in the bidding: keep it simple and follow some rules. Accept that you won't reach the best contract every time, especially at this moment. Some simple form of sayc will do.

[jimbelk]

I have about a year's worth of experience teaching bridge to small groups of college students. (We play every week in the math lounge, and beginners often participate.) For a complete beginner, it is not really practical to teach ANY bridge bidding system to start with, except for the basic understanding that all bids should be natural.

Of course, there needs to be some "hidden system" that you have in mind to advise players on how to bid. I would definitely suggest a strong 2♣, with other two-level bids being weak, but there's no particular reason to mention it until they try to open a strong two, or until an experienced player tries to bid a weak two. Beginners tend to enjoy opening weak twos once they learn about them.

My experience is that beginners find five-card majors confusing, especially since they don't yet understand the importance of major suits over minor suits. I would stick with 4-card majors to start with, and there's no particular reason to give them a specific rule on which suit to open with 4-4. (Say something general like "try to plan ahead and think about what you will bid next".) Don't switch to 5-card majors until they're ready to learn an actual bidding system.

Strong notrumps will work fine, although they will come up so rarely that the beginners won't ever learn how to bid over them. Most beginners will try to open 1NT the first time they get a minimum balanced hand, and you will have to tell them that a 1NT opening actually shows some extra strength. (It's possible that weak notrumps would work better, but I haven't tried.)

The one artificial convention that they will need early on is takeout doubles. This will come up the first time one player has a strong hand after another player opened.

It's really hard to get beginners to invite or bid game. Instead of giving them ranges for invites, my experience is that it works better to tell them that game requires 25 points total, and then let them work it out for themselves. It also helps to provide them with some very simplified version of the scoring, so that they can see a clear advantage in bidding game. I like to use the following:
* 2 points for making a partscore
* 5 points for bidding and making game
* 10 points for bidding and making slam
* 20 points for bidding and making grand slam
* 1 point/undertrick for setting the opponents
These numbers have been chosen so that it makes sense to bid game with a 50% chance of making, etc., and so that sacrifices work about the same way as they do normally. (For a doubled contract, just double the bonus for setting the opponents, or add a flat +2 for making.)

I haven't tried teaching precision to beginners, but I think they would find it somewhat confusing. Also, the ACBL's Learn to Play Bridge software is so good that it would be a shame to teach them a system that isn't compatible with it.

Finally, try not to get into the habit of telling them how to play contracts, how to defend, or what to bid every time. If you always answer questions of the form "What should I bid with this hand?", then they will never stop asking. Of course you will need to help with bidding a bit to start with. But as soon as possible, they need to start making decisions on their own, so that they can experiment with what sorts of bids lead to good or bad results.

[Free]

Wow you give your students a lot of freedom in the choices they make! I wonder if this really is a good approach, because they don't know anything yet.

It's like teaching someone to play chess, but only explain how to move their pieces. They won't learn about development, middle game strategy, end game strategy,... They'll lose all the time and won't know why. How can they ever learn something?

If you show them how it should be done, and especially why (very important), you get much better results imo. They'll start seeing paterns, similarities,... and get some understanding about the game instead of memorizing their lessons.

[Mbodell]

Well, it probably depends on environments. If you don't give the students more direction and put them in a duplicate game it wouldn't be great, but if they just play amongst themselves, it wouldn't matter. Same thing with the chess, if you don't teach them endgame and openings and they just play amongst themselves they'll develop their own styles for a while.

I think it is probably a good idea if you have a group of beginners and can swing them developing together.

[helene_t]

jimbelk, on Aug 26 2010, 03:46 AM, said:

My experience is that beginners find five-card majors confusing, especially since they don't yet understand the importance of major suits over minor suits.

I think if that is the case then you have started teaching them bidding at an earlier stage than I would. I would say that they need to understand the basic objectives of bidding before they start bidding.

The decision tree:

Do we have enough values for game?
---Yes -> Do we have a fit in a major suit?
-------Yes -> 4M
-------No -> Usually 3NT

is something they will learn during the mini-bridge phase.

[pdmunro]

jimbelk, on Aug 25 2010, 09:46 PM, said:

* 2 points for making a partscore
* 5 points for bidding and making game
* 10 points for bidding and making slam
* 20 points for bidding and making grand slam
* 1 point/undertrick for setting the opponents
(For a doubled contract, just double the bonus for setting the opponents, or add a flat +2 for making.)

I like it. Nice and simple and captures the spirit of the game. Will try it, if the staff at work want me to host a bridge night.