[nige1]

gordontd, on 2014-March-07, 07:14, said:

Looking around the room at tournaments, or at the clubs where you play, may support this idea but if you looked at the memberships of all bridge clubs in England you would find more women than men playing.

Agree. Also, IMO, if you include "Kitchen bridge", "Lunch-time Bridge", and "Bridge classes", then women are more plentiful then men.

[mike777]

If nothing else I think people forget if 20 some million play bridge worldwide....If you are in the top ten thousand that is not nothing.

Now note many say there are only some 100 or so worldwide true current world class players, current world class level players
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On a separate note....I think it shows that current top robots are really pretty good compared to the 20+ million or so.
Not so much compared to your top 100. I would go out on a limb and say robots are better than the median ACBL player

--
"Who plays bridge?"


at some point ..not today..robots may play more deals on bbo than humans.
It would be very interesting to know what % of deals in 2013 were played on bbo by robots....1%?? .001%?

[jogs]

StevenG, on 2014-March-14, 10:21, said:

The only people coming into the game are retirees, or those with adult children. Of these, the numbers that wish to play serious bridge are very small. Non-affiliated clubs are surviving reasonably well, but otherwise the situation doesn't look at all promising.

The bridge community must convinced the retirees that playing bridge is better from them than playing golf. Also playing bridge is cheaper.

[Antrax]

uday, on 2014-March-14, 12:29, said:

Is there a large group of players out there that "just wants to play bridge" in the sense that my uncle Herb just wants to play Minesweeper? Maybe we, who play duplicate bridge, are too walled off from the "real" bridge players out there.

Not sure if I'm representative, but I don't really have time to play seriously, and don't want the relevant parts of my brain to atrophy. The various quick play options are great for that, since bots don't care if you drop out suddenly after playing 5 hands, they play a system you know in advance and even at basic play you need to count the hand and bid normally to get good results, so it's challenging enough.

[mycroft]

jogs, on 2014-March-16, 10:19, said:

The bridge community must convinced the retirees that playing bridge is better from them than playing golf. Also playing bridge is cheaper.

And, at least for 6 months in the year, possible in a way that golf is not. Of course, many of our players get around that by moving to Arizona for the winter and golfing there.

But retirees golf because they learned to earlier in their life, for professional reasons or otherwise; same with bridge. New bridge players are hard to get at 60; returnees that now have the time for it less so.