[hrothgar]

ArcLight, on Sep 14 2005, 08:01 PM, said:

 

>The point is that if the organized membership drops from 100K to 10K it may lose >critical mass. No more bridge clubs. Maybe some national and world championships >(I'm not really interested in them).

The organized membership is going to suffer a dramatic contraction. No ifs, ands or buts. Its a simple matter of demographics. The question is whether we are smart enough to learn from the example of King Knud (Canute, Knut). Rather than wasting time trying to comand the sea, I prefer to focus on ensuring a soft landing.

If you're seriously interested in the topic, I recommend that you read "Bowling Aone" by Robert Putnam

>With few people playing bridge, how will new players be recruited?
>Who will try and recruit younger players?
>Especially if Bridge has very complicated bidding?

I think that you are confusing two VERY different topics. From my perspective, young players thrive on complexity. Have you ever looked at the rules for games like "Magic the Gathering", Warhammer, or god forbid Star Fleet Battles? The amount of minutia is mind boggling.

Equally significant: In my experience young players like to experiment. More importantly, they dislike being told you play 5 card majors because we know best and this is the way its always been done.

>Does it have to be that way?
>What would the benefits be of a simplistic bidding system?

As I have noted many times in the past: When I teach bridge to new players, I teach them using a game very similar to mini-bridge. I ignore bidding completely for many of the reasons that you suggest.

With this said and done, when I introduce bidding I say that there a 1001 different approaches regaridng how to reach your best contract and how to prevent the opponents from reaching theres. There is no "best way" or secret to success. Youn need to decide what works best for you.

>Imagine trying to teach a new player MOSCITO. While the system notes are not >too long, it would require someone to memorize 8 pages.

If a player is unwilling or unable to memorize 8 pages than they aren't part of the target demographic. Write em off now, cause you're gonna lose to X-Box sooner or later...

[ArcLight]

>I think that you are confusing two VERY different topics. From my perspective, young players thrive on complexity. Have you ever looked at the rules for games like "Magic the Gathering", Warhammer, or god forbid Star Fleet Battles? The amount of minutia is mind boggling.


I also play wargames, I am used to reading 48 page rule books, but I don't find that enjoyable. Star Fleet battles is far simpler than many wargames. That doesn't mean the wargames are better.

In "World Class" by Marc Smith, a few of the featured players mention that they got inot Bridge accidentally. They had to wait somewhere to be picke dup after soccer, or it was raining and there was a bridge club, etc. Was it the complexity of the bidding system that attracted them? Or perhaps the card play and bidding?

As a kid I liked complicated things. But I also liked fun games. If you set the hurdle high "complexity" then the smart kids who haven't decided to make the plunge my decide not to bother.


>Equally significant: In my experience young players like to experiment. More importantly, they dislike being told you play 5 card majors because we know best and this is the way its always been done.

Experimentation can be fun. But frequently at Bridge you end up introducing all sorts of unseen holes. It reminds me of some post by Fred and another by Eric Rodwell.



>Imagine trying to teach a new player MOSCITO. While the system notes are not >too long, it would require someone to memorize 8 pages.

If a player is unwilling or unable to memorize 8 pages than they aren't part of the target demographic. Write em off now, cause you're gonna lose to X-Box sooner or later...


Its not just "8 pages of rules" its 8 pages of bidding sequences. Thats much harder to remember than the rules to a game like Settlers of Cataan.

I think 8 pages up front for new players is certainly too much to ask.
The way I got started playing Bridge was througgh Spades. One of the strong Spades players went over the basics. Showed me Standard American. Then I used Freds program (on the acbl website). If I didnt have a little hand holding in the beginning, I'd never have gotten started. I doubt I'd put the time into memorizing 8 pages of sequences.



>The organized membership is going to suffer a dramatic contraction. No ifs, ands or buts. Its a simple matter of demographics. The question is wehther we are smart enough to learn from the example of King Knud (Canute, Knut). Rather than wasting time trying to comand the sea, I prefer to focus on ensuring a soft landing.

I'm unsure of your point. Are you saying not to bother trying to recruit new members?

What is this soft landing?

[awm]

There are several different ways to promote bridge. We have basically the following:

(1) Recruit the children of current bridge players. This happens "automatically" to a great degree. Curiously many of the kids who are most trumpeted as "successes of the US junior program" are in this category, but that's another issue. I don't think the complexity of bidding methods or even the manner in which bridge is advertised has much to do with the success of this.

(2) Recruit gamers. These are folks who are into other games (often very complicated games). They will probably not be thrown by complicated bidding systems (compare to the number of pages of openings one has to memorize to be a good chess player, or simply reading the rules of some of the wargames out there). In fact the avenue for creativity (you can devise your own bidding system!) is something that sets bridge apart from the majority of games out there.

(3) Teach high school kids to play. The thing about this is, most of these kids will not take up bridge seriously. There are so many other things kids can do for fun these days (video games, collectable card games, etc) that most of them are not going to pursue a game which is more popular among their grandparents' generation than among their friends. However, in the long run, it is quite possible that these kids will "remember" bridge when they are much older and it will be easier to get them into the game as retirees than it would be if they had never heard of or played bridge before.

(4) Try to teach the game to older people who haven't played before. This is where "keeping things simple" is likely to have the most benefit. In general teaching bridge to older people who haven't played similar games before seems to be hard, and I think this is why there's a big focus now on (3).

[DrTodd13]

I remember about 10 or 15 years ago before I knew how to play bridge that there was a woman on PBS who had a bridge show. The woman was about 187 years old, had wrinkles deeper than the grand canyon and kept talking about how wonderful, fascinating and lovely certain bridge hands were. I don't remember too much about bidding discussions but I can't imagine they were very up-to-date.

As much as we would all like to maintain the game so that we have something to do 20 or 40 years from now, the decline is inevitable. You can't change human nature. Most people are lazy. Most people don't like to think unless necessary and even when they think they are thinking it is at a very shallow level. For the masses, how do you compete with the brain-dead insta-entertainment that is TV and team sports? I don't think you can. I think you just have to target your promotions to the small percentage of people who actually like using their minds. Maybe somehow arrange to have free bridge lesson coupons placed in the materials of many other complicated occupations.

[Al_U_Card]

Quite the discussion. Any (marketing) plan requires a review of the strengths of the product and the requirements of its target market.

Bridge is mentally challenging. It feeds the competitive urge. A "game" (the common unit of measure) can be played fairly quickly. Comparison and evaluation of results is clear and rapid. Monetary cost associated with its practice or use is relatively minor.

OMG we are looking for people like us! Some time on their hands, mentally ept, fiercely competitive and of moderate means.

The best place to start the search for a new (not already participating) clientele is through word of mouth. Every one of us must approach people we know to see if they are among the unwashed 25 million who "know of" the game. If each of us spends 1 hour of our bridge time every week in this way, we will always have somewone to play with.

[SoTired]

The game of bridge is NOT elitist. Yes, bridge is an intellectual activity, but that does not mean bridge players are intellectuals. We all know many bridge players that love the game and play it all the time that need help operating a light switch.

I know players that periodically ask me to explain Ogust or Jacoby 2N again, because they forgot. They have been playing for 20 years, but if the bidding goes 1C 1H 1N 2H, you have a 50/50 chance they actually have a weak hand.

And, yet, they love bridge and have withdrawal pangs when on vacation. So it is not just the geeky teenager we need to market to.

[hrothgar]

ArcLight, on Sep 14 2005, 09:11 PM, said:

What is this soft landing?

Right now the ACBL is structured based on the assumption of a large membership base. The spending patterns for the organization and the governance structure both assume a membership base of X and revenue of Y.

Its unclear whether these assumptions are justified. Its very possible that the membership base will ungo a sudden and steep decline.

Some people, myself included, thing that the ACBL should begin planning for this decline in advance. In any ways, the arguments are analagous to suggestions that the US should be phasing in significant increases in gasoline taxes in order to avoid sudden/calamatous price shocks in the future...

[awm]

Last I looked at the ACBL membership statistics:

(1) ACBL membership was actually growing.

(2) Average age of members was actually declining (although it's still in the mid-60s).

(3) Recent tournaments were setting records for table counts, despite the general increase in the number of regional tournaments being held.

All of the pessimistic predictions for bridge seem to be based on the ideas that:

(1) The new generation of retirees (people now in their mid-late fifties) didn't grow up at a time when bridge was as smashingly popular as it was in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Therefore they weren't as acquainted with bridge in their youth.

(2) Kids today don't seem to be that interested in bridge.

But I'm not sure all this gloom and doom is warranted. Many of the new generation of retirees are college-educated (far more than in previous generations), many have been exposed to similar games (hearts or spades or euchre), and most are committed to remaining mentally active in their retirement. This may actually be a positive change for games like bridge.

As for the kids, there's plenty of hearts and spades playing in college. Online bridge games like BBO are making the duplicate game more accessible to kids with peculiar hours of free time, limited funds, and lack of interest in attending the local club where they are the youngest by forty years. Many people predicted that chess would undergo a huge decline once computers started beating the best human players, but instead the opposite has been true. Online chess sites have increased the popularity of the game among young players, and BBO is doing the same for bridge.

Certainly bridge is unlikely to attain the levels of popularity that it had in the 30s-50s where games were televised and appeared in newspaper headlines. But with world population exploding and interest in "intellectual" pursuits rising as more and more people go to college and pursue "intellectual" careers, I don't see any reason to believe that bridge will undergo a dramatic collapse.

[pigpenz]

Jlall, on Sep 14 2005, 03:51 PM, said:

This college kid on pokerstars and I are regulars in a 5/10 NL game. We play against each other almost every day, and I got his AIM one day. He is very interested in bridge and has done the LTPB software. I played with him on yahoo a few days ago. Poker may be a good avenue to get young people:P

My wife who teaches at a high school says now they have to stop kids playing poker in between classes....i am sure when JLall was in grade school he had duplicate boards in his backpack along with his leather jacket

[hrothgar]

awm, on Sep 14 2005, 11:48 PM, said:

Last I looked at the ACBL membership statistics:

(1) ACBL membership was actually growing.

(2) Average age of members was actually declining (although it's still in the mid-60s).

(3) Recent tournaments were setting records for table counts, despite the general increase in the number of regional tournaments being held.

According to the most recent numbers that I have available, the average age of ACBL members was 68 in December 2004. This decreased to 67.28 in the Summer of 2005.

The ACBL has been desperately trying to recruit news members and has been having some success. However, this does little to effect that main problem faced by the organization: The ACBL has a nasty demographic buldge working its way through the membership base. There were a LOT of people who started playing 45 years ago. They're not going to be arround forever. I'll note in passing that one impact of the demographic budge "exiting" such a system is a sudden decrease in membership age. (You suddenly have an abnomally high number of "old" members exiting the system. In theory, the number of "young" members entering remains constant...)

Regardless, the average age of the membership isn't a particularly useful number to be tracking. The mean is a wonderful summary statistic if your data is normally distributed, however, we're not looking at one of those cases. In this example, the Mode is a much more useful datapoint.

[Elianna]

hrothgar, on Sep 14 2005, 02:03 PM, said:

Regardless, the average age of the membership isn't a particularly useful number to be tracking. The mean is a wonderful summary statistic if your data is normally distributed, however, we're not looking at one of those cases. In this example, the Mode is a much more useful datapoint.

Why mode? I'd be much more interested in median.

[hrothgar]

Elianna, on Sep 15 2005, 12:40 AM, said:

hrothgar, on Sep 14 2005, 02:03 PM, said:

Regardless, the average age of the membership isn't a particularly useful number to be tracking.  The mean is a wonderful summary statistic if your data is normally distributed, however, we're not looking at one of those cases.  In this example, the Mode is a much more useful datapoint.

Why mode? I'd be much more interested in median.

Median and mode are both good...

Normally, when I've needed to track the impact of a buldge over time, i do so using two values:

1. Define the edge of the cliff: Find the expected age at which members exit the the system
2. Track the buldge (which will typically be normally distributed arround the mode)

The median also gives you a decent amount of information, but its trickier to analyze changes in the median over time...

[Blofeld]

ArcLight, on Sep 14 2005, 01:11 PM, said:

>Equally significant: In my experience young players like to experiment. More importantly, they dislike being told you play 5 card majors because we know best and this is the way its always been done.

Experimentation can be fun. But frequently at Bridge you end up introducing all sorts of unseen holes. It reminds me of some post by Fred and another by Eric Rodwell.

To emphasise hrothgar's point, the purpose of experimentation is mostly to enjoy yourself and find out for yourself what works and what doesn't. If you didn't end up introducing all sorts of holes then designing bidding systems wouldn't be interesting, and people wouldn't bother experimenting in the first place.

[ArcLight]

>To emphasise hrothgar's point, the purpose of experimentation is mostly to enjoy yourself and find out for yourself what works and what doesn't. If you didn't end up introducing all sorts of holes then designing bidding systems wouldn't be interesting, and people wouldn't bother experimenting in the first place.

On the other hand, people perceive holes and unkowingly introduce a worse problem to fix the hole. They dont realize this until a lot of time and effort have been expended.

Personally, I'd rather not tinker with a system. I'd like a decent, well specified system, that I can use off the shelf. If I were to play Precision I'd use the Manly/Berkowitz book. For 2/1 I use the Lawrence books/software (and even there, there isn't an easy summary). I don't care if a system is the best, I just want something well defined so pard and I can agree on something.

My interest in experimenting is adding more conventions, rather than changing the system structure.

This will come of a very negative, but needs to be said:
What makes any of you think you are able to do a better job than the original designer anyway? Systems do evolve, and you may find a genuine improvement. But unless you are very experienced and a good player, your solutions are unlikely to be beneficial. I can still see the interest in trying your self, but I would never want to help test out someones new system. 99 out of 100 times it will be worse, and I wouldnt want to waste my time. I can see using a new/evolving system if its popular where you play. Like Polish Club or MOSCITO.

By all means, go ahead and be creative. Don't stifle innovation. But I will wait untill a system is refined and partners are available.

>To emphasise hrothgar's point, the purpose of experimentation is mostly to enjoy yourself and find out for yourself what works and what doesn't. If you didn't end up introducing all sorts of holes then designing bidding systems wouldn't be interesting, and people wouldn't bother experimenting in the first place.


I think people design systems because they see problems in existing ones. I don't know that most top players say "I think I'll design my own system for fun and spend a lot of time developing it".

Here is a challenge:
Design is simplistic bidding system for newer players. Try and make it as good as possible, with 4 pages of rules.

[hrothgar]

ArcLight, on Sep 15 2005, 03:50 PM, said:

I think people design systems because they see problems in existing ones. I don't know that most top players say "I think I'll design my own system for fun and spend a lot of time developing it".

I think that young people are hardwired to be contrary... They don't like to do as they are told. They don't take things based on faith. They're particularly dubious about claims that they should do stuff because this is the way its always been done...

Kids like to experiment. And in doing so, they make lots of mistakes. However, this is how you learn. Looking back on life, I've always learned more from failures than success. If you get some right the first time, it was almost certainly luck. God forbid that you end up convinced that you know the "right" way to do things.

[Al_U_Card]

Which makes you wonder about the segregation of play into 3 sections. Basic (Stayman and Blackwood), Technical (the usual suspects ie 2/1, WJ, Prec. etc.) and HUM. Let kids get into the HUM and have no fear that they would back away from ferting their way to a fun round.....

[Gerben42]

Quote

My wife who teaches at a high school says now they have to stop kids playing poker in between classes....

I think one should encourage playing poker in between classes not stop them. They are doing something intelligent and improve their social skills (not to mention mathematics!)

That's LIVE poker with fellow students, not online poker or with creepy characters.