As a hobby or pastime, what could be nicer, four friends sitting outside on a balmy summer's evening around a table with gin and tonics playing a rubber of bridge? This book will guide you to that state of nirvana.
If you can play whist you can play bridge, using easy to follow tables and card layout diagrams this will guide absolute beginners through the basics of card values, trick values and the bidding sequence.
Chuck in a bit of common sense and it all will become clear: the bidding system and scoring; how to open the bidding and how to reply; overcalls after the opposition have bid; slam bidding; playing the hands; finessing and cross trumping.
There are twenty nine sample hands guiding you through the nuances of bidding, playing and scoring.
Ideal for use as a reference whilst bidding and playing the hands at home.
What could be nicer, four friends sitting outside on a balmy summer's evening around a table with gin and tonics playing a rubber of bridge? This book will guide you to that state of nirvana.
What could be nicer, four friends sitting outside on a balmy summer's evening around a table with gin and tonics playing a rubber of bridge? This book will guide you to that state of nirvana.
What could be nicer, four friends sitting outside on a balmy summer's evening around a table with gin and tonics playing a rubber of bridge? This book will guide you to that state of nirvana.
Excerpt:
I first started playing bridge at the age of eighteen when I was posted out to Hong Kong in the RAF. My mentor through the past three years as an Apprentice was with me. An Eastender with a good poker brain, he initiated me from my sheltered life at boarding school to the world of booze, birds and now bridge. As it was two days before pay day and we were skint and sat in the NAAFI and someone asked us if we would like to play bridge.
I shall never forget one the first hands we played against some inscrutable Chinese gentlemen who bid hearts up to the six level. I was sitting with five of them and naturally doubled. They went up to make six no trumps and it was then that I discovered the wonderful world of convention bids.
Convention bids are unnatural bids, ie: 1 club can mean 16 plus points and nothing to do with clubs.
Several years later I was stuck out in the middle of the desert for weeks testing a radio beacon. My colleague and I were fed up with counting dead flies so decided to devise our own bidding system and not surprisingly did quite well afterwards playing “kitchen” rubber bridge.
Morally you should tell your opposition if you have made an unnatural bid. But this was long before I was thrust into the heady world of duplicate bridge governed by the English Bridge Union with convention cards and alerts!
My cockney partner went on to play at the international level for the Isle of Man and I ended up playing at the county level for Leicestershire. I managed to scrape up enough EBU master points to make a two star master and played in both the Leicestershire and Warwickshire leagues.
I had a very astute partner on Thursdays for the league matches and another partner for the more relaxing local club games and then with another partner for the extremely social “kitchen bridge” games at the weekends. So I ended up playing three different systems: Precision Club for Thursdays; ACOL on Wednesdays and Benjamin ACOL at the weekends.
My wife and I are both retired now and play in the sunshine of the Costa del Sol at several local clubs and as a man and wife team are doing surprisingly well. I teach beginners for the U3A (The University of Third Age) and surprisingly again my students are actually listening to what I tell them and we are progressing.
I have tried to introduce them to using their own initiative and common sense to overcome any difficulties as everybody knows there is no such animal as a perfect bidding system and you really do have to trust your partner and assume he has a valid reason for a particular bid.
This book is dedicated to beginners but it is my experience that you are never to old to learn and going back to basics can prove very profitable as the New Zealand rugby team repeatedly keep showing everybody.
I have found that a lot of players strive for more and more complicated systems as if to prove something, but in reality achieve actually zilch!
I have learnt purely from experience and practice. Practice is the most valuable lesson. As Jack Nicklaus said: “the more I practice the luckier I get.”
