[ajm218]

Hi all

I have met a lot of people recently who claim they would like to learn to play but have never had the chance, or the time etc.

I have tried to sit down and teach them on an ad hoc basis but find they don't really take it in, probably because it’s too over-whelming to do in one big chunk and/or my explaining probably isn't ideal; where do you start?

I remember my learning curve consisting of some books for beginners; followed by a year of playing on sites like Yahoo and BBO until I became at least aware of concepts enough to be able to ask better players about things.

Can anyone recommend any beginners books or resources I can recommend? I think what would be ideal would be a book/resource defining the game followed by a couple of hundred hands of mini-bridge split into sections with good commentary and explanations? Anyone know of any good ones or able to advise me?

[mr1303]

Hi Andy

The English Bridge Union has a number of books based on their beginners courses that they run, known as the really easy series. I have a couple of them sitting at home, and they can be bought from the EBU shop.

You get a discount if you join the EBU teacher's association. I joined last year, and it is well recommended, especially if you do one of their teaching workshops that they run from time to time.

E-mail John Pain (john@ebu.co.uk) for more information.

[Gerben42]

AJM in what country are you? This will be relevant for the question at hand.

[pigpenz]

interesting, I have been mentoring in the BIL....it is a task that is hard to describe as far as where to begin and where to go....makes you sort of realize that we were all green at one time

[Gerben42]

Another factor is age of your potential beginners. With older beginners you should probably start with Minibridge and then go on to real bridge. However if you have college students they will be bored if you stick to Minibridge too long.

My group of college students went from "what is bridge?" to "play in the club in the normal game" in ten 2-hour lessons.

About content: Don't overload them with system. This means that all these standard system stuff is too complicated. Here are some things:

Don't teach them Transfers, Benjamin or other conventions they do not need.
Stick to the basics. It is much more important that they get the easy hands right.

[Sigi_BC84]

Gerben42, on Mar 9 2006, 12:18 AM, said:

Another factor is age of your potential beginners. With older beginners you should probably start with Minibridge and then go on to real bridge. However if you have college students they will be bored if you stick to Minibridge too long.

My group of college students went from "what is bridge?" to "play in the club in the normal game" in ten 2-hour lessons.

About content: Don't overload them with system. This means that all these standard system stuff is too complicated. Here are some things:

Don't teach them Transfers, Benjamin or other conventions they do not need.
Stick to the basics. It is much more important that they get the easy hands right.

What system did you teach to these beginners? I assume it's not any standard system so maybe you can give the opening structure and which conventions you've taught. I'm also interested in the general teaching approach you've taken.

We will get a few junior beginners soon and we are planning to give them a crash course to get them into the normal tourney as quickly as possible (keeping the Minibridge short and cutting the Forum-D crap).

Any experience and advice highly appreciated.

--Sigi

[MickyB]

Gerben42, on Mar 8 2006, 11:33 AM, said:

AJM in what country are you? This will be relevant for the question at hand.

Murph is one of the English juniors.

[Gerben42]

Hi Sigi, I will send you my notes.

Basically 5-card majors strong NT, 1♣ can be two cards. 2♦♥♠ weak two bids.

Two conventional auctions only:
1. Stayman
2. 2♣ opener + first response

Few rules, no exceptions, keep it simple, thanks.

Perhaps even better would be something like the Big NT system but this has the disadvantage that it's too different from what the world plays.

[luke warm]

i honestly think fred's 'learn to play bridge' part 1 is an excellent resource... after that, part 2... can be found at acbl.org

[Gerben42]

Yes it's a great program, especially for getting to know the card play and counting HCP and things like that.

[P_Marlowe]

Hi,

I dont think you can teach to play bridge
in one large session.
You need a couple of meetings, which should
occur on a regular basis.
The reason: If you have to learn something totally
new, you will be exhausted after 45 min.

Remember: The system is only one part, the
mechanics of the game, the scoring are also parts
of the game.

The way I learned to play:
The teacher gave a short introduction

- mechanics
- point count
- hand types (bal., semi. bal., un bal.)
- Requirement for opening 1NT

After that, we started to play a set of predealt hands,
not surprinsingly, the contract was always 1NT.

It was scored normaly with the help of boxes,
that was it for the day.

The next lecture: repetition, responses to NT, explaing
the simple play technique of a finesse

Followed by another set of predealt hands.
...

If you are looking for a course book for teachers:
Ron Klinger: Basic Acol Bridge (... more or less the titel
... ), there should be a version for 5 card mayors with
strong NT available.

With kind regards
Marlowe

[inquiry]

If you are ready to teach your students (you need 8 at a minimum and in multiples of 4) where you have them play a preset number or prepared hands, send me a message. Homebase club has a tool for quickly and effectively harvesting hands played on the BBO, mixing with the hands commentary (the lessons the teacher wants to say about the hands) and generating individualized output for the students via email or web posting.

The output shows the students bidding/play as well as the teachers comments. And we can automatically post the same on the web and/or email a copy to each player (aka student). A side benefit, each student sees the hand with himself sitting what looks like the south seat in the hand diagram (no matter what actual compass position he was sitting at). Routinely the results can be posted and emailed between 2 and 4 minutes after the event (speed dependent upon how distracted the operator who runs our tool for doing this happens to be).

This is a great help for student and teacher using prepared hands on bidding or play problems. After playing some number of hands, say 4 or 8 or 100 (up to you), everyone gets their own copy of the comments and their bidding play (they don't have to try to remember what happened an hour ago, they can see the hands in nice graphical style). Now if a teacher wants to open a chat room and have an open disucssion with the teacher, it can be about students questions as the basics of each hand with the teachers comments is already in their "hands."

To see an example of how this will look to the students, take a look at: http://www.homebasec...users/snl11.htm . The number of hands and the size of the commentary are basically unlimited. Note this was a swiss event and while the player sat West sometimes and south sometimes, in every diagram he is shown at the bottom and their bidding is the last one in the bidding table (on far right)... this is especially nice for students as this format seems less confusing.

This can be useful for beginners up to classes for advanced players as well. I have prepared some sets of very challenging hands with matching commentary for instance. And have some squeeze specific ones as well. But the topics are only limited by the teachers desires.

For true beginners this maynot be a reasonable solution, but for players who are at the playing stage it can work. We will make this available to BIL volunteers/instructors through BILMANAGER. Those interested outside BIL can contact me separately.

[inquiry]

In response to a question, yes we do this for FREE for BIL instructors/teachers/mentors who do not charge their students. Again, hopefully this will run by/through maureen (BILMANAGER). We will give any other teacher a free trial to see how they and their students like it. After that, the usual concept will be to run a homebaseclub paid tournament restricted to people choosen by the instructor (or unrestricted or restricted by some other criteria... instructors choice). Obviously if instructor is teaching SAYC, event limited to SAYC, etc.

[EarlPurple]

The simplest system I could come up with (though it might not be simple enough) for a bright beginner is:

1♥ and 1♠ are 5-card majors

1NT is 16-18

1♣ promises a 4-card major and 1♦ response enquires, whereas a 1NT response is weak, 1♥ and 1♠ show 5-card suits, 2♣ is a semi-positive with no 4-card major and 2♦ forcing to game.

1♦ denies a 4-card major. Again 1♥ and 1♠ responses show a 5-card suit, 1NT is a weak response, 2♣ semi-positive and 2♦ forcing to game. So the responses to 1♣ and 1♦ are effectively the same.

2 bids are more advanced. If I'm going to play the system myself I would like a multi:

2♣ 18-21 (but not 18 balanced which you open 1NT) OR a weak 2 in diamonds.

2♦ game force or weak 2 in either major or 22-23 balanced.

2♥ and 2♠ are pre-emptive with 5 card suit and 5 card lower suit.

2NT a matter of taste - could be one of the balanced hands or could be pre-emptive.

Of course you probably think the 2-bids are far too complex for beginners, but actually in the UK multi-bids have been very popular for a long time and a lot of the time it's relative beginners who wanted to play them because they didn't want to drop their strong 2s.

Of course I will also teach them competitive bidding by the law of total tricks and get them to learn that bridge is a competitive game and the opponents are there to make things hard for you.

[CarlRitner]

That sounds something like MidMac by Jon Drabble.

Cheers,
Carl

[cherdano]

EarlPurple, on Mar 9 2006, 08:16 PM, said:

The simplest system I could come up with (though it might not be simple enough) for a bright beginner is:

Wow this system is too complicated for me. I hope you have very bright beginners.

[kenberg]

Are they interested in playing Matchpoint Duplicate at a club, or rubber bridge with friends at home? It makes a difference. Goren drew many poeple into bridge starting with rubber bridge. Rubber bridge does not mean trivial bridge.

If they don't know which they want, I would suggest they start by playing rubber bridge. Partscores, four card majors, bids mean mostly what you think they mean. You bid spades if you have a few, and partner raises when he has some. He jump raises with a better hand. Either 1S-3S is forcing (preferable and Goren), or you allow 1S-4S on a good hand. Definitely no Jacoby 2NT. If partner doesn't have spades, he bids what he has at the two level if he has decent values, 1NT with modest values, and passes if he doesn't have anything. You try to get to a sensible contract and then you try to make it. A great advantage of partscores is you can bid two making four and be perfectly happy.

As far as age is concerned, at 67 I am probably a little old to for lessons in skateboarding, or maybe not, but I don't see why I would need a watered down version of a card game. They don't need Roman Key Card Blackwood but unless they are addled they need the full game.

And yes, like Luke, I think Fred's stuff is very good.

K

[keylime]

I'll be honest, I think they should learn EHAA first. Yes, I just said EHAA.

Why? Simply put - it doesn't have many conventions, it's mostly natural, and you bid your 4 card suits. After they get the hang of this, THEN intro them to the basics.

[awm]

I second Keylime's suggestion of EHAA. Some reasons:

(1) You don't need to spend a lot of time on bidding over 1NT or 2♣. These are probably the most complicated parts of "standard" bidding, and also the least useful. Much better to focus on understanding which bids are forcing and which are not, and how to show/limit shape and values. In my opinion people are too quick to move beginners (or near-beginners) on to learning "conventions" and spend too little time explaining the reasoning behind bidding. Getting rid of the 1NT and 2♣ methods (temporarily anyway) helps here.

(2) You get to bid suits that you have. Opening a bad three-card minor is counterintuitive to most people, at least at first.

(3) EHAA is quite possibly both more fun and more effective than standard bidding. Certainly it is more effective than most other systems at a comparable complexity level.

The main downside to this is that it's "not standard." But if you have a group of bright beginners who are going to play mostly amongst themselves (at least at first) rather than trying to pick up random partners at the club, this seems like a good approach to me. Also note that EHAA is closer to ACOL (British standard) than to SAYC (USA) or SEF (France).

[Sigi_BC84]

keylime, on Mar 9 2006, 09:17 PM, said:

I'll be honest, I think they should learn EHAA first. Yes, I just said EHAA.

Why? Simply put - it doesn't have many conventions, it's mostly natural, and you bid your 4 card suits. After they get the hang of this, THEN intro them to the basics.

I also think EHAA is very good for beginners because it's really simple. However, as Gerben said when he mentioned the Forcing Notrump system, it is too far from Standard. It's probably best to teach a watered down version of Standard because chances are they wanna practice on the Internet and then they need to know Standard.

Starting with EHAA and then changing to Standard? Possible, but I don't want having them to unlearn something after five or so sessions -- better to start with 5 card majors straight away.

--Sigi