Online bridge update 28

The two-hour interactive session Play These Hands With Me, held last Monday, seems to have gone down well and ws a lot of fun for me too. I am therefore proposing to repeat it on Monday (November 2nd) and maybe again the following week. The format involves my bidding and playing a series of real life deals, some of which I have played myself or recorded from other sources, plus a few that are randomly dealt deals I have never seen before. The idea is to talk through my thinking at every stage of the hand and discuss all the issues that come up with you as we go through.

This format is one that I know from personal experience is invaluable in taking the conventions and play techniques you have learnt so far and applying them to a real life situation at the table. As many of you have told me, it is one thing to know in principle what to do and another to put all that into practice. In particular, the challenge is to organise and prioritise your thinking so as to focus on what is most important at each point, recognising that this may differ from one hand to the next.

There will be the normal Tuesday morning supervised play session again this week (November 3rd), starting at 9.30am). You can book in by using the payment button in the sidebar of the website or, if you have any technical problems with that, pay by bank transfer as normal and let me know that you are planning g on attending. All the group sessions will continue this week in the usual way as well.

There is now one week left until the first part of our new two part online bridge course for beginners. Day one is on November 7th and day two on November 28th. Each day will consist of two three-hour online lessons; one from 9.30am to 12.30pm and the second from 2pm to 4.30pm. Each one can be booked separately, so that you can decide after the first whether you want to move on with the next. Thank you for everyone who has booked up so far. I still have one or two places left (numbers restricted to ensure sufficient individual attention).

The sessions will be fully interactive and participants will receive a full set of my extensive notes after completing each day’s session. We will also play through together a series of example hands to illustrate the game in action. Some people think that it is not possible to learn the game in just one or two days, but I know from experience that this is far from the truth. The aim of the course is to take you to a point where in answer to the question “do you play bridge?” you can truthfully reply “Yes, I can”. Bridge is a skill for life that you won’t regret acquiring and this course will give you the platform to do just that.

Jonathan Davis