Online bridge update 29

The two-hour Monday morning interactive session Play These Hands With Me continues to work well so I have decided to extend it for a few more weeks, albeit with a mild twist. I will kick off with a small number of hands based around a specific theme and then move on to generate new randomly dealt hands to bid and play through (discarding those that are of no great teaching value). 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.

I am including a Paypal payment button in these posts but if you have trouble making them work you should be able to book your place by going to any page of the website and looking for the payment option in the right hand sidebar.

There will be the normal Tuesday morning supervised play session again this week (10th November), starting at 9.30am). You can book in by using the payment button in this post or in the sidebar of the website. If you have any technical problems with that, pay by bank transfer as normal and let me know that you are planning on attending. Please let me know as early possible that you intend to join as it makes it so much easier to arrange the tables. If we have the same 16 as last time I am proposing to arrange this as a teams match – the purpose being to enable me to allow you to compare your bidding, play and scores to a professional match (one of the better features of Bridge Base Online).

All the group sessions will continue this week in the usual way as well.

Last week I took the decision to defer our new two part online bridge course for beginners by a week because some of those attending had to change their plans because of the recent new lockdown rules. Day one will now be on 14th November and day two on 28th November. Each day consists 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 are fully interactive and participants will receive a full set of my 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 achieve just that.

Jonathan Davis