I learned bridge on my own, with no one to play IRL with. I still have only played IRL bridge about 5 times. And 3 of those were failed attempts to get family and friends into it.
I grew up playing cards and chess. So the underlying fundamentals came naturally to me. Unfortunately it is a dying game played almost exclusively by older people at the “casual” level. One issue it has is the bidding language. It is quite a daunting mountain to climb. But the 80/20 rule absolutely applies here. If you know some basics, you can bid in most situations.
I found that playing on BBO against the bots helped me memorize the language and the nuances. When a bot makes a bid, you can see the meaning. When you are considering bids, you can hover over them and see the meaning before you commit. I’m probably close to 95/5 now, where I don’t need to look at the explanation of potential bids before I make them.
This is reassuring. I definitely need about a minute to commit to a bid, and have to look it up. Still haven’t gone through all the modules yet, but I have covered everything I’ve heard about (here, and in the Agatha Christie book that was centered around the game and the whole reason I looked it up to begin with).
Over the pandemic, my bridge group met online. We played with bridge software (bridge base online) but we ran a simultaneous zoom meeting so the four people at the virtual table could chat and socialize. It worked pretty well. If you’d like to play bridge that way, I’d help you set it up. We just need two more goactuary players.
I think it’s more fun to learn with people to talk to and discuss the hands.
I would be happy to play anytime. Lots of actuaries play bridge.
The gang here a couple of times has done well enough in bidding challenges in order to get our names into a prestigious bridge magazine, for starters.
Some actuary named Stan Tulin regularly plays with pros and won a national championship.
My regular partner is actuarial professor at Drake University.
If you ever owned the book Actuarial Mathematics by Bowers et al, Newt Bowers was an actuarial professor who played bridge at the Des Moines club. I played with him a number of times before he passed away, nice guy.
I used to work at Travelers in St. Paul, the actuaries there ran a weekly lunch bridge game and sometimes I bump into them during the May tournament.
I know an actuary in Omaha that plays in tournaments.
I’ve played with someone on here in person in California. The guy that likes origami, can’t recall his username…
And he’s not an actuary but I have played two matches against Bill Gates and his pro team. One of those times he was at my table, played with him for 45 minutes. I knocked him out of one event, but he edged out my team in a match in a different event that was non-elimination.
No doubt the list goes on.
There was a time that eight of us would play team matches. Four people could play at a table and NerdAlert and I could kibitz and I could provide commentary to her privately about everything that’s going on. That could be very instructive if not overwhelming.
I think it’s more fun to actually play, and discuss the hands. (And i am not as good a bridge player as the ones who post about bridge here, but I’m perfectly competent. Just not great. I play mostly for the social aspects, which is why the zoom window made it worth doing for me during the pandemic lockdowns.)
You just have to make sure that you play with the right people. When I used to play, there was a woman at the club who wasn’t particularly good who would berate her partner for anything that went wrong. I’d carefully end play her partner, only to hear her say “You gave them a ruff-sluff! How can you give them a ruff-sluff?” I don’t understand why anyone played with her more than once.
Holy mother of books, one of the books I got is QUITE large. And we walked to and from the library today to pick them up, which is about 3 miles round trip.
I bet the Goren book is large, but is the Tips from the Masters in the QUITE large one? If it has over 4000 diagrammed hands and plays, that should be a lot of pages.
More on the BBO bot play. Not sure how much you’ve gotten into it by now.
You can click “play solitaire”, and that has it’s value. But slightly different interface than the rest of the site. I would start there for a bit, just to get used to the bidding a bit.
But once you get a little comfortable, you’ll want to move on to the bot based challenges.
Challenges - create a challenge: Create a challenge against a bot. You each play 4-16 hands. Start with 4 hands at a time. And after you can compare your results. I would set up the challenge with IMPs, Best hand checked (meaning you will have the best hand (HCP) at the table. This will give you hands that you’ll be the primary driver of the action most of the time. After, breakdown the differences in the results between you and the bot. Both bidding and cardplay.
Once you get more comfortable, you can increase the number of hands. You can uncheck “best hand” which will make it random and you may end up with the worst hand, but give you a more wide range of hands to practice, including playing defense much more often.
You can try “declare-only” which means you don’t do the bidding. You just inherit the contract and play the cards. Good for practice playing the cards.
Once you are feeling comfortable with that. Challenge a friend. I’m happy to accept a challenge. DM me for my username, if interested. I’m newer to the game as well, so not sure if more or less useful than playing against bots.
You can also enter into some free tournaments on the site. There is a daily free tournament against bots. There is a big one on Sunday. Sometimes weekend long tournaments.
Once you get really comfortable, there are tournaments that run throughout the day that are free to enter. Some are against bots, but most are with human players. Your partner switches each hand. No chat, so no one will yell at you.
I signed up for the 8-week beginners class starting at the end of the month, because I feel like I need to actually play with commentary (as others have mentioned here is a good idea). My husband is also learning with me.
Will be able to make 7 of the 8 weeks, have to skip the last one because it falls on our vacation, but hopefully by then we know the basics!
I shall find out the official answer to this question beginning Tuesday. I expect the first few weeks will be spent covering trump and very basic rules, I probably won’t learn anything new for quite a while. Maybe not at all! But I’m more going to get familiar with the bridge club so I can start playing there after I finish the classes in June.
I would hope you could start playing right away. Unless the other members don’t want to be bothered with new players, or they’re playing for money or something.
I don’t want to be the person no one wants to play with because they suck that bad. Also my husband is taking lessons with me so maybe he will be my partner.
