[Cyberyeti]

 LBengtsson, on 2022-July-20, 22:47, said:

A friend who is a natural card player (plays poker, canasta, whist also) and plays bridge at intermediate level - mainly due to not having many conventions on her card - asked me what conventions she needed to learn to play a better game of bridge?

That question puzzled me also? I had not even asked myself what conventions I needed and I have been playing game for over 40 years! She has been playing bridge 30 years also, I guess.

So, with this in mind, without adding a lot of complicated conventions to your card, what do you feel are the essential conventions to play at intermediate level, and what needs to be added to play at advanced level?

You don't need conventions to play at advanced level, a funny story. I went up to the mind sports olympiad to kibitz some bridge back in the years before it was a big deal. The director who I knew came up to me and said that one team was a player down, and would I mind sitting in for a bit. I said yes, and my soon to be partner could be heard saying to his team mates "I just got through to Mr X's partner, he got back about 4am stinking drunk and won't be around till at least lunchtime". So I sat down to play the first session of the multiple teams with a system discussion of "Rubber bridge Acol". Our only bad board came where I couldn't remember if that agreement included 1M-X-2N being a good raise to 3, we were 50 odd IMPs to the good, Mr X turned up at half time and they went on to win comfortably adding another 50 or 60.

The most important thing is to learn to play the cards and defend, then hand valuation, system comes a poor fourth to those.

[Cthulhu D]

The time to add conventions to your card is when you are having a repeated problem during sessions that could be solved by having an agreement/convention to deal with that problem.

If you want to get better at the game, you need to engage in deliberate practice, not adding conventions imho, ymmv, etc.