[kereru67]

Pairs is the usual format in clubs these days, yet they teach bidding as if we were playing rubber bridge. In pairs you compete aggressively for the part scores, especially when not vulnerable. You use doubles at low level as a vague takeout request rather than penalty until you've sorted out your preferred suit. Why do they teach beginners to bid as if they're playing rubber?

[pescetom]

I think there is a case that classical bidding systems are *over*focussed on part score competition rather than the opposite.

The fact that MP pairs is the usual format in clubs sounds a lot more like a major problem. Mix in some IMPs and they'll soon be able to evaluate and use their systems better.

Having said that, yes, much bridge teaching is dull and outdated and the task is inherently difficult, in particular explaining doubles and their follow ups to Novice (and even Intermediate) players.

[LBengtsson]

Matchpoint Pairs is a bit of a strange game imo. Risk-taking is encouraged. And yes, I agree, it is what many clubs play today, but I guess that the majority of higher-ranking games are team matches of 4 or 6 so learning the 'IMP' way to play is a good starting point for most novices and beginners. Once, they have mastered the basics, then they can learn the psychology of MP play which brings a completely different element to the game.

To answer your question, I do not think any bidding system is designed with either IMPs or MPs play in mind. And it all depends on the type of hands that are dealt that day. I remember getting near 85% one day in a MP field of mainly good, and some advanced club players, when playing Precision with my regular (late) partner. When we looked at the hands afterwards, it was as though the majority had been dealt with Precision in mind. So the system did help on this occasion.

I cannot comment on how bridge teaching around bidding is structured, but I guess that the Law of Total Tricks (LOTT) does form part of the basis these days. I cannot recall from my youth ever being told about this, only discovering it later in books on bridge. I think it is difficult enough getting any novices/beginners to pick up the basis of bidding hands, without complicating things further with strategic bidding for certain events.

[AL78]

You have to start somewhere with beginners, and that somewhere is the fundamentals of the system and the logic/structure of the system. Once that has been taught and they've had some practice at bidding, the scoring and strategy at MPs comes in. One problem at my club is beginners are taught fundamentals of Acol weak NT and card play, and the most basic parts of competitive bidding, but most of the latter is untouched and they sort of find it out as they go along. What happens is we have a lot of beginners who take years to work out how to use takeout doubles, cue bids and how to deal with overcalls and pre-empts, and most of them still don't bid properly in competition.

[paulg]

You need to get beginners out of classes and into playing at the club.

So teach them the basics of what most people at the club play and just go from there.

p

[pescetom]

 paulg, on 2022-December-17, 07:20, said:

You need to get beginners out of classes and into playing at the club.

So teach them the basics of what most people at the club play and just go from there.

I'm more in agreement with al78.
Rushing them into the club too soon or without mentoring is just going to clone yet more poor club players (and maybe lose a few demoralised).

Our crop of beginners this year are now outplaying some seasoned pairs, but they were well taught first and with some attention to competitive aspects (and discontinuity with some legacies that most in the club still play).

 LBengtsson, on 2022-December-17, 06:00, said:

I cannot comment on how bridge teaching around bidding is structured, but I guess that the Law of Total Tricks (LOTT) does form part of the basis these days. I cannot recall from my youth ever being told about this, only discovering it later in books on bridge.

LoTT is a good example of the discontinuity I was referring to earlier: most of our existing club players ignore or distrust it, just as many struggle to make weak openings and are firmly attached to legacies like Negative Free Bids, Penalty Doubles of strong 1NT, 4NT as plain Blackwood and so on. The beginners have to be warned about these differences (and then there is the tricky choice as to whether they should give in and play them or politely refuse).

Although LoTT goes beyond that, as it is not just a systems issue but a surprising phenonemon that needs to be understood in its own right (and then the system and tactical modifications are obvious). The other day I paired with an elderly but expert player who quickly scoured my systems card and then just sat down and played it (!). The few accidents we had were almost all related to LoTT aspects and he couldn't really accept that 1M-3M showing 4 cards and little else was a playable agreement. I was shocked that someone who has played bridge for over half a century (we made 68% all the same) had not read up on this, although I imagine he quit high level competition before it was widely publicized.

[helene_t]

MP vs IMP is overrated. Even at imps, losing a parts score swing is as expensive as missing a nonvulnerable game.
Besides, in a beginner mp field the frqs will be all over the place so mp strategy doesn't apply.
Just teach beginners something that is locally popular (you may omit some nonessential conventions).

[pescetom]

 helene_t, on 2022-December-17, 08:21, said:

MP vs IMP is overrated. Even at imps, losing a parts score swing is as expensive as missing a nonvulnerable game.
Besides, in a beginner mp field the frqs will be all over the place so mp strategy doesn't apply.
Just teach beginners something that is locally popular (you may omit some nonessential conventions).

For true beginners yes, the ideal would probably be BAM but MP or IMPs won't make much difference on learning the important things.
But going forwards (or for the significant number who have played for years but never really understood their system) I think playing some IMPs makes quite a difference, as they have to get to grips with bidding thinner games and not missing slams, which leads to more insight into how mechanisms like invites and shaping out work and are tuned.
The problem I have found is rather that quite a few players (including some more accomplished) have become one-trick dogs and make no real attempt to adapt to the differences from MP. Also some are excessively competitive in attitude (considering their level) and dislike the high variance of cross-IMP pairs or simply the fact that they do less well.

[thepossum]

I find pairs the least pleasant form of Bridge

I would have thought if you are a good Bridge player you need very few bells and whistles to bid good contracts in any form of the game

[pescetom]

 thepossum, on 2022-December-17, 16:54, said:

I find pairs the least pleasant form of Bridge

Agreed, although IMP pairs is at least useful training for more pleasant team play.

 thepossum, on 2022-December-17, 16:54, said:

I would have thought if you are a good Bridge player you need very few bells and whistles to bid good contracts in any form of the game

If the others also use very few bells and whistles and are not good like you, then yes

[AL78]

 thepossum, on 2022-December-17, 16:54, said:

I find pairs the least pleasant form of Bridge

I much prefer IMPS as I find it irritating the dilemma of whether to bid 4M or 3NT for the sake of an extra 10 points, getting fixed by the field, and I like the idea of looking for safety plays to make the contract or picturing the only layout to get a contract down and playing for it, even if it costs overtricks when the layout doesn't materialise.

[AL78]

 paulg, on 2022-December-17, 07:20, said:

You need to get beginners out of classes and into playing at the club.

A few anecdotes/thoughts based on my 20-year experience at my local club:

You cannot do this without their will. At my local club pre-pandemic we had an evening session for beginners/improvers which was a duplicate session where players could ask for advice (classed as an EBU teaching session so no masterpionts given). At one time we had a small separate parallel session which was practice bridge with no scoring, the equivalent of four people playing in someone's house. These two sessions were stepping stones from lessons to the conventional club duplicate sessions. There were times when beginners had been playing in the small parallel session for a number of months we encouraged them to move into the beginners duplicate but they didn't want too. Some of them eventually stopped coming to the club because they felt pressurised.

Many years ago we had the beginners duplicate on one evening with three other open sessions on other evenings. The club has always had an excellent teaching programme and does a great job of bringing new people into the game, and the idea was the bridge evening classes fed into the beginners duplicate and beginners would move onto other sessions when they had gained confidence. What happened was beginners moved into the beginners duplicate and set up camp there forever, never moving on. The club playing area is of very limited size and can only accommodate around 12 tables comfortably. What happened is the equivalent of filling up a sink with the outlets plugged, the beginner's session filled up to maximum capacity and we ended up having to turn people away because we had run out of space. This caused some resentment and two of the improvers decided to start up an improver's duplicate on the one free evening in the club calendar (although the club policy was that it was open to anyone but it was mostly improvers who played). This worked very well and beginners did move onto that new session at least until that session became congested. Once capacity had been reached some of the improvers became resentful of the more experienced players who played on that evening (maybe two or three pairs) taking the attitude that they shouldn't be playing because it was primarily an improver's evening, and this sparked off a 'them and us' attitude.

During and after the pandemic, the club calendar had been thrown into the air with online bridge through the pandemic and a slow return to some F2F bridge over the last couple of years. A consequence of adapting the club calendar to a post-pandemic new normal is that the distinction between sessions for experienced and less experienced players has all but gone, and whilst there maybe one or two sessions which are primarily attended by beginners, most sessions are a melting pot of experienced and inexperienced players, with attendance at any one session much lower than it was in the past. This has the effect of increasing the randomness of the open duplicate sessions (from my perspective the quality of bridge at the club in terms of gameplay satisfaction has declined significantly over the last 10-15 years) and antagonising a small minority of improvers who resent "their" session disappearing and them now having to play amongst the experienced players (and one or two of those have stopped playing).

What I have learnt from all this is people develop comfort zones and are extremely resistant to moving out of them. Moving out of a comfort zone is what helps you to progress as a person. Inexperienced players like to play bridge amongst their peers/friends and treat the open sessions with an attitude of almost fear, which I suspect means they don't want to get repeatedly hammered and finish last, although there have been very occasional reports of rude/antagonistic behaviour which doesn't help. Once these comfort zones are established, some seem to take on tribalistic attitudes and form a mild hostility to those they see as belonging to another tribe encroaching on their space.

In summary, the club seems to have or did have an ideal setup of classes for newcomers --> beginner's duplicate --> improver's duplicate --> open duplicate for people to climb the bridge ladder. The reality is the majority of people don't climb the ladder all the way or even much of the way, and a significant subset aren't interested in the competitive element and instead play for the social aspect. What we end up with is few beginners ever making it to club intermediate level (by that I mean able to be competitive in an open session if not necessarily winning frequently) and many have become permanent beginners, always turning up for that one session or playing in a weaker open session with their peers and that's it. There is one lady who has been playing in the beginners/improvers duplicate for a good 20 years, and whilst I have been involved in assisting on that evening over the last 15 years, she has never advanced beyond a beginner.

[helene_t]

When I started my bridge teacher's training I was impressed by some idealistic instructors who argued that beginners should learn the fundamentals of card play and only learn bidding after a year or so.

But most beginners don't want that. They want to learn bidding immediately so that they can start playing at the club.

[DJNeill]

Wooldridge, Hurd, Kranyak, all the customary pairs winners play pretty standard openings.

[AL78]

 helene_t, on 2022-December-18, 06:58, said:

When I started my bridge teacher's training I was impressed by some idealistic instructors who argued that beginners should learn the fundamentals of card play and only learn bidding after a year or so.

But most beginners don't want that. They want to learn bidding immediately so that they can start playing at the club.

It is fine to start beginners off with minibridge but waiting a year before teaching bidding sounds excessive to me.

[Douglas43]

What does the OP mean by "Classical bidding systems"? IMO Acol with weak NT is better suited to pairs than to IMPs, strong NT and 5cM is probably the opposite.

[pescetom]

 Douglas43, on 2022-December-18, 15:22, said:

What does the OP mean by "Classical bidding systems"? IMO Acol with weak NT is better suited to pairs than to IMPs, strong NT and 5cM is probably the opposite.

I think you're certainly right about Acol with weak NT, and Italian 4 card majors with strong NT for that matter.
Which 5cM systems are "Classical" is more a question of opinion and some like BWS 2/1 are undoubtedly less suited to MP than others, although all are more attentive to part-score than strong club or relay systems.
But I think the OP was referring more to over-defensive competitive methods (and mentality) rather than the constructive system.

[pescetom]

 AL78, on 2022-December-18, 14:51, said:

It is fine to start beginners off with minibridge but waiting a year before teaching bidding sounds excessive to me.

If you wait a year before teaching bidding you have already lost people like me at the beginning (which admittedly may be a good thing )
A week or two might make sense.
The problem with teaching bidding is not bidding, but the way it is taught.
If lesson 1 is "The 1♣ opening" and they do not understand how two hands make tricks together and what is needed to make a partial/game/slam, then even the brightest students will soon be looking for the exit.

[pescetom]

Twice in my early bridge career (a decade ago) I was close to giving it up entirely.

The first was on lesson 5 ("The 1NT opening") when I was taught the Stayman convention, with replies:
2♦ = minimum and no ♥/♠
2♥ = ♥, denies ♠
2♠ = ♠, denies ♥
2NT = maximum and no ♥/♠
3♣ = minimum and ♥+♠
3♦ = maximum and ♥+♠
My first thought was "this is illogical for various reasons", the second was "how the heck do I remember it?" and the third was "if this is the simplest convention, what will the other be like?"

The second was the first time I was paired with an advanced player in the club.
Things were going reasonably well until I was on lead and took the first three tricks in my suit.
I decided it was probably better to give Declarer a ruff rather than finesse my partner in another suit.
"Sei uscito in taglia scarto !!" (you gave a ruff and sluff) he shouted to the whole room.
I had no idea what he meant, but clearly I had committed a cardinal sin and wasn't even capable of understanding it.
I played like rubbish for the rest of the evening and thought seriously about not coming back.

[dokoko]

 kereru67, on 2022-December-17, 01:29, said:

Pairs is the usual format in clubs these days, yet they teach bidding as if we were playing rubber bridge. In pairs you compete aggressively for the part scores, especially when not vulnerable. You use doubles at low level as a vague takeout request rather than penalty until you've sorted out your preferred suit. Why do they teach beginners to bid as if they're playing rubber?

They should teach beginners to play bridge. To bid contracts they can make and then try to make them. Tell them that it is good to make more tricks than needed for the contract if possible.

If the beginners continue to take lessons once being improvers, discuss hands from their tournaments and how they could have done better. Competitive doubles and the like aren't tools for everybody; competitive raises OTOH are. Explain them how MP scoring works and what tactics are called for. That it is sometimes reasonable to bid contracts they probably cannot make. But - very important: Teach them things they are ready for - a good teacher should know where each of his students stands; answer their questions and encourage them to ask more.