This section of the site is primarily intended to supplement the learning process as you climb the learning curve of the world's best card game, bridge. It is written by someone who has never taken a bridge lesson, intended as a welcome distraction to those who are going through the rote learning of bridge instruction. We all learn in different ways, what works for one player is often different from what works for another. My goal is not to disparage bridge instruction, but to provide an entertaining new look at the game for eager players working at mastering the rudiments, and even the more common type of learners who want to know what it's all about but can use a break or two from the textbooks.
The genesis for much of the material is a small group of eager learners at Vancouver's Lawn Tennis & Badminton Club, where I directed the Monday Evening duplicate until the pandemic stopped us all. With tables dwindling, a few members discovered that the club had people who were interested in learning the game, or had played before, but felt intimidated to play in the group of experienced players. This, sadly, is as far as it gets in many places, but the VanLawn team pressed on, setting up a basic lesson series and then asking me for ideas on integrating the players as they learned. I thought the best way to proceed at first would be to have the learners play deals from the previous week's game, and a set of 16 new boards was acquired, from which I chose interesting deals from the previous week, copied them into the new boards, and wrote a program to produce special travelers. (I soon found that when looked at from the point of view of new players, there is something learnable on almost every board!) As the learners completed the boards, they would open the travelers, enter their score, see the scores that had been made in the open game the previous week, and read a few comments on the bidding and play one might expect. At the end of the evening I gave out Bruce's Bridge Basics handouts that became the basis for this book. These were designed to be taken home and read out of interest, but not with the expectation that there would be any sort of test or programmed learning involved.
Our little group included about a dozen people who were taking the lessons and also showing up on Monday evenings to practice. Sometimes I would play in this group to make up the numbers, a few times the group would vote on a volunteer to be promoted in order to even out the numbers in the two games by playing with me, and quite often we were pleasantly surprised at our results. Then the pandemic hit suddenly in March 2020 and everything stopped. With a lot of extra time on my hands, I took a close look at the BBB texts and edited them, adding in a BBB#0 for complete beginners, and making a list of further topics to cover in the future. Once the ACBL began the Virtual Clubs program after six lockdown weeks, I was asked to direct the online games for the Vancouver Bridge Centre, and these took off quite well: as I write this foreward in late February of 2021, I have run at least one online game every day since April 2020! (Don't be too shocked; online games take about three hours to run, leaving lots of time to make up for the fact that I haven't had a day off in months.) Now, with vaccines going into arms and the end of the covid tunnel in sight, even if still far away, I hope to finish this little collection before we all get busy restoring our normal lives.
Most BBB handouts, here presented as separate pages, have a main essay and also a sidebar which usually, but not always, includes a deal and some relation to the main essay. Some sidebars are presented as progressive problems and ask for a response before the next snippet is seen further down on the page. Others are presented as complete stories without interruption. Best is to read the main essay first and then check out the sidebar, but whatever works for you makes me happy.
About me: A games enthusiast, I learned bridge quite late, in my twenties in the early 1980s, and became enthralled by it; sadly, it took up too much time I should have been using on other important things like education and I became a university dropout. A series of the types of jobs one takes without a good, complete education kept me from playing much bridge for a while, but after a year or two I returned to the game more often. At that time I also had an interest held over from high school in very basic computer programming, and the largest local club had a scoring program whose author had passed away. The program had been written for a pre-IBM PC computer and the old machine was breaking down; ACBLscore was about five years in the future. I volunteered to take on the task of writing a new scoring program based on the old one, breaking down the old program using old manuals, and this worked for a few years, until the ACBL's scoring program was introduced with far more features than I had ever dreamed of. In those days I had just enough money to buy an early computer and create a small magazine in the postal games hobby, and I learned the rudiments of writing and desktop publishing by writing and editing this 'zine'.
Someone asked if I would be interested in serving on the local bridge Unit Board and I did so in 1993, taking on the task of computing local masterpoint races from ACBLscore records (a job that had been done by hand, from the printouts or the scoring sheets), which I still do in 2021! The Vancouver-area Unit has a wonderful newsletter called the Matchpointer, and I edited that for two stints totaling about ten years. My goal as editor was to make a newsletter with so much material in it that it would be taken home by players, not read during a hospitality break and left at the club; for we wanted players to have, in their homes, the schedules and other information they would need weeks later when new events were about to take place. Now, of course, that is not as much of a priority when virtually everyone has the Internet and can look up information easily. But in the period 1994-2004 the bridge world was quite slow to find the entryways to the Information Superhighway!
When I went to my first regional in about 1990 I was surprised at the technology used to produce Daily Bulletins, the results newsletters that appear each day of the tournament. At that time, copying machines were being used to produce them, but they still looked like they came off the mimeograph machine, printed on legal-sized paper with a corner staple, clearly done on a typewriter and not a word-processor, where one could experiment with layouts and formats to improve the look. I got my first chance to do this at a Seattle regional in 2002, and by then I had enough experience from my postal gaming magazine and the Matchpointer to make them both organized and modern-looking, and this continued until 2014, when we switched over to online Bulletins.
I began directing club games in 2004 and was hired as a part-time ACBL tournament director a few years later. My work at regional tournaments collecting data from the directors-in-charge for Daily Bulletins (which probably helped when Vancouver wanted more local tournament Directors and my name, familiar to TDs who recommend new hires, came up) continued and I worked only local smaller tournaments for several years, but with the switch to online bulletins I began working at larger tournaments more often. As a player, my work in directing and other bridge jobs has reduced my chance to play much, but I became a Life Master in 1996 and managed to get to 1000 masterpoints recently by playing on the final day (my day off) of a large regional. My best achievement so far has been learning enough about bridge administration and directing to make it my only job. Gone are the days where I would toil away at other jobs to be able to participate in the bridge world in my spare time!
* Author to Reader has no advantage at all over the more straightforward Foreword, and it's not even original (I saw it in Charles Van Doren's A History Of Knowledge). Writing, whether on the page or adapted for the screen, is a formal process. The very formality of writing tends to make the reader forget that the real objective of the writer is to tell a story. Form is useful as an organizing device for any type of composition, but must be dispensed with whenever it gets in the way. By using the more informal title Author to Reader, I hope to dispense with the formalities so we can concentrate on discovering new and interesting characteristics of our favourite game.
—Bruce McIntyre
Next up: BBB#0: Bridge Rudiments