[Fluffy]

My best advice is to enjoy the game.

If you do you can hopefully find others who enjoy the game as well and fill comfortable with them, they will help you improve.

[sathyab]

Here's my $0.02.

1) Read anything and everything ever written by H.W.Kelsey about this game.

2) If you haven't already done so, get Larry Cohen's RealDeal CD's. If you aspire to be an expert some day, it'd be a shame if you didn't take advantage of the best interactive lessons in Bridge that's available out there.

3) If you're one of those that unfortunately has a good memory for bridge deals, curb your tendency to rush through the hands in (1) or (2) above, for if you miss the gist of a hand, it'll take you a lot longer to revisit them than your counterpart with 64k memory.

4) "Be a good partner; ask yourself how you could have done better". Sage advice, the bridge-equivalent of "Ask not what the country can do for you but what you can do for the country". Back in the real world, my practical advice is: play with peers, someone who's evenly matched with your abilities. If your parter is a lot better than you, you'll suffer from a feeling of inadequacy. If on the other hand you're a lot better than your pd, it'll frustrate you.

5) Cultivate buddies that you can confess your partner's sins to Seriously though, you need someone who has the time to listen to you and is honest enough to tell you if you're the one who screwed up on a given hand.

6) No matter what you do, try to do it thoughtfully at the table. In other words even if you do something that doesn't work out on a hand, if you remember the thoughts you had at the moment that you erred, you can go back, re-examine them and correct them. This is really hard when you play a lot of bridge, even two session events for instance, as you have to conserve your energy for playing. So you have to get into the habit of being able to replay them mentally later. Bottom-line is that making thoughtful mistakes is the first step toward avoiding them eventually.

7) How much to play and how much to study ? The challenge is to transfer as much of your off-line thinking ability to on-line execution. So allow yourself enough time to analyze your performance fairly well before you play the next game, so you can bolster your off-line capability from the last session that you played.

[han]

Agree with the short posts by Fluffy (excellent advice!) and also Jlall. Don't have the patience to read the long ones, sorry.

[cherdano]

Fred already replied in this thread, a couple of years ago:
http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?sho...st=0&#entry1412

[cherdano]

Some thoughts on my own experience. I am not an expert (yet? ), but I do think I have improved more in the last 2-3 years than most others I know whose level is similar to mine.

I think the most important thing hasn't been mentioned yet, and I understand why because I hate to say it myself, it sounds cheesy/pathetic/silly depending on your mindset but I think it is true: First of all you have to decide that your main goal at bridge really is to become better. I see many who I am sure would claim they really want to become better, but when you see them play they continue to make (IMO) silly bids just because they are fun or because they works sometimes, they get lazy when they get a challenging declarer play problem (that they would probably solve on paper), etc. When you want to have fun playing bridge that is all fine but when you really want to improve, your mindset on every hand should be on winning, or more precisely on playing the best you can.

Most of the other things I can think of already have been mentioned, but let me repeat it just to add my vote to the others with whom I agree:

• Play a lot (but take it seriously, and look for your mistakes after the session). Of course, ideal is to play against better opponents, but no matter who your opponents are you will gain if you take it seriously and look for your mistakes. (Just because you played a lot better than opponents doesn't mean you made no mistakes, or that you could not have played even better.)
  
• Read a lot (especially quiz books) (and take it seriously, don't skip to the solution before you are pretty sure you know the right answer) (BridgeMaster etc. count as reading of course)
  
• Try to find a regular partner who also takes bridge seriously
  
• Play a system close to standard. Playing something very non-standard is an inefficient use of time in many ways: it means you have to spend time learning this system instead of learning better judgment which is more important, and (way more importantly) it means you can pick up a lot less by osmosis. You won't be able to see how the expert at the other table judged your hand differently, you want as easily get useful comments from better players, and it is much easier to ask for opinions from others when you first have to give a lengthy explanation of your system. [I made this a very long point, maybe I am taking it out of proportion, but on the other hand from all I have seen those with the biggest discrepancy between skill level compared to the effort they have put into their bridge are those who spend most of their bridge-time improving relay schemes etc.]
  
• Be willing to revise your judgment, when you ask for advice take it seriously. I think BBF works well for this if you know whom to listen to.

[jdeegan]

I just remembered a useful way to practice playing bridge by yourself and at your own pace. BBO lets you rent GIB for a few dollars per month. Do so, then go to the Main Bridge Club and start a new table. Install GIB in three positions and play the fourth. You will have to learn GIB's version of 2/1 and its carding, but both are reasonable. Afterward, you can see how well or poorly you did against the BBO field. You also can look up the hands later in the BBO archives.

[y66]

More cheese please.

Thank you Cherdano. Your thoughtful posts are very helpful and much appreciated.

Ditto to many other thoughtful posters on this thread and others. I'm reading them carefully. Not trying to become an expert, just a competent bridge player. Slow going for me. Slow, but fun!

[jikl]

Another simple one for when playing at a real table. When you are dummy, take the time during the hand to mentally relax. This helps alot with concentration levels towards the end of long sessions.

Sean

[Trumpace]

jikl, on Sep 14 2007, 07:31 PM, said:

Another simple one for when playing at a real table. When you are dummy, take the time during the hand to mentally relax. This helps alot with concentration levels towards the end of long sessions.

Sean

I don't agree with this.

This advice is alright if this thread was about winning events. This thread is about how to become an expert... and I think for that you need to practise counting etc as dummy to get there.

[CSGibson]

I want to thank the players who took the time to give good advice on this posting. I appreciate your selflessness in helping other people who aspire to be great players.

[JLOGIC]

you made it csgibson!

[CSGibson]

sweet, thanks for the compliment on the necro. It turns out that Matmat was right, but there's lots of other good advice that I'm still taking trying to improve.

[johnstell]

I would consider myself to be an expert as I can hold my own against world class players such as the Hackets and many other grand masters.
I've been playing for over 20 years since i learnt to play in college...i just grabbed a simple book on cards that was 7 pages long that described the rules of the game...after that i was hooked. I've always been good at cards and clearly Bridge was the ultimate card game - so i had to learn how to play it!

When i went to university i joined the bridge club there and continued to play in various bridge clubs around my UNI.

We discussed systems and plays with other like minded people.

After a couple of years I would describe myself as being a good player.

After finishing university I came back to live around Manchester and got a regular partner who played with me, I then had a couple of others partners who were more serious - one very and we played in a lot of green point tournaments together - every weekend we would be playing in a tournament together.

I also played in league matches...I vastly reduced my club playing time as the standard is very mixed and now I play just in the league or private games where I know the game is going to be a good quality as I'm playing against Grand Masters and people who have represented England etc.

I don't think it is essential to learn all the systems...most of the time it comes down to judgement whether you should bid one more / pass / double etc.

I think hte more natural you can play the better as over sustained periods of time - if you are playing 100 boards over a couple of days then you will get very tired - therefore I would advocate playing at a decent tempo and keeping it as natural as possible...some systems people play for the sake of playing systems - quite often they give all the info to the defence and they know exactly where everything is and the distribution.

[rsteele]

Read the intro to "How to win a duplicate bridge" by Marshall Miles. Then make your choice - bridge or a family picnic.

[keylime]

I've been working through the Rodwell Files text, and before each tourney, I run through my hand combination exercises to get the mind fluid. Then I do some exercise involving counting - Sudoku, Cross Sums, SOMETHING that involves counting.

Then I go through any problematic bidding sequences to make sure I am aware of when they come out. I even have a page in the front of the notes for the "Stuff I Forget" (great example is my 5440 sequences in C-cubed; I forget those quite a bit without reminder).

Lastly, play against better competition. I am very spoiled being here in DC that on a Thursday night, I can choose which high quality game to play at in either Silver Spring or Alexandria in the A/X.

[inquiry]

I would guess advice on how to become an expert (quickly or otherwise) probably should be provided only by experts. Having said that, and realizing that I fail to meet the "expert" standard of providing an answer to this question, I will answer it anyway.

The generic advice given earlier is fantastic, To summarize the generic advice that I liked,
1. play a lot
2. review the hands you play
3. don't worry so much about fancy bidding methods, work on declarer play, defensive play, and hand evaluation.

I know you are very interested in your bidding and bidding mistakes, and that you are keeping a record of all your hand, with review of bidding.

I think I can give you a few piece of very specific advise based on the above generic advice with what I think will improve your results and your game quickly.

First, review hands you play with your real partner(s) (not so much random people) with focus on DEFENSIVE HANDS and your defensive carding. Focusing review early on defensive hands makes sense on several levels. First, you defend ~50% of deals you participate on, compared to only ~25% which you play as declarer (and you are dummy on the other 25%). In addition, defense being generally accepted as harder than declarer play to "get right" probably means that you will find more mistakes on average per hand where defense was played than where you declared.

In addition, reviewing defensive hands gives you a chance to not only improve yourself, but to improve your partnership by discussing defensive carding, and improving your understanding with your partner about when positions where your defensive agreement need to be "strengthed." By this, I know that players of your ability know that at trick one, despite an general agreement for 3rd hand signal to be Attitude (or count -- whatever your agreement is), that some situations require 3rd hands carding to be something else... perhaps suit preference, or count (or if your agreement is usually count, perhaps attitude). These trick one situations are easy to identify and get sound agreement on. Then you can fine tune other carding agreements later in the hand, including when is a card "obviously" count, when is it obviously "suit preference", etc.

Working on defensive carding first (and frequently) with your partner will show dramatic improvement in your partnership results (after perhaps a short period of worse results as your fine-tuning, leads to one partner getting the new agreements confused, or not realizing that regardless of what your agreement is, sometimes you have to play the wrong card for right bridge reasons).

Another area to examine is hand evaluation. Are you properly up evaluating hands with good fit with partner, or with well located "values" based on the opponents auction, or down grading your values based upon the opposite situations. Notice proper evaluation can be you had up-evaluated your hands or down graded them too much rather than enough. I found that I have been too aggressive upgrading and downgrading based on such factors, while often were too conservative in this area.

As far as bidding system, I would not muck with that too much. The only exception is if reviewing your hand record, you find out that your system has a huge gap in it somewhere. What you probably find is if you are bidding too many games with no chance or too few good slams, that it is not your system as much as failure of your hand evaluation. If not a hand evaluation problem, then ok, look and see what tweaks you can do to your system to help in this area.

The one area you should spend time on with bidding is your "competitive auctions" with a focus on how to involve your partner more in the decision process of competing one more level or selling out to the opponents. I say this because on auction where the opponents stay out, seldom give rise to huge imp or matchpoint swings. It is the decision process where both sides are bidding where huge scores swings are more likely. If you find your competitive bidding results are much above average, then focus on something else. If you find that your getting slightly above average results or worse when both sides are bidding, this should be an area you look at. Question to ask: are you overcalls helping them with locating cards when they play the hands on hands you should not be in the auction? Are you taking advantage of clues from their bidding when you declarer? Are you overbidding in competitive auctions or selling out too early? Things like that, look for trends in these type auctions where your less than ideal results.

With online hands, where you can review the hands, this becomes quite easy to sort hands into files where your side defends and to quickly pull out hands where your side got "less than ideal" results. For the defensive hands, I would review all defensive hands, because if you do, you will find a lot of your good results were due to stupid declarers rather than good play/agreements by your side. Slowly review card by card on defensive hands, and see if the cards your side is in agreement with what your carding agreement is, and see (as noted above) if improvement in carding agreement would result in the same carding/result on the hands you

To aid you in reviewing hands played on line (where reviewing card by card is really helpful), here is a few clues.

1.) Double dummy solver from the bridge-captain, will be of great help. FIRST you can download all you results from ONline BBO games and using the "filter option", find all the hands with a specific partner, and if you like, only the ones you play on defense (filtering works, however, only for imp hands, not matchpoint hands, see below if you want both). Then you can sort (using the scorecard) bad results to good results, and then review the hands one at a time, card by time.

2) Keep a permanent record of the hands, in an easily searchable format so you can review them and share the results of what you find with others (primarily your partner). I can share how I do it using a combination of software tools, bu that is beyond the scope of this reply. I will just say that I use excel using screen capture from myhands, and converting hands from pbn format from double dummy solver, and adding those to the data from myhands in the excel spreadsheet.

[jillybean]

inquiry, on 2012-July-12, 13:58, said:

I would guess advice on how to become an expert (quickly or otherwise) probably should be provided only by experts. Having said that, and realizing that I fail to meet the "expert" standard of providing an answer to this question, I will answer it anyway.

.....

+1

[benlessard]

Play slower,count & dont be afraid to duck or to play 2nd hand high.

[rduran1216]

judgement takes experience and knowledge. Get a thorough understanding of a system and why/how to implement advancements to it. Cardplay I'll admit I think is about natural skill and not necessarily booksmarts about hearing how to play/defend a hand. The hard hands make up 5% of them at most, to be a solid/expert player, make sure you do the right thing on the other 95% first, and then work your way to that 1 hand out of 20. As you get better you'll start to see more at the table, and visualizing layouts is the most important thing.

IMO tough decisions defensively often take place at trick 2 or 3, and by then you need to eventually see the entire hand. Ask yourself why declarer is doin what he is, and see which layouts are consistent with the play so far.

[Phil]

rduran1216, on 2012-July-16, 11:09, said:

The hard hands make up 5% of them at most, to be a solid/expert player, make sure you do the right thing on the other 95% first, and then work your way to that 1 hand out of 20.

Yes, the difference between the good and the great in a matchpoint game might just well be %.