Is the Challenger Opponent Also Basic or Advanced? Try enough times and most players will lose – but at least you can review the boards to see what the bot did differently! Uday once reported that the Basic bot beats 91% of humans, and the Advanced bot beats 98% or so. In fact, I recommend keeping a running tally of your results over many short matches against the bots, again with Just Declare mode turned on – hat tip to Jordan Lampe for the idea.Īs soon as your 8 boards are complete, you get a comparison against the robot opponent. You can set it to Just Declare mode, and try your best for free against the Basic bots. Log into BBO, click on Challenges, and try Challenge a Robot. Get it while it lasts – you can actually play 100% for free, for as many boards as you want, all day and every day, and you never have to learn how to bid or defend with a bot. One last objection is that playing with bots is generally not free – but it’s only $1 a week to fill your table with 3 basic bots! Next most frustrating, defending with a bot partner means receiving seemingly random carding signals, with almost no regard to your carding. The most common objections are that players who score well against bots know how to trick the bots with strange bidding plays. Some people absolute hate playing bots for various reasons, others love it and play too much. I happened to get my start using Audrey Grant’s BetterBridge interactive lessons – and I still pay for my subscription years later! There are plenty of ways to sharpen your game without a dozen tables of opponents, and possibly even without your partner! There is a crowd that enjoys reading books, and the monthly bridge bulletin has excellent columns for developing and advanced players.įor those who want a more interactive experience, almost everyone has their own favorite online lesson set. But it gives plenty of time in the odd hours of the night to practice alone. Even the usual Honors evening circuit will be a stretch. That means no 2-session events for me, and no driving. We are back from our travels and jet-lagged for quite some time. The best way to learn and improve is to actively look for your mistakes (which can only happen if you actually play), ideally by doing a post-mortem along with a player who is good enough to figure them out.For those going to Allendale this weekend for yet another NJ sectional, good luck! If you want to learn things quickly: do some reading, play some hands and do a post-mortem of the hands you played with a better player who knows the stuff. Not counting vs counting is compared to driving blind vs looking where you are going. While in theory this is all fine, to play good, winning bridge, you need to be focused at the table, and be able to do: Counting.īeing able to count the hand (high cards, distribution) is the single most important ability which separates the good players from the average player, and for most this only comes from playing. It is unlikely that one single individual will ever gain that through his/her own playing experience. Reading will make you familiar with the distilled thoughts of experts, card play techniques, bidding issues etc, which they arrived at, after having had years of experience. It's well worth it though - I envy you your journey!Īssuming your goal is to play good bridge, you need to do both: reading and playing. So to answer your question, yes I would "just master the most basic rules and then try playing" but I'd make sure to keep reading more, then playing more, then reading more again! Bridge is an incredibly deep game, perhaps unequalled in depth by any other game - you could easily spend your life playing it, mastering it, assimilating the ideas of others who have tried to master it. Reading some of the greatest writers on the subject will be a short-cut to ideas and epiphanies that would take you years or decades to stumble across in the course of playing with just the basics under your belt. Sure, you'll get better and better as the fundamental concepts begin to dawn on you but Bridge is an immensely subtle and sophisticated game and some of the finest game-playing minds of this and last century have thought about it for millions of hours. There are many, many excellent books out there, but until you're sitting down at an actual table it will be hard to visualise what it actually feels like, having only partial information, trying urgently to communicate your hand to your partner despite your opponent continually getting in your way.Įqually, I think it'd be a slow process learning Bridge just by playing it. I think you'd be hard-pushed to learn Bridge just by reading about it.
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