Source: BridgeWinners  by Tracey Bauer

I am located in Northern California and we are in a shelter in place.    I sent an email to my Bookclub last night and already have around 20 people (their families are interested …husbands and children too) that want to learn how to play in this next three weeks of home quarantine.

This is only about 17 people I reached out to, I’m sure if I reached out to more friends I will have more interested in learning something new during this time.   I’ve never had the time but I suddenly have a lot of extra time to finally get my friends involved in our wonderful game.

I have Zoom to do a webinar and was hoping someone might have some beginning bridge Presentation they are willing to share with me and maybe give me some advice on teaching beginning bridge.

Please reach out to me if you are willing to help.

3 Comments:

Kevin O’Brien: You could find YouTube videos teaching bridge. If you like an Aussie accent, Peter Hollands is excellent. Other commenters will chime in with others they like, I’m sure.Or find Jeff Bayone here on Bridge Winners. He may send you his 2018 award-winning book A Taste of Bridge with all the associated teaching materials. “Send” is electronic format, thus an e-mail attachment.

BBO still has Learn to Play Bridge software, I believe.

Go get ’em!

Richard Willey: FWIW, I recommend that you start by teaching people some variant of Minibridge rather than bridge.1. Bidding is complicated to learn at the best of times
2. If a player can’t look at two hands and understand what contract they want to be playing in bidding becomes incredible more difficult

The way in which I have introduced my friends to bridge is the following

1. Deal out the hand
2. Each player announces how many HCPs they have
3. The side with the most points declares
4. The player with the most points is declarer. Partner is dummy
5. Declarer looks at dummy and decides on the contract. The can chose any of the following: 1NT, 2M, 3m, any game, any slam
6. The hand gets played out.

The goal is to get players to understand

1. The basics of declarer play and defense
2. What is a “good” contract

If they like things, great…

After a while you can start to introduce bidding…

Julien Christen: I don’t know if it’s available in another language than French, but FunBridge has something aimed at beginners wanting to start playing. I haven’t tried it (my partner would surely say that it wouldn’t hurt…), but I just had a quick look. It starts by explaining the basics of card play before moving to bidding. It looks like it is some kind of French standard system, but it should be pretty close to 2/1

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