You Hold…

April 7th, 2006

The Little Things

Sometimes the smallest details can make or break a bridge hand.

This deal is an actual hand from the Vanderbilt Knockout Teams at the Dallas NABC.

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March 30th, 2006

Greetings from Dallas

I’m writing this from Dallas Texas, home of the 2006 Spring NABC. The kickoff charity event is tonight, but I was in town early for the North American Open Pairs national finals.

The NAOPs are somewhat different from most events in the American Contract Bridge League. Most events have no pre-qualification necessary, or if there is a pre-qualification, it’s relatively minor and easy to accomplish. In contrast, the NAOPs (and it’s team counterpart, the Grand National Teams) are a ‘grass roots’ event. Qualifications start in the local clubs, and work their way up through the ranks. A unit level qualifier leads to a District final, where the top 3 pairs qualify for the national finals, played at the Spring NABC. My partner and I were fortunate enough to win the event in our district, so we were here early representing the SouthEast district of the ACBL (District 7, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Eastern Tennessee). Unfortunately, we did not qualify for the second day of play. We had a good afternoon session, but only finished average on the day. Since only 28 pairs of 72 qualified for day 2 of the event, that was insufficient.

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March 26th, 2006

Learning the Game 1 - The Basics

Whenever the topic of bridge comes up with any of my acquaintances or co-workers, they inevitably say something similar to: “I’d like to learn how to play. But of course, between job and family - who has time for a card game?”

I can certainly understand why bridge may seem daunting to an outsider. Anyone who has read a bridge column in the newspaper knows that bridge has so many names or slang for different aspects of the game, it seems like a different language. All of that can make it very difficult for someone new to the game to learn - or even to want to learn. This is very unfortunate; bridge is a wonderful game, and in fact is probably not much different than many other games people already know such as Hearts, Spades or Pinochle.

In this series of articles, I’m going to try to go over the basics - the minimum you need to know to play the game. Stay tuned for Part 2, The bidding.

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