Coldstream Bridge Club

FREE BRIDGE LESSONS - FREE FULL COURSE on how to play ACOL - dip in and out of - NO STRINGS ATTACHED

Coldstream bridge club in Berwickshire is a great place where you can be acquainted with similar like minded persons who would like to get together and push a few cards around the green felt.

Coldstream bridge club are always looking for new members especially young new members. Bridge clubs need new life bringing into them, so young students emerging out of college or university are the best people to enlist at a bridge club. Bridge is a magnificent card game that helps stimulate the brain, as a consequence the mechanics in the game can keep a dialogue going for hours on just one hand alone!

Most bridge clubs now present guidance to new members - usually for a small fee to pay a teacher who will train similar minded newcomers how to take part in the best card game of them all. Coldstream bridge club like all clubs also present distinctive days / nights for different standards of play so certain nights will be stronger than others.

The majority of bridge in the United Kingdom is Duplicate bridge where pairs compete beside one another - generally there is a north/south winner and an east/west winner. Some bridge clubs will do an arrow switch so that all the pairs can compete alongside one another.

Bridge clubs will offer various forms of bridge such as pairs or teams as well as distinct forms of the game within those categories such as Butler pairs or Swiss teams.

The English Bridge Union is responsible for bridge in the UK, the majority bridge clubs obtain money every night you play and pay a small quantity to the English Bridge Union, this is known as Pay to Play.

For stronger games of bridge, clubs will hold open competitions on a periodic basis where outside players will come in and play at weekends...small prizes are presented to the winners...but in general prize money is kept quite low as in general people are playing more to test their ability against like minded people rather than trying to earn a living wage by playing bridge.

Players from Coldstream may also play in their Berwickshire league and stand for their region if they get good enough. Full weekends can be taken up playing in tournaments up and down the nation - it therefore becomes a good social game.

A further great part of playing bridge is you can sit at the identical table as an England player for instance - you can play the best players in the country, which you cannot do for the most part in other competitive sports.

There are as well significant online communities such as the BBO where you can play for free and if you wish to play all hours of the day - playing alongside live opponents is still the best though.

Common Bridge Conventions

If you plan to play at Coldstream Bridge Club then it's almost certainly a good idea to learn some basic convention systems accurately. A lot of people in the UK play ACOL with a number of fundamental bridge conventions thrown into the muddle such as:

Stayman
Major suit Transfers over an opening 1NT
Blackwood

That is as simple as it gets! If you are wanting to play in a partnership for a long time as many people quite often end up doing you can adjust your system or/and flesh it out a lot more by adding extra gadgets to it such as:

The list is lengthy on conventions - it is what's more critical for partnership of how you play the double and what calls are forcing and non-forcing.

At the end of the day our advice is not to go to heavy on the magic as they are easy to forgotten if your card is chocked full of them - the most important part is bidding, playing properly and enjoying yourself.

A Brief History of Bridge

The ancestry of bridge can be traced back to 1529 when it was referred to by Bishop Latimer in a published sermon. Playing cards became very popular and the mainstream game of Whist is still played. Contract bridge, which starts with an auction, was invented in 1925, during a cruise, by the American Harold S. Vanderbilt.

Bridge took off in a big way and was popularised by Culbertson and Goren, both American. The play of the cards was understood whilst Whist was the dominant game, but bidding methods had to be developed. In 1934 a group of strong London based players came up with a system that proved very successful. It rapidly spread to all parts of the UK and came to be known as Acol, the name of the road in which the originating bridge club was, and still is, located.

As is the way of things where lots of bright and dedicated people are involved, there have been lots of developments. By the turn of the century the Acol system had evolved, and there were many dialects, but all would still have been recognised by Acol's inventors. In contrast in the USA and most of the rest of the world had changed to systems that are usually described as Five Card Majors. Most of the bridge played on the web uses this type of bidding system.

Bidding

Bridge differs from whist in two important ways. Over and above one of the sets of cards being exposed, the vital difference is the way in which the game starts with a bidding phase. The end point is that one partnership outbids the opponents. Play then starts. The objective of the wining side is to make sufficient tricks to at least guarantee the contract they entered into. The opponents try to prevent them making their contract.

If you have never played bridge the bidding appears to be a classic auction. Each bid must be higher than all previous bids. However to an expert it is a sequence of coded messages. So learning to play bridge involves learning what amounts to a specialised language!

The Acol System

Acol, which is based on opening with 4 card majors, is the system of choice for most bridge players in the UK. Understanding the Acol system is vital to anyone playing bridge in the UK. Most of the people that you would like to be your partner will be Acol players, and even if you and your partner are playing a different system, you need to understand what the opposition are saying to each other!