Omagh Bridge Club

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

Omagh bridge club in County Tyrone is a fantastic place where you can get together with similar like minded people who would like to get together and push a few playing cards around the table.

Omagh bridge club are always looking for new members especially young new members. Bridge clubs require new life bringing into them, so young students coming out of college or university are the best persons to sign up to a bridge club. Bridge is a wonderful game that helps stimulate the mind, as a consequence the mechanics in the game can keep a conversation going for hours on just one hand alone!

Most bridge clubs now bestow training to new members - usually for a slight fee to pay a tutor who will train similar minded newcomers how to take part in the best playing card game of them all. Omagh bridge club like all clubs furthermore provide distinctive days / nights for various standards of play so certain nights will be stronger than others.

The best part of bridge in the UK is Duplicate bridge where pairs compete alongside one another - frequently there is a east/west winner and an north/south winner. Some bridge clubs will do an arrow switch so that all the pairs can compete alongside one another.

Clubs will suggest different forms of bridge such as pairs or teams as well as distinctive forms of the game within those categories such as Butler pairs or Swiss teams.

The EBU is accountable for bridge in the UK, most bridge clubs take money every night you play and pay a small amount to the EBU, this is known as Pay to Play.

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

Players from Omagh could also play in their County Tyrone league and represent their region if they get good enough. Whole weekends can be taken up playing in tournaments up and down the nation - it for that reason becomes a great social game.

Another great aspect of playing bridge is you can sit at the same table as an England player for instance - you can play the best players in the country, which you cannot do on the whole in other competitive sports.

There are furthermore large online communities such as Bridge Base Online where you can play for free and if you wish to play all hours of the day - playing next to live opposition is still the best though.

Common Bridge Conventions

If you intend to play at Omagh Bridge Club then it is probably a good idea to learn several rudimentary convention systems properly. A lot of people in the UK play ACOL including several essential bridge conventions thrown into the mix such as:

Stayman
Major suit Transfers over an opening 1NT
Blackwood

That is as uncomplicated as it gets! If you are wanting to play in a partnership for a long period as a lot of people fairly often end up doing you can modulate your system or/and flesh it out a lot more by adding more gadgets to it such as:

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

At the conclusion of the day our advice is not to go heavy on conventions as they are easy to forget if your card is chocked full of them - the most significant aspect 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!