Welcome! Let's talk about bridge

Our (you and I) mission statement

Why am I creating a bridge substack?

Because I think online bridge instruction can be improved by a lot. Let me tell you how I will tackle the (neverending!) journey to bridge excellence here.

Cardplay technique is the absolute backbone of bridge excellence. The first few steps of the journey are learning how to finesse, draw trumps, establish a suit, etc., all the way up to sophisticated squeezes and endplays.

I will not focus on teaching cardplay technique here, because interested students can find an immense catalog of excellent books, magazines, and websites to learn this. (I will recommend a few once in a while)

I will focus on presenting the habits that will make anyone a better player, and that cannot be learned from a book. After all, buying a book about a diet will not help you lose weight, unless you adopt that diet. Theory is nothing without practice.

In the hands presented here, therefore, you will watch me detailing what I am doing in my mind, what are the steps that I am following before I decide to use technique X, technique Y, or whatever. The core of this process is hand visualization — the effort to reconstruct the opponents’ hands before we commit to a play.

You may be thinking, what about bidding?

Here there is another important divide, analogous to Technique x Good Habits. There are many publications (books, magazines, websites) dedicated to the structure of bidding systems, or presenting bidding conventions. Experienced players know that they can find detailed explanations of stuff like Puppet Stayman or Inverted Minors in many spots.

I will not focus on bidding systems or conventions, for the same reason. What I will do, when I talk about bidding (which, at least in the beginning, will be less frequent than cardplay), is to talk about hand evaluation, to give tips on how to gauge the trick-taking value of your hand in the context of the auction of a real hand. The divide here is Conventions x Evaluation, which is the same old Technique x Habits divide we’ve seen above.

And this is why this space is called the Bridge Studio. You come here to practice!

Which leads me to suggestions as to how you should approach my publications here. Try to not peek at the whole hand. Follow the text closely and try to understand each step of the reasoning before moving to the next. It is by putting yourself in the driver’s seat — NOT as a simple spectator — that you will train your brain to do similar moves at the table.

I will try to write very clearly about these steps, but I am also dependent on your feedback, so do not hesitate to comment if you believe the exposition can be improved.

So, follow me into the Studio, and let us do some work!