Husband and Wife Bridge: A Special Thanks to Coach Matthew

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December 3, 2012
by Kitty Cooper in ,

It is both difficult and rewarding to play with your spouse. Difficult because the emotions and anger tend to be overwhelming. “If you loved me you would have given me my ruff!” One tends to take partner’s errors personally when you are married to him. The rewarding part of playing with your spouse is having a great bidding system because you can talk about bridge any time of day or night and bid the monthly Bulletin and Bridge World hands together. “Did you see that article on the Lebensohl variation, shall we play it?”

Steve and I  were so angry at each other after the last regional we played that we were ready to quit playing with each other. So I contacted good friend Matthew Granovetter of Bridge Today and asked him for some coaching help. Who better than the author with his wife Pam of the ACBL Bridge Bulletin bridge column showing both sides of an issue?

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Tournament Game Times, What’s Your Opinion?

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November 1, 2012
by Kitty Cooper in

The use of morning and afternoon game times instead of the traditional afternoon and evening game times at the recent Philadelphia Nationals generated a heated debate on the Bridge Winners website at http://bridgewinners.com/article/view/philadelphia-schedule/ as well as many comments on Facebook and other social media.

Please contribute your opinion if you have ever played in a tournament to our online survey on our polls page. Warning, the survey does not work properly in Safari (on an Ipad or mac) where it will tell you that you have already done the survey.

MiniBridge in Raibidpura India

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August 27, 2012
by Kitty Cooper in ,

Someone recently sent me a link to a blog about bridge in Raibidpura India. They have started a bridge club and are using miniBridge and, judging from the pictures BBO, to teach their children to play

 

The blog also talks about what a successful town Raibidpura is because of the bridge playing. Quite fascinating.

Suggestions for Teaching Kids Bridge

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August 16, 2012
by Kitty Cooper in

I recently received an email with a great suggestion from reader Erin for a game to use when teaching bridge to kids. I would love to hear other useful suggestions and experiences in the comments to this article. Share what worked for you with other teachers.

Erin said “I came across a game a long time ago which is useful to teach to kids before they learn bridge. It’s very simple.

Take the honours out of a deck of cards (AKQJT), shuffle them, and deal them between two people. Someone leads a card and the other must follow suit. The winner leads the next card. If you want you can keep a cumulative score that is tricks won over 5, and the winner might be the first to, say, 10 or 20 points.

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More on Basic Bidding

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May 25, 2012
by Kitty Cooper in ,

These days most of my bridge writings are published in the District 17 newsletter which my husband and I edit. Our columns from the newsletter are also online at the District 17 website. My Basic Bidding series there is mainly a reworking of the materials here without the drills.

But there are several articles there that are not previously published here that are of particular interest to the advancing player:

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New Years Resolutions

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January 14, 2012
by Kitty Cooper in

Did you make any Bridge resolutions for the new year? Like respect your partner and the opponents at the table: no yelling, card slapping, or faces?

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Happy Thanksgiving from the Seattle Nationals!

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November 23, 2011
by Kitty Cooper in

For serious bridge players, the arrival of Thanksgiving means that it is time for the Fall National Championships. This year they are to be held in Seattle; details available from the ACBL web site. There are plenty of bridge events for all levels of players, as well as lectures and entertainment. A national bridge championship is always great fun for everyone. Yes it is cool and rainy here, but at least it is not snowy, and bridge is an indoor event anyway!

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USA loses World Championships!

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October 29, 2011
by Kitty Cooper in

It is sad for us USA players to see our country losing its dominance in world bridge. We have the largest tournament bridge playing population (142,592 out of 312,520,000 or .045%) of any country. However as a proportion of the total population, both France (104,097 out of 63,396,000 or .164%) and the Netherlands (88,641 out of 16,721,000 or .53%) are beating us. So what are they doing better than we are? Aside from winning gold medals in the recent World Championships.

Note these numbers are only the players are members of the national organization that runs tournaments (the ACBL in our case). The actual bridge playing population, not just tournament players, is estimated at 25 million Americans by the playing card industry according to a blog post at mlive.com.
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The Future of Bridge

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October 9, 2011
by Kitty Cooper in ,

There is an interesting discussion over at the bridge winners site on the future of bridge.  My thoughts on this are that teaching the game in a fun way is extremely important and miniBridge may well be the key to getting people started with the game (right Maggy?)

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How to get people playing Bridge? Ideas from Maggy …

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September 19, 2011
by Kitty Cooper in

Just found a wonderful bridge blog and ezine from Maggy Simony, a 91-year-old who is interested in bridge history and how to keep people playing our wonderful game. She has some very good ideas. Check it out http://bridgetable.net/e-zine/

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