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!
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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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?)
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/
Playing with a new partner the other night I bid 2NT in competition in this auction:
RHO me LHO partner
1
Pass 1
Double
2 2NT Pass
If you were my partner what would you think that meant?
I recently wrote a suit symbol plugin for WordPress which is active on this site. Put an exclamation point in front of the suit letter: C, D, H, or S in your posts and comments to get a pretty suit symbol – 
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I have moved all the free Bridge lesson material that was in the Bridge area on KittyCooper.com to this site. Well almost all of it. Let me know if you miss anything. It is all free to use, just credit me.
For those of you who enjoy my lectures at Western regionals, my next one will be “Preempting” at the Scottsdale regional in October 2011.
I spent ten years in the 1990s teaching two or three club series a year (now called the ACBL Bridge Series) to adults in NYC (Greenwich Village) and really enjoyed it. I did it as a ten lesson series, stretching the first lesson into two lessons to add more play time and including point count at the end of the new second lesson. I also took lesson five, finesses and opener’s rebids, and made it into two lessons. First I did opener’s rebids using the hands from lesson two in the diamond series. Then the following week, a bidding review, followed by finesses using the lesson five club series hands. Most adults find finesses very difficult so we needed to spend a lot of time on it.
Bridge Winners includes an online ACBL convention card editor! Articles on the nationals, pictures, beginner and intermediate articles and much more … it is a social networking site for tournament bridge players with 3800 members as of today.
And for those of you who did not know this, my other job besides bridge is web developer (I own Open Sky Web Design) and we helped build that site. Some of the features there, like suit symbols in posts, will be available here and for sale (inexpensively) to add to your own blogs.
Everyone knows the adage “eight ever, nine never” which refers to finessing for the queen of trumps. I recently received this question about it, which is answered below.
Why do you play for the Queen to drop when you have nine trumps, isn’t a 3-1 split more likely than a 2-2?
It is true that when you are missing four cards, a 3-1 split is more likely than a 2-2 split. However a specific 2-2 split is more likely than a specific 3-1. When you cash the Ace and lead towards the KJ and everyone follows, there are only two possible cases left, the 3-1 where the queen is finessable and the 2-2 where the queen is dropping. Read on for a fuller explanation of why the 2-2 is more likely.