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Matchpointer Online :: Welcome!
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Articles aimed at new playersThe articles on this page are aimed primarily at newer players, or players making the jump from social bridge to club and tournament bridge.
Got an article aimed at newer players? Send it to us, we'll be happy to add it in! Unit 430's latest masterpoint race, geared toward newer players.
by Bruce McIntyre How it works Schedule of RRR-eligible events Current Standings How the Rocket Rookie Race Works (and why it has been added) Unit 430 has several masterpoint races based on a calendar year's worth of achievement in local competitions:
That's where we were at the end of 2011. Since 1993, when I first joined the Unit Board, I have been responsible for keeping track of these races. Before that time it had been done by hand, but by 1993, ACBLScore was two years old, up to the task, and made the job easier once the learning curve was overcome. Strangely, the scoring part of ACBLScore became the LAST part of the program I learned about when I began directing games: up until that time I had used it for masterpoint races and for the Daily Bulletins I produced at tournaments. One thing that I had noticed about the Phil Wood Under 200 race became a suggestion that the Unit Board eagerly accepted for 2012. The under-200 race is usually won by someone who seldom plays with another player who is under 200 points. Usually the winner has spent most of the year in Flight A slugging it out with the Unit's best players, with a partner who is often among them. And while rewarding new players who have the talent to slug it out with the experts was a good idea in 1974, and still is, there is almost no chance for a player to win the under-200 race by playing with other under-200 players in limited events. The idea I came up with was to have a race covering all Unit events geared towards newer players, but to only count the masterpoints won by non-Life Masters, playing with other non-Life Masters. The Unit supplied the catchy name for the race, and I suspect will probably supply a trophy or plaque by the end of the year. Here are the rules:
Here is a list of the RRR-eligible events in 2012: Rocket Rookie Race-eligible events in 2012
Lots of chances to win RRR points. And now for the punch line: after 18 years of using ACBLScore to figure out the winners in these races, I am now faced with one that ACBLScore will not be able to handle, at least not completely! The only logical way to work out the leaders in this race is to look at the ACBLScore output, select the RRR-eligible masterpoint awards, record player numbers and masterpoints won in a file, event by event, and let a computer program crunch the numbers together. The program indicates that these are the current standings: Current 2012 Rocket Rookie Race Standings (as of February 19)
81.85 masterpoints have been won by 72 RRR-eligible people so far in 2012. (Players must be paid-up members of the ACBL to be eligible for all ACBL masterpoint races.)Contrasts and Comparisons
by Bruce McIntyre I decided to learn bridge more than a quarter-century ago, mostly because it seemed to be the only well-known game I hadn't yet figured out. It wasn’t easy. It was quite difficult, in the rows of bridge books at the library, all written for people who played, to find one that instead was aimed at someone who didn't know how to play. I had never even played a game involving trick-taking, so a lot of the most basic ideas were quite foreign. My first idea was to borrow the book of rules (The Laws of Contract Bridge) and work it out from that. Not one of my better plans...they may be the official rules but they are not meant to teach you how to play. Eventually I found a book for beginners by Charles Goren and became that fairly rare example of a player who learns the game without actually playing it. It was only when I actually saw the game being played that the utter cool of bridge compared to other card games became very clear:
How did partner know you could trump the third round of hearts? You played your highest spot card on the first trick and your lowest on the second. How did you know that partner’s entry was in diamonds and not clubs? Partner led the 9♥ to the third trick. He might have led any heart. This fairly high spot-card showed that he preferred diamonds (the higher of the two remaining suits) to clubs. Presto! But it’s not really magic. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had a wonderful saying: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The co-operation aspect of bridge brings forth these new strategies, more so than in any other partnership game I know of:
Let's start with what duplicate has to offer:
Some duplicate players are over-competitive, anti-social boors. It's true. The nature of duplicate bridge turns the nicest people into the worst kind of monster under especially trying circumstances (to say nothing of what it can do to people who aren't quite as nice). We've all seen it happen, and there is one reason it continues to happen. We tolerate it. Some of us even sit back and enjoy a bitter argument between opponents, knowing that a frustrated player tends to play worse than a calm one. Social players don’t share this view...when faced with poor table behavior, they just don't return. There are other games elsewhere. What we have discovered in the past decade is that both approaches are wrong—but the response of the duplicate veterans, who tolerate it, is worse than the response of the social players: temporary tolerance, and then permanent absence. The solution is in the Laws of Duplicate Bridge and has been there for decades—but tournament players just never saw it. The Laws actually say that "a player should carefully avoid any remark or action that might cause annoyance or embarrassment to another player or might interfere with the enjoyment of the game." In the past decade many clubs and tournaments have adopted a Zero Tolerance program for unquestionably unacceptable behavior. Players who behave poorly are given a small penalty to their score for the first offense. The second offense in the same session means good-bye. Zero Tolerance doesn't mean that any small lapse in etiquette will automatically get a player a penalty. What Zero Tolerance means is that the players themselves should never tolerate anything that is unquestionably out of line. If they don't call the Director and explain what happened, the miscreants cannot be punished, warned, educated or whatever is appropriate in the situation. It doesn't even need to be directed at you: if a player is berating his partner in a way that makes you uncomfortable, call the Director and have it dealt with. But we need to understand that what may be shockingly excessive to one player is merely edgy flamboyance to another. Most players will apologize if they are told that their behavior is intimidating or distracting. In most borderline cases, as long as the offending player apologizes for the incident, only a warning will be given. And...it's working. There are signs that table behavior is improving compared to the bad old days not so long ago. Since we instituted the program locally, we have not had to eject anyone, and few penalties have been given. If you have not enjoyed the tournament or club game in the past, we invite you to give it a new try. By the way, it’s not as though this problem is unique to bridge. Have you never played with someone who swears on the golf course or in the racquetball court, or yells at a tennis partner? Perhaps the difference here is that we expect teammates and partners to be occasionally hostile in sports, but we don't think of competitive bridge as a sport: we think of it as a game. Organized competitive bridge had a hard time coming to terms with this verdict. There was actually a movement afoot in the late 1990s to have bridge recognized as a sport by the International Olympic Committee. It succeeded, and a week before the Salt Lake City Winter Games in 2002, there was an exhibition match to try bridge out as a potential Olympic sport of the future. Canada even won the (unofficial) gold medal! But eventually, the drive for Olympic status was permanently stalled when the IOC decided that the Summer Olympics would not be admitting any more new sports, and the Winter Olympics would be confined to games requiring snow or ice. Does this seal the deal? Is competitive bridge a game or a sport? There’s really no correct answer to this. However, there is one unique aspect of competitive bridge that you will not find in many games or sports: Everyone plays. When you play at a club game or at a tournament, you will often play a few boards against novices and a few boards against experts. If you go to a large tournament you may even get a few boards against some famous players, newspaper bridge columnists, well-known bridge teachers or authors, or even world champions! Try doing that at your tennis club or golf course. It just doesn’t happen. It doesn't always happen in bridge either, of course. The most popular game at most large tournaments is no longer the Open Pairs. More and more players are playing in the bracketed knockout team events, where teams are bracketed (grouped) together by their masterpoint averages, so you won't get a chance to play Mr. Famous Expert unless you have a lot of masterpoints (or your teammates can make up the slack!) But in an open club game, you will almost certainly play a few boards against some good players. At a small weekend tournament, most of the games will be open pairs and you will face the best players in the area (although quite often there will be a separate event for newer players that you can play in). You won't spend the while day against the superstars, but you may meet several of them. At a large regional or national tournament, many of the events will be the bracketed knockout teams, but when the good players get knocked out early, they often play a session or two in the pairs games, sometimes with their spouses or with clients. (Yes, there are bridge professionals and people who pay to be their partners at big tournaments. Most clients are not addicted to masterpoints, the currency of tournament success. They just want to play and learn from a very good player.) So when you step out and play at a club or in open games at tournaments (and at some point you will), you're going to meet some very good players, and it may at first seem impossible to have any success against players like that. Don't despair! You still have two ways to succeed:
Above all, have fun. If you've read this far, you probably will. The hardest step, it always seems, is the first one. Go for it! Bidding Gadgets You'll Need
by Bruce McIntyre The newcomer to duplicate bridge is usually amazed by the way players bid. Bids that the rookie has learned as strong are suddenly weak, suits bid apparently naturally can be quite a bit shorter than expected, and some bids come from deep space, light-years from their natural meaning! Armed only with Stayman, Blackwood, takeout doubles and perhaps a select few other conventions, the rookie feels outgunned by the tournament veterans. What to do? Most conclude that they need to learn this "new bidding." We all want to understand what our opponents are doing. Who knows, maybe there are some ideas we can use in our own partnership. But you don't need to learn any new conventions to walk into a club or go to a tournament and play bridge. You and your partner can play any natural system you like in any bridge game anywhere. The rules say so. It's the players who play the funny bids who have the obligation to make sure their system is understood by their opponents. The rules say that too. It seems to me that the most difficult part of duplicate bridge, to new players, is bidding. Cardplay is seen as though it will take care of itself. We all go through a phase where we fervently believe that if we just use the latest bidding gadgets, we'll be able to get to the right contract every time, as the experts do. Trouble is, the experts who create these gadgets are experts in bidding and in cardplay. The beginners that study and use the experts' bidding techniques properly reach a few more games and slams than those without the science—but if they have concentrated on bidding and not improved their cardplay as well, how many of these expert contracts can they make? (And for every novice who studies the new techniques and uses them properly, there are dozens who use them improperly, for these gadgets trickle down indirectly from expert to newcomer, and often the crucial details are garbled in the process...) The right way to change your system (if you must) is slowly, making sure that as you learn, you are developing your cardplay skills as well. That’s the big secret. Here is a good starting list of conventions to consider for your system—but only if you wish. This list of changes to what is commonly accepted as standard outside the duplicate world comes from Max Hardy’s excellent book Standard Bridge Bidding for the 21st Century. I have changed the original order a bit to give new players an idea of the best sequence to upgrade their methods. You certainly shouldn’t make all of these changes at once.
Along with these there are dozens of minor changes you might make, if only because Fred played one of them against you and got a good result. You can make subtle changes to existing conventions like Stayman or Blackwood, or have specific agreements in specific situations, or you can even invent new stuff! But, in a tournament or at a club, you might meet eight-twelve different pairs in a single night. It’s not like playing a few rubbers against the Joneses every Tuesday, where you know what they play and they know what you play. It seems like a different and perhaps unfair game to the newcomer to tournament bridge. These players have been playing together at this club for a long time and know one another, you don’t. How can you be expected to know when their bids are strong and when they are weak (so you know when to pass and stay safe?) It's a fair question, and one that early bridge organizers must have considered years ago, when bridge players began to meet for tournaments and in clubs. The answer lies in what we call the Principle of Full Disclosure. The Principle says that every player has a right to know what systems and conventions and styles the opponents play. No pair may ever agree to play a convention and keep it secret from the opponents. In order to keep the information free and accessible to all, the rules allow the organizers ways to keep everyone informed. Convention cards are one way. You can look at an opponent's convention card (assuming it is properly filled out) and find out the basics about a call they made. (A call is any bid, double, redouble or pass.) Alerts and announcements are another. Players must immediately alert when their partner makes a call that is deemed 'alertable' by the ACBL. This gives the next player a heads up about the call and that it has a special meaning. A very few situations require not an alert but an announcement; for example, a 1NT opening requires, in tournament bridge, the partner to announce what the agreed high-card point range is. Questions are another. When it is your turn, before making a call you can ask either opponent about a call that their partner made. You don’t ask the player that made the call, you ask the partner of that player. Remember, what you are asking about is not the actual hand the player's partner holds, but about the agreement that they have about that call. If they have a partnership agreement, they have to tell you about it. If they haven't discussed the situation, then both sides are in the dark! If you get a poor score and part of the reason is a convention card that is wrongly marked, or a missed alert, or a misleading or wrong answer to your question, call the Director: every game has one. The Director will hear from all sides and make a judgment call. If an infraction caused damage, an adjustment to the score will be made. It's important to note that in the vast majority of cases, the Director is instructed by the Laws to 'restore equity,' which means to decide what would likely have happened without the irregularity. Very few cases involve a mandatory penalty. If someone forgets to alert, causing a different result, the Director just assigns the score that would have been obtained without the forgotten alert (with all doubtful points resolved in favour of the non-offending side). The player who forgot will be reminded to alert it next time, but not given any further penalty. As you add new conventions and gadgets to your system, you'll learn when you need to alert or announce the bids your partner makes. You might forget things and get an adjusted score; don't let that bother or deter you from learning more. Your convention card will fill up with your selected gadgets (not too fast, though). You'll become an expert at explaining your partner's conventional calls. You may not quite understand everything now, but play for a few months and the light will (I hope) go on. If so, congratulations! Welcome to the bridge world! What you need to know if you've played bridge before
by Bruce McIntyre This article is designed for people who have played bridge before but have never tried duplicate bridge. If you're interested in learning how to play bridge from scratch, you should do this right now (assuming you have a Windows PC): type the letters ltpb into your browser's search window and hit ENTER. The search will lead you to the free software Learn To Play Bridge, which you can download for free. LTPB1 is an interactive instructional program to teach people about bridge who have never played before. LTPB2 is a second volume which helps teach basic bridge skills. In this article, however, I am going to start with the assumption that you know how to play bridge, perhaps even with a fair bit of skill, but are concerned that the extra things that happen in duplicate games, whether at a club or at a tournament, will distract you from having a good time and playing well. Some players try our game only once or twice before deciding that there's just too much to learn to make the leap from social or rubber bridge into duplicate. It's true that there is a lot to learn to become an expert, but you need only a very small part of that to make a decent start. You will be able to get by just by doing the following:
That last is the most important at your first experiences at duplicate bridge. It is very easy to get lost in the intricacies of modern bidding or cardplay strategies at your first game. You might even get interested in a local tournament that is coming up, and try to fathom how the different events work. All of this will simply get in the way of what should be your first goal: to learn the basics of duplicate by playing and having fun. Those strange bids that get your opponents to the right contract and the nearby Regional can wait. A good place to start is the ACBL convention card, which is something you can download from the Internet and have a look at even before you go to the club. The idea here is simple: the convention card is for your opponents: it lists popular bidding styles and agreements, and by checking off the ones you play it allows your opponents to access this information easily. You're likely to find that you've never heard of many of the items on the card. There are online articles on how to fill it out, but if you play a simple, natural system, you have only a few things to indicate on the card: what your 1NT range is, whether you play four or five card majors, what sort of two-level opening bids you play, and so on. Do the best you can and don't worry too much about being perfectly accurate. You will feel an urge to understand every possible checkbox on the convention card. No need. You'll feel inadequate about the areas of the card where you have no agreement, or one that is different from most other players. Don't. Concentrate on bidding as well as you can with the tools you know. Don't agree to play anything that you don't know. Especially if you arrive without a partner and the Director pairs you up with someone, you may draw a player who thinks you can easily remember five, or twelve, or forty "little agreements." Be stubborn. Say no. If you go along, you will forget most of it and get bad results. Even if you remember some of the agreements, you might not know what to do on the following round of bidding. Or you might make a bid only to later discover it meant something else! As a game Director, I often have to play to fill a half-table, sometimes with players who are new to duplicate. The best are those who concentrate on playing simple systems and losing as few tricks as possible in the play. The worst have handicapped themselves with bidding agreements they don't understand. Fancy agreements only win when there actually is an agreement to use them: if both players are not familiar with the agreement, you lose more points than you gain. The danger for many new duplicate players is to take in all of the fancy agreements at once. Instead, learn them thoroughly one by one, after you are familiar with the basics. Bid-boxes are a useful addition to clubs where a dozen or more tables may be trying to bid at the same time. They reduce the level of chatter in the room. They remove the unconscious voice inflections that some players unintentionally add to their bids. They place the entire auction on the table for everyone to see whenever they need a review. And they are pretty cool to use. A few minutes practice with a bid-box will make you an expert:
That's about all there is to bid boxes. They look strange but they take almost no time to get used to. Duplicate cardplay is different from rubber bridge. The idea is that everyone, or almost everyone, plays the same deals. The cards are only shuffled at the beginning of the game, and each deal's four hands are placed in these strange contraptions called "boards." Players remove their hand at the start of play and return it when they're done, so the next table can play the same deal. During the play, instead of tossing your card into the middle as rubber bridge players do, you play your cards face up in front of you. When the trick is over, you take your played card and turn it over, pointing the long end towards the side that won the trick, overlapping the cards so that you can quickly see how many tricks each side has. If there is a question about following suit at the end, the whole play can be reconstructed. Once a result is agreed, you take your thirteen cards only, and put them back into your slot in the board. In most pair games, pairs play 2-4 boards against a pair, then the East-West pairs go to the next higher table, while the boards go to the next lower table. This ensures that everyone plays a few hands against almost everyone sitting in the other direction, and that everyone plays most of the boards that are in play. But there are some exceptions, which a good Director will warn players about in advance. At tournaments, instead of shuffling, a computer program produces the deals and the players at each table make a few boards (that they don't play in the game, of course) from the printed deal diagrams, instead of shuffling. At the end, players get a sheet listing all the deals from the session! In duplicate, each deal is a separate event, unrelated to previous boards. There are no partscores that carry over to a future deal where they might be converted. The vulnerability and dealer are marked on each board, and follow a pattern. Duplicate therefore has a few slightly different scoring rules:
You will find that most duplicate players know the scores for most contracts, even some of the doubled ones, by heart. You will too after you play for a while. The back of bid-box cards shows the scores that can be made with that contract, so if you ever need to know what one club making 5 redoubled and vulnerable is, you can look it up. The back of a convention card has a place to write the contract and the score for each deal as you play. Make sure that you hide this from the opponents, who may not have played some of the boards you have already played. It is best not to hold up play while you fill in your score. Your score at the end of the night is not the sum total of all of your plusses and minuses. Instead, the scorer (usually a computer) looks at each board played and gives each pair one "matchpoint" for each result worse than theirs and a half of a "matchpoint" for each score that is the same. The winning pair is determined by these matchpoints, and there are some general strategies in matchpoints that you'll need to know:
And what is your goal? Your goal in your first few games should be to have fun, learn the basics, meet some people, and play enough to complete that first step as quickly as you can. If you are close to a club, let the Director know that you can come down at a moment's notice if a player is needed. The more often you play, the faster you will get through the "complete novice" stage. And it will happen if you keep playing. You'll begin to read the newspaper bridge columns and get some books from the library or from the club itself. Check out some internet sites for more info. Play online. Plan a session or two at a local tournament to see what that's like. As long as you keep playing at the club, eventually someone will ask you if you're free for a game some time. It may seem to you that most of the advice I have given is to ignore almost everything that goes on. You may think that this will make you seem strange. You will seem strange, but in a good and impressive way. Most beginners get lost in the rules or the jargon or the strange and cool bidding gadgets almost from the start. But those that stick to the basics get noticed: they improve faster. So: have fun, play as well as you can, and as often as you can, in the most comfortable way that you can. It won't be long before you are a regular! What it is and how it affects new players
by Bruce McIntyre One of the big mysteries to new players is the ACBL and what it does. Quick answer: as a new player to duplicate bridge, you hardly need to worry about the ACBL, or ACBL Membership at all; but that's not much of an answer. Let me see if I can summarize the ACBL and why at some point (but not right away) you should consider becoming a member. ACBL stands for American Contract Bridge League. In addition to the USA, the ACBL is the organization that runs bridge in Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, and a handful of clubs in other countries (military bases, as well as a few clubs that are for some reason ACBL members). It oversees tournaments, represents this part of the world in meetings of the World Bridge Federation, and runs all kinds of programs designed to promote bridge. For most duplicate players, the biggest program the ACBL runs is the recording of masterpoints for all members. But there is much more involved in this large organization: charity programs, fundraising programs, bridge education, co-ordination of hundreds of regional and local tournaments each year, plus three massive eleven day tournaments each year that the ACBL runs directly. In addition, there are several events which begin at the club level continent wide and qualify players to district championships and then a national final, and lots of other special events and programs for clubs. The ACBL has a monthly newsletter, the Bridge Bulletin, as well as a website at www.acbl.org from its headquarters in Horn Lake MS, a suburb south of Memphis TN. Where to begin? Let's start with tournaments. Three times a year, usually in March, July, and late November, the ACBL runs huge eleven day tournaments called North American Bridge Championships. These extravaganzas of bridge attract thousands of players of all levels, and there are events for the best in the continent (even world stars enter these events), as well as events for every level of player right down to the newest rookie. The ACBL is divided into 25 Districts: our area is in District 19, which includes B.C., Washington State, and Alaska. There is a separate organizing body for District events called DINO (it stands for DIstrict Nineteen Organization, and if you find that strange, District 18 calls itself WASUMI: it covers Wyoming, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Utah, Montana, and Idaho!) Districts run several week-long (usually Monday evening thru Sunday) tournaments each year which are called Regionals. These tournaments also have a wide range of events, depending on their size. The largest Regional tournament in Canada takes place every June in Penticton and has events for new players as well as experts. There are also annual Regional tournaments in Lynnwood, just north of Seattle, and Victoria and Vancouver alternate years to hold a Regional tournament. Once in a while there is a Regional in Spokane, or Tri-Cities, or other places. Alaska has a small Regional every June in Anchorage. The District also runs a handful of other events and the members of the District Board meet on the Monday afternoon of most Regionals to discuss business. The next level down gets us to Units. There are several hundred Units in the ACBL, and twenty-four of them in District 19. Our Unit is Unit 430 (a easy number for duplicate bridge players to remember: 3NT making four not vulnerable scores 430), and is a fairly large Unit by population compared to some others. Units run a handful of weekend Sectional tournaments, usually Friday thru Sunday, but occasionally longer. In these tournaments, there are sometimes events for newer players, but locally we have found it best to devote one session on the weekend to the rookie game (running rookie sections in every session makes it hard to attract enough eligible pairs for a reasonable game). A growing trend locally is to run more games for players under 750 masterpoints, which these days is an intermediate level. The last level is bridge clubs. There are thousands of ACBL-affiliated bridge clubs. Part of your entry fee in any ACBL game goes to the ACBL as a sanction fee. A listing of all ACBL clubs is located at the ACBL's web site. Clubs range from invitational games at country clubs or businesses to once-a-week games to larger clubs that sometimes even own their location and run several events each day. Units also run several other events, and serve as local organizing committees for bridge. Our local Unit Board meets about once a month to discuss tournaments, finances, and many other programs that the Unit administers. Unit 430 runs a team competition that goes from October to April each year and beyond, as well as a program of Monthly Unit Championship games, quarterly Mentor-Mentee games, charity and fundraising games, and a week-long event where club games qualify for masterpoints as though they were actuall tournaments. This website is financed by the Unit, which also finances a subsidy fund for players who qualify to play at sometimes distant national finals. Parallel to this hierarchy is the Canadian Bridge Federation. This organization was set up to run Canadian Championships and programs specific to Canadian bridge players. The Canadian Bridge Championships take place in late May or early June each year, and the CBF runs other Canada-wide programs as well. The CBF website is at www.cbf.ca. There is also a USBF and a Mexican and Bermudan counterpart, primarily to select representative teams, but the ACBL runs all other tournament and club bridge in all four countries.
The way masterpoints are awarded has changed significantly over time. At first your masterpoint total was the only thing considered. Then the idea of different coloured masterpoints for different classes of events took over, to ensure that players of high rank had to have at least some experience at the higher level tournaments. Today you can win gold points at most NABC events and some Regional events, with the remainder of events at these tournaments paying red points. Club game masterpoints and Unit Championship games pay in black points. Silver points were added for sectional tournaments when they began losing attendance to regionals in the 1980s. There are even platinum points for the highest-rated events at NABCs, used only to determine the ACBL player of the year. Most recently has been the introduction of "unpigmented" points for winners at online tournaments. Each successive rank on the way to Life Master has requirements in coloured points (as well as limits in how many online points can count). Once you get to Life Master the colour of points don't matter any more. It will seem at first difficult to win any masterpoints at all. But as you play more and more, and venture out to try your luck in tournaments, you will find it less difficult to get them. Many new players feel that their current pace of winning masterpoints means that they will need to pursue a different rank: Afterlife Master! But the masterpoint system, as complicated and flawed as it is, is carefully designed to keep players on the road to their next acheivement and although it may seem to be a steepening incline at first, it is actually just the opposite.
Probably not. When you first start playing club bridge, you are trying it out. Some people take to it right away and are soon playing several times a week; it makes sense for them to become an ACBL member as soon as their masterpoint collection begins. Others find it a tough go at first and play only occasionally at their club. And without a membership, that is perfectly fine. We're happy to see you give it a chance. In many cases, players try to make it work several times, coming back to the club several years after first trying it out. A prospective player might be working hard at a job that makes it difficult to find time to play, or may have some other issues in his or her life that prevents him from taking on a new pastime. All this is understandable, and if we only see you at the clubs a few times a year, that's OK. The ACBL is an inclusive organization: it welcomes anyone who wants to play bridge and membership is not a strict requirement. The first main benefit of membership in the ACBL is the automatic recording of masterpoints (including those won for a short time before you join). Another main benefit is that you get sent the ACBL's monthly magazine, the Bridge Bulletin. These days, the Bulletin sent to members contains a page with your current masterpoint status (which used to be sent separately). The magazine contains articles on bridge (for all levels from novice to expert), bridge news, schedules of future tournaments, and bridge book reviews, as well as a vibrant letter column and a bidding contest. Membership in the ACBL also qualifies you for many discounts, including slightly lower entry fees at tournaments. (Club games do not charge extra for non-ACBL members.) A portion of your ACBL Membership fees goes back to your local Unit so that more local events can be supported. Other snippets of your fee go towards ACBL-wide programs supporting bridge education, promotion, and charity programs. You should consider paying the small extra fee for CBF membership when you become an ACBL member: this helps fund Canadian bridge events, ensures that charity money raised at Canadian bridge events goes to Canadian charities, and supports teams which represent our country at the World Championships. How expensive is it? Not very. It costs about half the price of an entry fee at a club, each month. For first-time members there is a fairly large discount. The monthly magazine alone is worth the price of admission.
Once you've joined, you'll be on the road to getting your Gold Card. They'll send you a white cardboard membership card with your player number on it first, but it gets replaced when you become a Life Master with an attractive (and much heavier!) card, made of some gold-coloured metal, which I suspect is probably not gold. The Bridge for Dummies book makes a good joke about this: "What can you do with your gold card? Well, if you get on a bus, show your gold card, and pay your fare, the driver will let you ride." Actually the ACBL will change the first digit of your player number to a letter (1 thru 9 translates to J thru R) to indicate that you are a Life Master. And you'll be off on a new quest: Bronze Life Master. Then Silver Life Master. Then Gold Life Master. Then... You get the idea. Have fun playing. (It'll get easier.) |
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