Why I Quit Bridge and Why I Came Back
bridgewinners.com
bridgewinners.com
Depending on where you live what people do online can vary a lot, especially if you have a mix of young and old people. My Club had lots of players/parants that used WeChat and lots that used Facebook messenger. Some people barely used the Internet. Different clubs will have different mixes.
I ended up having a website with updates and a Facebook group. 1-to-1 Communication was done via SMS since everybody had that. I used to also do announcements on Club night, posters on the wall and a mass SMS at the start of each year to remind people we were starting up again.
A website for registering is not a trivial thing to setup and maintain. Even if you are just using a SaaS vendor it will still cost significant fees. Our Club charges $100/year to cover everything. If you want something non-standard then who knows what that will cost.
I know that since I left some stuff does take place on discord and some registration is done automatically online (under the grace of a club member with time). But you have to pick your technology to match your members. If most of them a 50+ then a discord that only 10% use is only for discussion, not somewhere for official communication/business.
He/she doesn't like email, facebook, or phones, so there's an obvious solution: the entire club must switch communication tools to accommodate this person. Ignoring the difficulties you'll have getting most old folks to use these tools, or the fact that many of them likely don't use smartphones or laptops.
So also the website, etc.
While fb isn't great as a company, their free groups tool is a godsend to all sorts of clubs and organizations, particularly those without access to a volunteer with IT skills.
The author also doesn't like the hours that other people arrange games.
:shrug: Some people just can't be pleased.
On the one hand, he complaining about how it's so unfair that he has to take public transport and so it takes him longer and costs more to get there. That's not really anyone else's problem. Sure, it sucks for him, but he'll have the same problems with every activity he wants to do, not just playing bridge. It already seems beyond generous that people are offering to help with his transportation costs.
He then rants about how people shouldn't use mailing lists because it's far too much effort for young people to actually read what others have to say. After all, he's a young person, so the only thing that matters in this world is what he has to say. So all these "old people" should hang out around on discord 24/7 just in case he wants to ask something that everyone else already knows because they read their emails. The real kicker is that he doesn't care that this system has been working for the club for a long time and works for everyone else, he only sees that it's inconvenient for him because he can't be separated from his memes on discord for more than the 30 seconds it'd take him to read an email.
The technology bit seems a little ridiculous, young people can and do respond to email just fine, I don’t think trying to move to Discord is a good use of anyone’s time.
But when I was a player (and struggling to get anyone to use email), everyone was unfailingly nice.
Also, a lot of players expect you to "put in your time" so to speak. If you don't alert properly or if you are using weird systems but asking basic questions, that really pisses off a lot of them. Frankly, the alerts are a big issue - not alerting a "weird" bid can be a huge advantage - but the rules around it are nuts.
Every game has its bad apples, though. I doubt you get that ratio playing chess or trading card games.
Chess and trading card games are notorious for having participants who have absolutely horrible social interaction skills.
My experiences playing bridge were always way superior on a social interaction scale.
For me, the two big reasons I quit were (1) the rating system, and (2) finding a partner.
For the rating system, it’s just not competitive. Master points don’t necessarily mean anything. If you have a lot, it means you’ve played a lot - maybe they at least mean that. You could play for 50 years and easily become a life master but be complete garbage compared to the kid who did it in a month or two. There’s no information to understand how successful you actually are minus what you alone know about yourself and your game. It’s just not as fun, especially once I started to play games that make success extremely evident via stats / ranking.
Bridge is very unique in needing a partner to play with and one that you understand quite well. I once played with one of the best players in the world as a 16 year old (literally, one of the “best” at least master point wise). We did terrible lol. I didn’t know what he was doing and he couldn’t stoop down to my level all too well. How do you find the right partner? Not really sure. Again, I think it’s actually a cool part of the game, adds a unique social element and togetherness to it but it does make getting plugged into it harder.
https://www.ebu.co.uk/gradings-rankings/national-grading-sch...
Just because people my age and younger use discord etc, doesn't mean this is either a "good" way for people to communicate, or something we should force people whose technical literacy could vary wildly between extremes to try and figure out.
Personally, I hate discord and messaging in general and much prefer to make phone calls. I guess that makes me an anomaly compared to my generation, but I generally find that whole section rude and trying to solve their own personal problem, not the problems of the community as a whole.
Fortunately that's not always the case with young people, I mean, this avatar-mania thing. Bridge is not anime- or otaku-adjacent.
Back to the subject at hand, and taking into consideration that I've never ever played bridge (but some of the people from my uni used to play back in the day, including one dorm roommate), I feel like the OP wants to change the entire culture of the game being played around his/her/their parts of the world (I think it's the Valley) only on account of him/her/they being younger. That's not how it works, there are moments in life when you have to adapt to the existing culture, not the other way round.
I would have thought WhatsApp would be a more universal tool for communicating updates. Or email, because people do use email. We just use it less as a proportion of all our communication than we used to.
I don't know why young people wouldn't be able to use email. I'm sure they won't use it for setting up something on their own, but you don't get to impose your preferences if you're joining events set up by others.
You're trying to find an opponent with similar skills but you're contacting everyone on the list, so most of the communication is falling onto the wrong people. You could fix that by having several lists for distinct player level ranges but now you've got 5 lists and that's a different can of worms especially for people right on the border of 2 levels
Then you've got the problem of receiving too many emails, so you make a rule to auto-sort them into a folder (note how you wouldn't have to do that if you were using something other than email) - god forbid you're 28 and work in a field that doesn't use email like construction so you're unfamiliar with auto-sorts and inbox rules, so you just get your inbox flooded and it's a pain in the ass.
We're quick to say that discord is confusing but email has its complexity
Then you invite someone to play and receive 7 answers, so you've got to send 6 "Sorry, I found already found someone!" . But email doesn't have a "delete" button so you might have to send another email to inform people that they don't need to respond anymore. You'll keep receiving messages about it 6 days later anyway because some people read their emails from the bottom up.
>Discord is such a pain to deal with. It's great for communities
A local bridge club is a community
I think what they'd need is just a custom website to be honest
Email lists work fine for the existing club members so I don't see why they would suddenly become a problem now. My guess is that young people don't know how to use email or their clients suck at reading email threads, but you'd have the same problem the other way around if you were to try to push old people into smartphone apps. The argument between mailing lists and Discord seems to be "that's what this groups is mostly using so the other solution is bad".
I agree that a website would fix most of the issues, especially when it comes to communicating things to the group. Just a boring old phpbb forum would probably suffice, though you'd need to limit registration to actual club members if you want to keep out the trolls.
The point I'm trying to make is that the perceived difficulties are part of any communication system. You need communication, because just a website isn't enough for finding people to team up with. I've seen all the problems you have with email happen in Discord servers that weren't even trying to organise anything.
LiBridge? (-:
Like, imagine if one of the chess sites let you pay, say, 25 cents, to make a game between two FIDE members to play rated games online.
I believe the problem is that bridge in the US (not true in some other countries) lacks a "critical mass" of 20 and 30 somethings.
Bridge is a game of limited information, and making best use of the available limited information and this included signalling WITH card play, but NOT tone of voice, expression, mannerism, or other such "pokerisms".
For instance "When I lead the Ace of a suit, I promise the king" is legal signaling. "When I hold my cards with 3 fingers I have the king of spades" is not.
This is contrary to the normal rules that you're not allowed to say ANYTHING other than a bid which is a number and a suit. That's why it's surprising on the first page that people are getting upset when he's asking them to be quiet. On the other hand, it's quite common to have a friendly chat during the game as long as it's obvious to everyone it has nothing to do with the game. However, that does obviously open up the possibility of secret information being passed as well as being distracting to the other team, so normally people respect the rules and only talk between games. If people are getting violent when being asked to be quiet during bidding, then they should definitely be told to leave by the organisers.
In terms of secret bidding, I have kind of mixed feelings about this. There are definitely opportunities for creating a very complicated bidding system, and over the years, that's how the main systems evolved, but most tournaments require you to play with specific conventions so that both teams understand the bidding.
In general, revealing the rough balance of your hand to the opponents isn't too big a deal, as if one team has a very strong hand, the other team obviously is in a much weaker position and there's little they can do to stop a win. In desperate measures you might bid something knowing you can't win, but might not lose too badly, in order to stop a massive win, but that's not common. However, understanding the other team's bidding lets you figure out the balance of cards in their hands, so you might be able to defend more strategically if you know they're going for a risky slam.
The real advantage of non-standard bidding systems is being able to communicate intent between "I have nothing and can't support", "with what you've got we can easily make game" and "with what you've got there's a good chance of a slam" as quickly as possible so that there's plenty of bidding space left to explore the details of best suit fit / NT, or to figure out that both teams are quite balanced and get out of the bidding while it's still low.
...I guess a lesson here would be to be friendly with everyone, including strangers.
I'm curious if you also find Texas Hold'Em Poker mechanical when switching between the various levels of thinking from 1 to 7 etc.
Bridge is to Euchre as Chess is to not just Checkers but Tic Tac Toe.
And get the very basic conventions and don't try to bid slam all the time, and table-talk like maniacs. It's quite fun.
Let me start by saying Bridge is a great game. I always liked the biding side of the game more than the card play. The former informs the latter.
The poster said something strange where players and directors objected to systems they wanted to play and mentioned specifically "2/1 GF". I don't know where they were playing but that's a pretty standard system. In North America, people generally play what are called "5 card majors", meaning you don't open 1 heart or 1 spade unless you have 5+ in that suit (with opening hand strength). 2/1 GF simply means if your partner responds with a 2 bid of a lower suit (eg 1S-2C) you now can't stop bidding until you reach a game level contract (3N, 4H/S, 5C/D). That has some consequences but it isn't that different to the NA 5 card majors and everywhere I played that was standard.
There are systems you can't play in certain events. In any ACBL sanctioned event you can play what are called "general card" systems so no one can object to a system that is permitted in an event.
A club game will typically be 21-27 boards, last about 3 hours and involve anywhere from 3 to 30+ tables.
The ACBL is in the business of selling masterpoints. This is as close as you get to a ratings system but it doesn't reflect skill, just how much you've been to ACBL events. Some events bracket you on masterpoints. There are different colours (eg silver for local tournaments, gold/red for regional and I think platinum for certain national events). The ACBL makes money by you going to those events where, at least prepandemic, you typically paid $20-30 per half-day session.
Clubs in NA are very much set up to cater to a very old crowd. Like the poster says, most events are during the workday. Only the largest clubs had evening or weekend games and they tended to have smaller attendance.
I agree finding a reliable Bridge partner is the biggest hurdle. Playing with pick up partners is way less common and less satisfying. All competitive Bridge is with fixed partnerships or teams.
What's interesting about Bridge is that it's been fairly resistant to AI. Of course any computer can remember all the cards they've seen but even I as a fairly mediocre player saw the flaws in both biding and play of pretty much every computer Bridge game I tried.
The ACBL has, at every opportunity, chosen to cater to their existing base rather than expanding it and it's been a running joke for years that every year the average age of an ACBL member goes up by 1 year. It's not too far from the truth.
I can't speak to discrimination. This probably depends on area to some degree. But club Bridge players are (IME), at best, a cantankerous and disagreeable lot.
ALL other communication is banned. This includes anything like mannerism, tempo, facial expression, etc.
High level competitions are played with a divider (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/78/Br...) that prevents one from seing partner.