Starting a Bridge blog

I should have started this blog about a year ago or so just to have something that documents my progress learning this fascinating game. I haven’t decided yet whether this should be in English or German. I guess it will be a mix with English for the more general stuff and German for tournament results, schaun mer mal :)

It all began in May 2004 with Sigi talking about Skat and Doppelkopf in his dancing club, when a friend told him to try Bridge. He then joined a beginners course and asked me to join. After the second session (too much Minibridge in the first one ;-) I knew I loved the game. Together with a few others we (Sigi and I) quickly went through a crash course in bidding and basic playing techniques in a few weeks that would normally have lasted over a year. Thanks Regine :-)

I don't remember exactly when we played the first tournament in the club, but it must have been something like August '04. Our goal was not to become last one, and from memory, we exactly did that. The expectations quickly raised, soon we scored around or above 50% most of the time. I won my first club tournament in January '05 with Regine. A very nice result was in August '05 when we scored 8th in a field of 91 pairs at a pub tournament in Koblenz (Regine and Frederic were 1st).

I guess since about 3/4 of a year I can really tell the difference between MPs and IMPs. Having soon discovered BBO (I'm Myon there), and regularly playing team events in Dudweiler, we learned to love IMPs and very much prefer that scoring. We now playing for team 1 of the Saarbrücken 65 club together with Klaus and Arno, and absolutely unexpectedly, have just won 72 out of 75 victory points at the first three matches in Frankfurt. We probably won't benefit too much from that, though, since these three teams probably won't make it into the final round, and the remaining two teams seem to be stronger. Judging from the recent team results in the Dudweiler club, and the (few) butler results in the Saarbrücken 84 club, we seem to be good at IMPs. Compare that with the 32% MP result last week ;-)

We are currently playing a 5 Majors system with a 15-17 NT, developed by Thomas Schmitt. He trusts us enough that we edit the system script and will usually accept new stuff. We were having a look at Moscito recently, but at the moment I don't feel like going into bidding more, at the current level I'm at, declarer play is much more important (you have to make the contracts you bid, after all...). Defense also could be improved, though I should practise declarer play much more judging from the hands that I could have made had I given more care to the opponents' discards.

Together with teams from Halle/Saale and BUM Mannheim, we were playing team matches on BBO in the past weeks, usually on Sundays. I'd like to have more teams join us there, if you are interested, please subscribe to the bbo-team list.

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