The Opening Bid
	Valuing Your Hand
	Index of Lessons

Bridge is a team game; you and your partner are trying to outscore your opponents. To do so, you must earn points. There are two ways to do so. First, you can earn points for bidding and making your contracts. Second, you can earn points for keeping your opponents from making their own contracts.

If, on a particular deal, you and your partner have enough points and/or favorable distribution to make a particular contract, then you should make every effort to "win" the bidding process for that contract. Only by winning the bidding process and then making your bid contract can you earn points from the first source above.

Definition: Making a Contract At the end of the bidding, one team or the other will have won the auction, and will have named a contract, promising to take a certain number of tricks with a certain suit as trump (or with no suit as trump). For example, if the final contract is 3 , your team is promising to take 9 tricks given that Hearts is the trump suit. If, at the end of the play of the hand, your team takes at least nine tricks, then you will have fulfilled that promise, and are said to have "made" your contract.

Later in these lessons, we will look at how you go about playing the hand in such a way as to make your own contract. Later still, we will look at how you can keep your opponents from making their own contracts. For now, though, let's take a look at how you and your partner can determine your own optimum contract and bid it.

What is the Bidding Process?

The best way to think of the bidding process in Bridge is, if you are old enough, to remember the original TV show "The Price is Right". On that show, the emcee (Bill Cullen, if you must know) put an item up for bid by the four contestants. In rotation, each contestant bid for the item, and the bidding continued until no contestant wanted to bid further. The winner of the item was the one who bid the highest amount "without going over the actual retail price" of the item. (This meant that having some knowledge of what the item likely cost was highly advantageous.) But the winning bidder not only won the item in question, but also any bonus that went along with it (and sometimes, the bonuses were worth far more than the item itself).

That is just what we do in Bridge. Each team is evaluating the cards they hold to determine their optimum contract and then attempting to outbid their opponents to reach it. They want to make sure, though, that they don't bid too high, for while there are bonuses for eventually making their contract, so are there penalties if they don't. So, the Bridge analogy to having knowledge of retail prices on "The Price is Right" is the skill a team has to determine accurately how many tricks they can take during play (given the right to name a trump suit or specify that none will exist).

So, the bidding process is that time during a hand where each team attempts to determine what their optimum contract is (if any) and then bid as close to it as possible without bidding so high that they end up failing to make the contract. Bridge puts a premium on accurate bidding.

In Bridge, we often have such contested auctions (much like an art auction), where both teams are bidding, continually raising the bid level until their opponents choose not to bid any further. Unlike art auctions, though, Bridge sometimes (actually quite often) has uncontested auctions, in which only one team is bidding.

But why, you might ask, would a team raise their own bid? If the opponents are not contesting the auction, wouldn't the team that is bidding stop as soon as they realized they weren't being contested, so their contract was as small as possible making it easier for them to fulfill it during play? Well, the answer is "No", and here is where the art auction analogy falls apart. Remember that we said above that games and slams offer significant point bonuses, and so when a team has enough points and, if a trump suit is being contemplated, enough cards in that suit, they should endeavor to bid that game or slam. So even if your opponents are not bidding at all, you and your partner may continue to bid in an attempt to determine if a game or slam is possible and, if it is, to bid it.

What is a Bid?

Since the second phase of a Bridge hand (after the shuffle and deal) involves bidding, we should make sure we know what constitutes a "bid".

Definition: A Bid A bid is a statement by one player that specifies (1) a number of tricks and (2) a trump suit (or Notrump), e.g., 1 , 3 , 4 , 7 . In each case, the actual number of tricks the bidder is promising to take during play is the bid number plus 6. So, if a team bids 4 , they are promising to take 10 tricks with Spades as trump. If they bid 7 , they are promising to take all 13 tricks with no suit as trump.

How Does the Bidding Work?

One player will "open" the bidding by making a bid. Bidding proceeds clockwise from that player (the "opener"). Any subsequent bid by any player must be "higher" than the previous one. A bid is "higher" if the number of tricks specified is greater than the last one or, if the number of tricks is the same, the suit named is higher in rank.

If the opener bids 1 , for example, any subsequent bid must be either in Spades or Notrump if it is at the one-level, or any suit or Notrump at the two-level or higher. If the opener bids 1 , and the player to his left bids 2 , then the next bid (by any player) must be 2 or higher.

The bidding ends when three consecutive players pass (decline to make a bid), the last bid becomes the final contract.

Exchanging Information Via the Bidding

Having discussed what a bid is and how the bidding works, we must now complicate the discussion by pointing out that, say, if the Opener bids 1 (which, as you will remember, promises to take a total of 7 tricks during play so long as Spades are trump), the Opener is not really promising that his team can actually do that. In a way he is, but it is better to just understand that he is trying instead to communicate to his partner that he (the Opener) has a hand that has a certain number of points and is a hand which he (the Opener) thinks would generate the most tricks if Spades were trump.

K Q J 8 7 2   A 3   K J 3   4 3

As an example, look at the hand at left. As we will soon learn, it is an appropriate hand on which a player might open with 1 . It is hard to see, though, how the Opener could promise to take seven tricks, particularly if his partner has very few points. But if his partner can contribute only a single sure trick (such as an Ace), then the contract has a very good chance of being fulfilled.

So not every bid is a real promise, but just an indication of what kind of hand the player has. As the bidding proceeds, and more and more information is shared, the partnership can make a more and more accurate assessment of their resources and can indeed, with their final bid, make a promise that they fully expect to be able to keep.

So the bidding might be better thought of as a conversation, conducted in code. One player might want to tell his partner something like "Partner, I have a hand that has between 13 and 16 points, with at least five cards in the Spade suit." But it is illegal to actually say that to your partner. Fortunately, a bid of 1 means the same thing.

Hearing your partner make that bid, you might want to respond by telling him "Partner, while I have ten or more points, which, combined with your 13 points minimum, means we should be able to take at least nine tricks, I do not have very many Spades. I would suggest instead that Hearts be the trump suit." You can't say that either, but fortunately, a bid of 2 over your partner's bid of 1 means basically the same thing.

So, if you can mentally verbalize what you would like to tell your partner, the process of bidding is the process of picking the best bid you can make that will communicate that message to your partner.

The Two Questions You Need to Answer Via the Bidding

There are two questions that the partnership needs to answer during the bidding process. The first is "Which suit, if any, should we choose as the trump suit?"

It should be obvious that it is to the advantage of a partnership to have, as trump, the suit in which they, together, have the most cards. Usually, the partnership should have a minimum of eight cards in their trump suit, but the more they have the better it is. If a partnership finds that it does not have such a suit, but still wishes to win the contract, then Notrump can be bid.

The second question that needs to be answered is "How many tricks can we take, given we get our choice of trump?"

Your partnership should hark back to "The Price is Right" and bid your games and slams if you can make them, but stop as low as possible if it becomes apparent that you can't.

Bidding Accuracy

Given our discussion in a previous lesson about games and slams, it should be apparent that if a partnership can take enough tricks to make a game or slam, they should bid that game or slam. There are significant scoring bonuses for games and slams, but these are only scored if you actually bid the game or slam. For example, and without bringing in a lot of arcane scoring information, if a partnership bids 1 , wins the bidding, and ends up taking ten tricks during the play, they wills score a total of 170 points. If, however, they bid 4 and take those same ten tricks, they will score an additional 350 points or so, for a total that is three times higher than they would have gotten had they not bid the game.

You might say that 170 points is still 170 points, but if you do not maximize the value of each hand you are dealt, but your opponents do, you will quite quickly find yourself on the losing side, scorewise. Even if you are lucky and get consistently more points in your hands than your opponents do, you would have to get many more points, hand after hand, to overcome the more skillful bidding of your opponents. While that can happen in the short run, in the long run the odds will even out and you will find yourself on the losing side more often than not.

Here is another example. If your partnership wins a 1 contract and takes all 13 tricks, you will score a total of 260 points. If, on the other hand, your partnership actually bids the grand slam (7 ) and takes the same 13 atricks, then you will score over 1500 points. If that's not an incentive, then the folks who set up Bridge scoring didn't do their job.

Bidding Systems and Conventions

As we have said, the bidding phase of a bridge hand is like a conversation. Partnerships are exchanging information about their hands in an attempt to determine if they should try to win the bidding and, if so, how high they should bid and which suit, if any, should be trump.

Thinking of the bidding as a conversation, though, gives us the opportunity to bring in another analogy. That of "language".

In actual bidding, and by agreement worldwide, only 15 words are allowed to be spoken: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, Spade(s), Heart(s), Diamond(s), Club(s), Pass, Double, and Redouble. It's like a language with only fifteen words. These same words are the only ones used no matter where the game is played or the nationality of the people playing.

But what I want you to think about is whether "language" might have an analogy in Bridge as it does in speech worldwide. Must it necessarily be true that the words "one spade", uttered as the opening bid in a particular auction, always mean the same thing? I happened to mention this bid earlier, and I said that it said to partner "I have between 13-16 points and I think spades should be trump." Will this always be true, no matter where and with whom you are playing?

Well, what makes Bridge such an interesting game is that the answer is "No". Over the years, and in an effort to make bidding more and more precise, different Bridge languages (usually called "systems") have arisen. In these systems, precise meanings have been assigned to each bid- meanings that may not be the same in other systems. Some "systems", like "Standard American Yellow Card" (don't worry about the name), are played by many tens of millions of people. Other systems, like the "Italian Blue Team Club" are played by a relative few professionals.

It would be impossible, and impossibly confusing for you, if I tried to cover all these systems in these lessons. And it really isn't necessary, as you are unlikely to ever play in a game where 95% of these systems are being spoken. So I am going to keep it simple. I am going to suggest a simple system to you, one that I think is easy to learn and reasonably accurate. It is one with which you can learn the game and enjoy it. As you play more and more often, you may come to learn about some other systems, and you may even choose to adopt them. But let's not worry about speaking "Italian Blue Team Club" until we have "Standard American" under our belt.

If you finish these lessons and sit down to play with a new partner, who asks you what system you use, you can say this: "I play Standard American with 5-card majors. I use a strong 1 Club opening (17 or more high-card points) with a negative response of 1 Diamond (less than 9 high-card points). I play a strong opening 1 Notrump (16-18 points) and 2 Notrump (22-24 points). I play Stayman, Transfers, Gerber, and Blackwood." All that may sound complicated now, but trust me- that's about as simple as it gets these days! And we will discuss each of these elements in upcoming lessons.

	The Opening Bid
	Valuing Your Hand
	Index of Lessons