Learn Bridge Online

Yes, up to a point. Everything about the rules, the bidding and the play can be learned from reading and from practice against a computer, and many strong players taught themselves exactly that way. What you cannot get from a screen alone is a partner. Bridge is a partnership game, and the second half of learning it is agreeing with one other person what your bids mean and then finding out, deal after deal, where the two of you disagree.

So the plan has two halves. The first six stages you can do alone, at your own pace, with the guides and tools below. The last two, conventions and real games, go much better with a regular partner, whether that is a friend learning alongside you or someone you meet at a beginners' class.

The times in the table are rough guides for someone putting in a few hours a week. Some people move faster, and nobody ever finishes the play and defense stages. Strong players are still learning them after thirty years.

The stages overlap. You will be playing hands as declarer long before your bidding is finished, and you should be. The order says what to start first, not what to finish first.

What to learn. Four players sit in two partnerships, North-South against East-West. All 52 cards are dealt, 13 to each player. An auction decides the contract, a number of tricks and a trump suit or notrump. Of the side that wins the auction, the player who first named the strain of the contract becomes declarer, declarer's partner lays the cards face up as dummy, and the player on declarer's left leads. You must follow suit if you can, and the highest card of the suit led wins the trick unless someone trumps it.

How long. An afternoon. The mechanics are simpler than most board games. What takes longer is being comfortable with the vocabulary, so keep a glossary open for the first few weeks.

Read. How to play bridge walks through one full deal from the shuffle to the score. The rules of bridge is the reference, rule by rule, and bridge positions explains the seats, dummy and vulnerability. Bridge terms defines the words you will hear.

Practice. Every guide on this site ends with a short practice round of eight questions, dealt fresh each time you press Play again. Do the one at the end of How to play bridge until you score seven or eight. Then deal real hands. The free bridge hand generator deals boards in your browser with no sign-in, and you can print them and play them out with three friends, or type one into the double dummy solver, which is free for a deal typed in by hand and shows the makeable contracts and the best play for every card.

What to learn. Before you can bid you need a way to say how good a hand is. Nearly every beginner's system uses high-card points (HCP), counting 4 for an ace, 3 for a king, 2 for a queen and 1 for a jack. Each suit holds 10, the deck 40, and the average hand 10. The second number is shape, how many cards you hold in each suit. A hand is balanced when it is 4-3-3-3, 4-4-3-2 or 5-3-3-2, with no singleton or void and at most one doubleton. Long suits add playing strength, which is why many players add a point for each card over four in a suit.

How long. An evening to learn, then a week or two of counting every hand you see until it becomes automatic. Count the points first, then the shape, then ask yourself how many tricks the hand might take.

Read. Hand evaluation covers points, shape and the adjustments players make. High-card points gives the odds of holding any count, and hand patterns the odds of each shape.

Practice. The hand evaluator counts any hand you type in, so you can check your own arithmetic. The practice round at the end of hand evaluation deals new hands every time.

What to learn. Bidding is a language for describing your hand to partner, and a beginner needs only a handful of words in it. The numbers below come from Standard American, the system most players in North America learn first. Players in Britain usually learn Acol instead, which opens a weak 1NT of 12 to 14 and allows four-card majors. Pick one system and stay with it.

• Open the bidding with about 12 high-card points or more. Pass with fewer, unless you hold a long suit and have learned the preempts that use one.
• Open 1NT with a balanced hand of 15 to 17 points.
• Open 1♥ or 1♠ only with five or more cards in the suit. Otherwise open your longer minor.
• A trump fit is eight or more cards in one suit between the two hands. Finding one is the first goal of most auctions.
• The two hands together need about 25 points for a game in a major or notrump, and about 33 for a small slam.

How long. Four to eight weeks to be at ease with openings, responses and opener's rebid. Bidding is the stage where most self-learners stall, because the books pile on exceptions. Learn the main lines and play hands with them before you read about the exceptions.

Read. Bridge bidding explains how the auction works from the opening bid to the final contract. The bridge bidding cheat sheet puts the openings and responses on one page to keep beside you, and SAYC sets out the full Standard American system when you are ready for it.

Practice. The Bidding Architect lets you write your bidding system down as a tree of bids and meanings, without an account (it is kept in your browser until you sign in). Its practice mode turns the system into flashcards, showing an auction and asking what the last bid means, or giving the meaning and asking for the bid. A visitor without a system of their own can practice on the sample system it comes with. For deals of a particular type, say a balanced hand of 15 to 17 for practicing 1NT auctions, set the point range and shape in the conditions of the hand generator.

What to learn. When dummy goes down, count your top tricks, the winners you can cash without giving up the lead. AKQ opposite xxx is three. Ax opposite Kx is two. A suit never gives more top tricks than its longer hand has cards, so a singleton ace opposite a singleton king is one trick, because the two fall together. Then compare the count with the number the contract needs, and look for the extra tricks in three places. A long suit can be set up by playing it until the opponents run out. A finesse tries to win a trick with a card that is not the highest, by leading toward it. A ruff in the hand with fewer trumps adds a trick that would otherwise be lost. In a trump contract, most of the time you draw the opponents' trumps early, unless you need dummy's trumps for ruffing first.

How long. Start in your second week, as soon as you can play a hand at all, and never stop. Card play is the part of bridge with no ceiling. The basics, counting and planning before you play to the first trick, take a few weeks to become a habit.

Read. Finesse explains the one technique you will use on most deals. Suit combinations shows how to handle a single suit for the most tricks, and bridge puzzles collects problems to solve once the basics are in place.

Practice. The Suit Trainer has a free try page with two suit combinations, played trick by trick against the site's solver in the defenders' seats. No account is needed for those two, and a free account carries on from there. To check a whole hand you played, type the deal into the double dummy solver and see where the tricks were.

What to learn. Defense is half the deals you will play and the stage self-learners skip most often. Start with the opening lead, the one card you choose before seeing dummy. Against notrump the usual choice is fourth from your longest and strongest suit. Against a suit contract, the top of a sequence such as KQJ is safe and attacking, and a singleton can win a ruff. Then learn the two old rules of thumb, second hand low and third hand high, and when to break them. Last come signals, the cards defenders play to tell partner what they hold or want.

How long. Start in your second month, once you can follow a hand as declarer, and keep going. Defense is harder than declarer play because you cannot see your partner's cards, and most players take a year or more to defend well.

Read. Opening leads covers the choice against notrump and against a suit. Bridge signals explains attitude, count and suit preference, and the rule of 11 shows how to read partner's fourth-best lead.

Practice. The Lead Trainer sets you opening lead problems and shows how your lead does over four thousand possible layouts of the unseen hands. Its free try page gives you two problems, one scored at IMPs and one at matchpoints, with the analysis of each lead and no account.

What to learn. You need scoring sooner than it seems, because it decides how high to bid. A contract worth 100 trick points or more is a game and earns a big bonus. Anything less is a part score. The lowest games are 3NT, 4♥, 4♠, 5♣ and 5♦. Twelve tricks bid and made is a small slam, thirteen a grand slam, and both carry bonuses of their own. Vulnerability raises the rewards and the penalties, and each trick you go down, called an undertrick, scores points for the defenders.

One example covers most of what a beginner needs. Not vulnerable, 4♥ bid and made scores 120 trick points plus a 300 game bonus, 420 in all. Vulnerable, the bonus is 500 and the score 620. Stop in 3♥ with the same ten tricks and the score is only 170, which is why players stretch to bid their games.

How long. An evening for the basics. Nobody memorizes the full table. Players at a club enter the contract and result into a scoring device, and at home a calculator does it.

Read and practice. Bridge scoring explains the whole system, the scoring calculator scores any contract you enter, and the bridge scoring chart is a free one-page PDF to print. The IMP table and duplicate bridge explain how results are compared at a club.

What to learn. A convention is a bid whose meaning is agreed and artificial, such as 2♣ in answer to 1NT asking for a four-card major. Conventions make bidding more accurate, but each one is something both partners must remember. Four are worth learning first, because they come up often and nearly everyone plays them. They are Stayman and Jacoby transfers after a 1NT opening, Blackwood for asking about aces before a slam, and the takeout double for competing when the opponents open.

How long. Two to four weeks for those four, learned one at a time and used in real hands before the next. Add more only when a hand comes up that your system cannot describe. Many club players get by with a dozen or so for years.

Read. Bridge conventions is the overview, with every convention on this site filed by the situation it is used in. When you start playing with a partner, the bridge convention card explains how to write your agreements down.

Practice. Every convention guide ends with its own practice round, and many show the convention as a full bidding tree from the Bidding Architect's library, which you can open in the Architect to read every continuation.

Somewhere around the second or third month you will want to play full deals against other people. There are three kinds of place to do it, and most players end up using more than one.

Online bridge sites

The large bridge sites let you play at any hour, with robots as partner and opponents or at tables with other people. Robot games are the gentlest start, since nobody minds how long you take and you can play the same deals as a field of other players and compare your result. Two of the best known are Bridge Base Online (BBO), whose home page offers free, unlimited bridge, games with humans or robots, and Bridge Master, a set of declarer play problems at five levels, and Funbridge, which plays on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac and Windows with robot partners and opponents and has multiplayer modes for playing with other people. Offers change, so check on each site which games are free before you sign up.

National federation courses and apps

National bridge federations run or recommend beginner courses, many of them online. In North America the ACBL's learning pages list classes, teachers and clubs by area, offer its free Learn to Play Bridge lesson software for Windows, and point beginners to free apps such as Tricky Bridge. In England the EBU keeps a directory of clubs and teachers. Most other countries have a federation that does the same, and its website is the place to start.

Local clubs

A bridge club is where most players find a regular partner. Many clubs run beginner courses of weekly lessons, often starting in the fall or the new year, followed by supervised games where a teacher stays in the room to answer questions. Once you are comfortable, the club's ordinary game is duplicate bridge, in which every pair plays the same deals, so you are scored against players who held your cards. If you later want to compete further, bridge tournaments describes the ladder from club games upward, and most tournaments run events for newcomers.

Short, regular sessions beat long, rare ones. A routine of about three hours a week might look like this.

1. 1.Read one guide a week, in the order of the path, and do its practice round until you score seven or eight out of eight.
2. 2.Play ten to twenty full deals a week, online or at a table. Play them as well as you can, without stopping to look things up.
3. 3.Pick one deal that went wrong and look at it again. Type it into the double dummy solver, see how many tricks were there, and work out where you lost the difference.
4. 4.Once a week, spend ten minutes on a single suit combination or opening lead problem.
5. 5.When you have a partner, spend some time on agreements. Write down what you play, and after each session note the auctions where you disagreed.

• Learning a dozen conventions before playing a first full deal. Each convention is one more thing to forget at the table. Learn the four in stage 7 after you can bid a simple hand, and stop there for a while.
• Reading for months before playing a single hand. Bridge is learned at the table. Play hands from the first week, badly if need be.
• Playing only against robots and never with a regular partner. Robots are patient and always there, but they never disagree with you about what a bid meant. A human partner teaches you that, and it is half the game.
• Changing to a new bidding system every few weeks. A beginner who switches systems learns the openings of several and the follow-ups of none. Stay with one simple system for at least your first year.
• Skipping defense because declarer play feels more fun. You defend on about half the deals you play. A player who defends well wins more points than one who only declares well.
• Counting points but never counting tricks. Points help you bid. Once dummy goes down, the count that matters is tricks, the winners you have against the number the contract needs.
• Never looking at a hand again afterward. A deal you got wrong teaches more than ten you got right, but only if you go back and find out why.