This Week in Bridge Archives

This Week in Bridge (TWiB) Library

This Week in Bridge is Robert’s lesson series. Each month has a topic (and sometimes that topic continues across two months, making a mini-course). You can download each lesson as a WORD document or view online as a PDF by clicking on the link next to each title.

These lessons are for members of our TWiB email list. If you share a lesson with someone not yet on our list, please ask them to sign up! The TWiB documents are free for personal use but are not for publication or resale.

You can filter the blog posts by Topic or by Level. There is also a chronological list (Archives) below.
Copyright 2010-2026 Adventures in Bridge, Inc.

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(640) Bridge Philosophy - “The Cardinal Sins of Bridge”

In bridge there are many things to learn and to remember. We are often taxed in keeping too many things straight in our heads. But even more important than remembering any specific piece of information about how to play bridge is to have the “correct perspective” on the game – to be able to play bridge with the correct philosophical approach. If you approach each situation with the same set of philosophies, both you and your partner will be far more successful.

(639) Defining Hand Strength - “Buckets”

When we pick up our hand, one of the first things we do is count our high-card points (HCP) and make adjustments for length, location of honors, shape, and many other factors. Once we have a number of points, we need to figure out how to make use of that information and how to effectively communicate it to partner. We usually won’t be able to communicate our exact strength to partner (we can’t tell them we have exactly 14 HCP), but we will be able to give partner a general idea of the strength of our hand – a range. Our range of strength is often referred to as which “bucket” our hand falls into…

(638) Opening Bids: Which Suit to Open?

The opening bid is the start of our conversation with partner (and often the opponents). It is very important that we get this conversation off to a good start – make the right choice for our opening bid. If we start off with the wrong opening bid, we often have trouble properly describing our hand as the auction progresses. Here we review the basic opening bid agreements and look at some of the classic problem opening situations.