Bridge is an excellent game for keeping your mind in shape, regardless of your age. (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have donated a few million dollars to help promote it to our youngsters; some of that money supports this new section at the ACBL site, for example.) Anyway, I figure there will soon be a lot of retiring baby boomers who would like to find a really fun way to stave off Alzheimer’s disease; that potential demand is partly why I decided to get certified as a bridge teacher two years ago.
Preparing for my first teaching experience taught me a lesson: To get new players hooked on trying the game (instead of scaring them away from it), I must condense, condense, condense . . . and illustrate, illustrate, illustrate. That’s what I was forced to do in order to fit the top priority fundamentals into four hours (...two 2-hour sessions). It was a success, and I am now working on follow-up lessons.
As a result of that preparation experience, I changed my mind about the best introductory bridge book. If you’re a numbers person or a puzzle-solver of any age, or a baby boomer wondering what the heck you’ll do with your time after you retire, I highly recommend Bill Root’s book below. In fact, I recommend it to anyone who plays less than 360 bridge hands a year—and especially to anyone who has never played the game at all. It helped me simplify and clarify many important points (about playing the cards and bidding the cards) as I prepared for that first class.
Here’s the book:
The ABCs of Bridge, by William S. Root
The bidding system this book describes (five-card majors) is hugely popular in North America; that makes it easy to find partners who talk the “same language” wherever you go in the USA.
Give bridge a try, and give this book a try. (Bridge and Alzheimer's do have one thing in common: You're always meeting new people.)
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Loosely-related joke I just remembered:
Doctor: “You have AIDS.”
Patient: “Oh, no, that’s horrible.”
Doctor: “That’s not all; you also have Alzheimer’s.”
Patient: “Oh, well, at least I don’t have AIDS.”
