1.0 Purpose of the Auction

It is too easy when you are first learning to play bridge to fall into the trap of trying to memorize a bunch of rules. I am going to try to teach you how to bid by making sure you understand the process, then when you get lost in the “rules of bidding” you will have a better chance of figuring out what to do.

The goal of both sides during the auction is to determine how high you and your partner wish to compete and in what denomination. Only very slightly behind this as a priority, is to do so in such a way as to make it difficult for the opponents to do the same.

In order to understand which contract we should try for, it is important to know the rules of scoring. Notrump, Majors and Minors are scored in descending order of importance. This becomes one of the main factors in deciding which suit should be trump.

The second main factor is the effect of your trump fit on the number of tricks you can take with roughly the same number of points. If you have eight trump between the two hands, you will expect to take one more trick with that suit as trump than you would at Notrump. If you have nine trump between the two hands, you will expect to take two more tricks with that suit as trump than you would at Notrump. So, if you can make:

There is no guarantee on the relationship between HCP and the number of tricks, but these are reasonable guidelines. The key thing to note is that if you are playing in a minor suit, you need to make two more tricks than in a major or notrump to improve your score. So, minor suit contracts are a thing of last resort.

Majors are entirely different though. If we have an eight-card fit in a major, we will almost always take one more trick than can be taken in Notrump, and outscore the alternative contract by 20 points.

Therefore, there are two questions that need to be answered:

• denomination, which suit or Notrumps
• how high, part-score, game or slam

It will help us to understand the process of answering those questions if we understand how tricks are won at bridge.

1.1 How Good Is This Hand?