[awm]

I voted "play more bridge hands" since I think this is really the key. Obviously most of these things will help (at least help some people).

One thing I think is interesting is that not very many are selecting "play exclusively with a small number of serious partners." I think this is curious, especially since you see a lot of people insisting that playing against bad opponents is bad for their game, whereas I would think that playing with a bad partner and/or a partner with whom you have poor agreements could easily be worse for your game. After all, bidding judgement and defense are hard to develop when you can't trust partner or don't know what he expects for certain calls/signals.

I also see a lot of aspiring expert players who play frequently with very weak partners (sometimes clients/students, but often just friends) and seem to feel this doesn't hurt their game, but would never be caught dead playing a club game (because this would "obviously" make them worse players). This seems kind of opposite to me, since you encounter many play/defense problems in a typical club session which are still interesting regardless of the opponents skill level (you just have to avoid resulting the board) whereas it's hard to make any decisions except in declarer play without partner being relevent.

In any case, I think it's helped me a lot to play primarily with a small number of strong partners, with thoroughly worked out agreements on system and style. Defending a hand when you're "in tune" with partner is very different (and a lot more fun) than defending a hand with a random (even an expert random).

[helene_t]

For intermediate players like me I don't think playing lots of hands is very useful, although I may be underestimating it. It is a very complex to analyze a hand and destile general conclusions from it. Often you made the right decision but it turned out badly, or vice versa. Part of the story is that club games are seven minutes per board like serious events, but beginners cannot achieve much more in seven minutes than throwing some cards in random order.

As for playing with a few regular partners: of course Adam is right that it is difficult to train bidding judgement if it's impossible to know what partner's bids mean, but OTOH playing with a single regular partner may make you rigid. If you play with many partners you'll be motivated to learn standard principles, and if you make some non-standard agreements with specific partners at least you will acknowledge that they are non-standard.