[Jangvik]

Rain, on Apr 3 2005, 02:37 AM, said:

You need telegenic personalities who can throw catchy one-liners in the air. You need commentators who can do the same.

Right on spot.

This game needs characters that stands out. These players does not need to be world class at all. I believe, for example, that the most famous bridge player outside the bridge world is Bill Gates. We need more people like that.

[Elianna]

Don't forget about Omar Sharif. He's a bit less controversial.

[ArcLight]

Spades

1) Books - Master Spades by Steve Fleishman is the bible of Spades books. He has another less advanced book Spades for Winners.
How not to Lose at Spades by Jon Galt Strichman is also a good beginner/intermediate book. The Joe Andrews book is more of an introductory book.

2) Websites - www.masterspades.com
Its chock full of great articles and very well done animated Rate your Game tests.

3) Spades Players - Spades is far simpler than Bridge and tends to be popular with less serious players, and also less educated ones. For example, it’s very popular in prison. This doesn't mean it’s a bad game, just that the typical Spades player is probably a couple of notches below the typical Bridge player both economically and in intellect. Talk about Zero Tolerance at Bridge, nasty comments at Spades games is very common, almost the norm.

4) There have been some attempts to organize Spades, and to introduce Duplicate Spades. I think a cigarette company sponsored a tournament (perhaps Phillip Morris?), and may have a yearly event.
Duplicate Spades was offered on e-bridge but didn't take off. At its heyday it would have perhaps 24 players at most at a time (several sessions a week).

5) I think Spades requires far less skill than Bridge. Because you have an open dummy hand, you can draw all sorts of inferences, send/read signals, and use the bidding. Spades has 1 round of bidding, Spades are always trump, and signals are much tougher to interpret. So Spades is less of a deductive reasoning game. However, Spades does have an interesting strategy aspect, bagging, and bidding a risky nil. One thing that hurts Spades as a skill game is the over valuing of the nil bid (at 100 points), and the existence of the Blind nil (aka Double nil). If you are playing a stronger pair and losing, just bid the blind nil. If it makes you win, if not, you were going to lose anyway.

6) Supposedly, on line cheating is not uncommon in Spades games. This is what numerous people have posted in some of the Spades chat groups. I've certainly encountered some strange play during some duplicate games. In some of the rated leagues it was hard to get "up games" (where you could improve your standing) because the teams/players at the top could avoid (evade) playing you.


PS - I got started in bridge through a Spades player who showed me "Learn to Play Bridge".

[hrothgar]

ArcLight, on Apr 3 2005, 04:23 PM, said:

5) I think Spades requires far less skill than Bridge.  Because you have an open dummy hand, you can draw all sorts of inferences, send/read signals, and use the bidding.  Spades has 1 round of bidding, Spades are always trump, and signals are much tougher to interpret.    So Spades is less of a deductive reasoning game.

Must say that this doesn't really make much sense...

I thought that wanted that minimized complex bidding. I would think that simplfying the auction and allowing players to focus purely on the card play and defense would exactly what you wanted. Equally significant, I don't understand why signaling is so more difficult to interprete...

I almost sounds as if you are saying that you want a more complex game so long as the complexity is restricted to those aspects that you personally like.

Of course, I could be underestimating your desire to avoid the "prison" element

[Gerben42]

So why are social players not interested in duplicate? Is it because we actually have agreements about our bidding system or maybe play some conventions that they were previously unaware of? I think not!

I think playing duplicate forces these players to think and to be around thinking people who are seriously trying to win. They don't want that.

An example:

At some point I went to the social bridge room in some other game site. Everything was happy and friendly, but then there was this auction:
1♥ pass 4♥. No doubt in my mind that the 4♥ bidder had opening bid strength and support of course. That's how it is played. But here goes: Because of my hand (which included a loooonnnng ♠ suit) I bid 4♠ and I was basically kicked off the table for taking away their game.

Also the same kind of players don't like it if you keep stealing their cards on the roll of a 7 playing settlers instead of rotating the picking between different players. They don't want to play 'make your best move in order to win' but they want to play 'let's be friendly and let's see at some point someone will win but as long as we are playing nicely and so on'.

To summarize: This has nothing to do with bidding systems, it has to do with mentality.

[hrothgar]

It might seem rude, but I'm really not worried if certain Pro's lose some of their table feel. As I noted earlier, my interest is providing an efficient mechanism to broadcast major events to spectators. Preserving "Table feel" really doesn't enter into the equation. And the end the day, some Pro's might be harmed by such a transition. Others would benefit. C'est la Vie Ultimately, Pros are much easier to replace that the fan base - Theres always gonna be someone at the tail of that distribution

Please note: The Laws of Bridge are very clear that players aren't allowed to fake "tells". Deliberately hitching with a singleton is a grave impropriety. If the regulations weren't so careful at eliminating such elements from the game, I might have more sympathy with arguments about protecting "table feel".