[legony]

Yeah! The clubs in my area get very decent turnouts - I’ve never seen less than 100 folks at games. That allows, I think, flexibility in coordinating a separate area for 0-20. Typically there are 5 tables devoted to the novices.

[Cthulhu D]

 legony, on 2018-August-26, 06:31, said:

This was my first time playing with serious, advanced players. I think at some point my partner forgot that I am still extremely new and that this was my first time playing outside of a 0-20 MP table and he criticized me several times. In one instance, I didn’t even do anything - I paused briefly (30 seconds to a minute at most) to look at my cards and ended up passing. Afterwards, he said: “What were you thinking? You really didn’t have anything to contemplate anything! I would have been very upset had you done something. You had me worried as it is.” There were a couple other times that he criticized me. I made all my contracts except one where I went down by 1 (and I knew where I made the mistake). He later told me it was awful what I did and that the opposing players who also play at an advanced level looked at him in surprise.

I don’t think we did terribly. We came in #5 overall with a few pairs below us. I felt awful when I left the club after everything was done. It ended on such discouraging note with my partner saying I made two major blunders.

I wonder if I should just stay in 0-20 games and avoid 0-500. I don’t have a regular partner to play with, so I’m at the mercy of directors/coordinators to pair me up.

This guy is a dick. I don't know why people get on their partners in casual games or even ever. What are you going to achieve? The bit I've bolded is very telling IMHO.

One thing I might suggest is find someone in the 0-20 games that you've played with and have good chemistry with and see if they want to swing by the 0-500 game some time and see if that works better for you. Doesn't have to be a serious 'partnership' just suggest a one time thing and if it works out suggest doing it again.

Similarly ask the director if any other players might be looking for a new partner and seeing if they want to play and see if you have good chemistry with them rather than relying on the speed date at the start of the night.

[el mister]

One thing that's hard when you're starting to play properly is figuring out the tempo, unauthorised information etc dimension of the game. You're concentrating on just bidding your hand in the right way, with an unfamiliar partner, and suddenly there's all this extra stuff to worry about.
I had to learn this in a very haphazard way as no one really explained it to me - I had a very similar experience to the OP in my first real club game, the local battleaxe gave me a bollocking (on board 1!) for pausing and passing. tbh it's best to just try and take it in your stride, at least you'll remember it and personally I find old people being rude to not really phase me.

[pescetom]

 el mister, on 2018-September-27, 04:58, said:

I had to learn this in a very haphazard way as no one really explained it to me - I had a very similar experience to the OP in my first real club game, the local battleaxe gave me a bollocking (on board 1!) for pausing and passing. tbh it's best to just try and take it in your stride, at least you'll remember it and personally I find old people being rude to not really phase me.

The more often it happens the less it phases you, at least with opponents.
With partners it can be much more stressing, especially as you are likely to play very badly once they put the pressure on.
Philosophy, self-esteem and time are all good allies.

[Vampyr]

 el mister, on 2018-September-27, 04:58, said:

One thing that's hard when you're starting to play properly is figuring out the tempo, unauthorised information etc dimension of the game. You're concentrating on just bidding your hand in the right way, with an unfamiliar partner, and suddenly there's all this extra stuff to worry about.
I had to learn this in a very haphazard way as no one really explained it to me - I had a very similar experience to the OP in my first real club game, the local battleaxe gave me a bollocking (on board 1!) for pausing and passing. tbh it's best to just try and take it in your stride, at least you'll remember it and personally I find old people being rude to not really phase me.

Do you prefer young people being rude?

[barmar]

 Vampyr, on 2018-September-27, 14:26, said:

Do you prefer young people being rude?

I suspect his point is that it's not so uncommon with old people (rude behavior used to be much more common in bridge), so he doesn't find it surprising.

[aimbot]

 barmar, on 2018-September-28, 06:32, said:

I suspect his point is that it's not so uncommon with old people (rude behavior used to be much more common in bridge), so he doesn't find it surprising.

Oh wow. This might explain something my partner and I were surprised by. We're both new players (half a year of bridge experience), not exactly young, but young by bridge club standards.

A lot of people at the local bridge club seem mean. Not most, but enough that it was a real shock to both of us when we started playing at the club. When we do any other competitive recreational activity (sports, board games of the sort that are popular on boardgamegeek.com, etc.) it's rare to run into people who are jerks right off the bat outside of high-level competitive play. When we go play duplicate, we expect that we'll average one pair a night that tilts and starts haranguing us.

In our last club game, we ran into a pair that accused us of cheating (we used a bid that was familiar to them and alerted it properly, the thing that bothered them was that they hadn't heard of the bid before and thought it was against the rules to use a bid they didn't know existed even after we explained the bid). They called the director over, who told them to calm down and that it was fine. They didn't calm down and were so upset that they continued talking about it loudly for the next few boards, even after we'd move on the to next table. They went on and on about how we and the young pair they played before us were mean, loudly enough that both of the pairs they were talking about could hear after we'd rotated. I don't think we were mean, but people almost never think they're mean, so maybe I'm just biased, but I can't believe that the other young pair they're talking about was mean.

My partner and I play with a group of friends outside of the local club regularly. Down at the club, I hear a lot of discussions about how bridge is dying out because young people nowadays don't have any attention span. Well, I know a lot of folks who would be considered young at the bridge club who play bridge, they just don't want to play at the club and get told off most nights they play. My partner and I are the only pair in our group who's played at the club more than once. No one else sees the point of heading 30 minutes uptown to play with a bunch of jerks when they can play with nice folks in a home game without commuting so far. To be fair, only 20% of the people we run into are jerks, but that compares poorly to the 0% in a friendly home game or a few percent in other recreational activities we do.