Bidding Practice

There are ways to make dealing out hands more fun and better at learning and practicing specific bidding situations, too.

Dealing out hands for bidding practice:

Deal out all four hands and you and your partner pick up one hand each.

Any hand that can open does so, and the other partner responds to the opener with each of the other three hands in turn. Bid all the way to completion, assuming no competition from opponents.

When done, examine each opener-responder combination in turn to clarify or to discuss bidding choices.

In this way, you get three practice sessions for each deal, and it's legitimate practice, too, as you never know exactly what a responding hand contains . There's no advantage to bidding only hands with game, as Duplicate is about being a complete player -- with bad hands and good ones and everything in between.

How To Practice Specific Bidding Situations

To practice specific situations like minor suit contracts, slams, major suit contracts, etc, all you need to do is bias the cards toward whatever you want to practice. You bias a deck by removing thirteen cards and playing with three hands - one opener and two others. After you've removed 13 cards, deal out the remaining ones into three hands and bid as above.

It works as follows:

To practice bidding minor suit openings, remove 13 major suit cards.

To practice major suit openings, remove 13 minor suit cards.

To practice game and slam hands, remove 13 2's and 3's and 4's.

To practice distributional hands, remove all or most of the cards of one suit.

In this way, the hands will still be random and not artificial, yet the hands will usually -- not always, but usually -- be biased toward your intended practice target hands.