Road Scholar program

Our Road Scholar program last week on Jekyll Island was called “Advancing Bridge”. We went with the idea of learning more about playing duplicate bridge and seeing if that was something we wanted to pursue.

Most of the 20 people enrolled in the program were duplicate players, but the program was for improving your game in any setting.

The instructor, Craig Hemphill, was terrific. He’s obviously an excellent player with a great knowledge of the game. But he’s also a terrific teacher, truly interested in seeing that folks learned what he had to offer. He was very well organized, stayed on topic, answered questions, started and finished on time. In short, he was the best.

The program was set up with instruction in the mornings, followed by supervised play in the afternoons and free play in the evening. He had set up boards with hands that illustrated the lessons, so we got to practice the new things we’d hopefully learned. To our amazement, John and I were first both days he kept track of the scores.

For the bridge players out there, we had lessons on Stayman, Jacoby transfers, signaling, defense, and slam bidding. I hope John and I will be able to use the things we learned. We are going to try some of the duplicate groups in town and see how we like them.

More later.