Ned Paul has been running Learn Bridge in a Weekend courses for several years. Here is his opinionated but experience-based guide.
Bridge is its own worst enemy. When you first take up chess you learn how the pieces move in about ten minutes and get going. You get your early experience PLAYING the game - playing badly yes, but playing. Then as you get keen you start learning a few openings and so go on from there.
In contrast, when you take up bridge, bridge players will tell you it is a complicated game that takes a long time to learn. Let's however distinguish between learning to play bridge, which is quite easy, from learning a bidding system which takes the time. It should take about the same ten minutes to learn the mechanics of the game as it does learning the moves in chess. To play bridge, you need to know how many cards you have, what a trick is, what trumps are, whose turn it is, what bidding is, which bids are legal, how the play goes (follow suit, winner of the trick leads to the next trick, etc), and how the scoring works. Armed with just that knowledge you could join a game and in doing so keep three other bridge players happy! Pretty shortly after that someone will tell you about valuing your hand (counting your High Card Points [hcp]). Your experience of the scoring system will then soon inform you that you can make a game level contract on many hands that combine with partner to have 25 or more hcp. So here are some basic bidding rules: 12hcp to open the bidding, 6hcp to respond and 25hcp combined bid a game.
In an untutored group, as you start to play like this , you will realise that there is a need to co-operate with your partner of the moment. This applies as much to the card play – Don't trump partner's aces! Play high-low from a doubleton – as to the bidding. Eventually however this need to co-operate with partner will bring into focus the benefit of your bids having a structure. Structured bidding means your partner can use information given to your mutual benefit.
There are many ways you can structure your bidding and such a structure is called a bidding 'system'. You can of course play bridge without a system but it's better with. The system you should learn is that which is most widely played in your potential bridge circle. In Britain we basically have two choices: learn Acol if you are going to play with real people or learn the more complicated and less intuitive Standard American if you are going to play online. Or both!
How much bidding system do you need to master before you can play 'live' with other people? Very little actually. You should agree a range for your 1NT opening bid, and learn how to open and respond to 1 of a Suit. After that everything else is optional and can be picked up in the running or learnt by reading. Learning anything more than this at the outset is just overload and further lessons on the system have no context until you have played and met some of the issues the system and its accompanying conventions are meant to solve.
This 'minimum needed knowledge' model is what I have used for twenty years in my successful 'Learn Bridge in a Weekend' course. To summarise it, on Saturday morning we learn the mechanics, on Saturday afternoon we learn to open and respond to 1NT, and on Sunday morning we learn to open and respond to 1 of a Suit. Everything is done while playing and the learners have cards in their hands from the start. Along the way we have declarer play work such as drawing trumps and knocking out opposing high cards and some defence such as standard opening leads (top of sequence, etc). On Sunday afternoon, the lessons stop and we play. I love the learner group to be joined by a few more experienced players, either suitable mentors, or just next step students. Together they can play the newcomers's first 'competitive (but supervised) bridge - either rubber bridge or even their first duplicate pairs. In this way the new players will have PLAYED bridge by the end of the weekend, surely the objective when starting them off. The notes and handouts that they take away go a bit further than they have studied and include stuff for example on opening two bids, including two clubs, and also on convention like transfers which they will meet pretty quickly.
Getting to play basic bridge relatively quickly in this way gives the newcomers a lot of momentum. For every course I have done, there have been at least some of the players came back for more bridge. The exit strategy is of course 'supervised play' – not more lessons. Your club or circle absolutely must be prepared to offer this to get any benefit from the weekend's teaching. Different players develop at different rates and the quick ones will soon be ready for duplicate without being held back by the requirement to do a thousand lessons first. I think bridge clubs have missed this point and as a result many bright newcomers get bored and have been lost to the game as a result. Young people especially don't want to wait before getting stuck in. If you are providing bridge for new players think of yourself as a bridge 'enabler' rather than a bridge teacher. Your students want the OPPORTUNITY TO PLAY bridge. The learning will come naturally as they play more and gather more experience. As you know, there is no bridge player who can say they are not learning every time they play.
If you need information as to the timings, material used and notes I give out to support Learn Bridge in a Weekend you can email me at ned@nedpaul.com.