Beginner lesson 3

Your First Bid

With a Cheat Sheet Beside You

Here it is — the lesson about the part of bridge with the scary reputation. So let's take the sting out immediately:

The auction is just a short conversation about two questions: How strong are our hands? and Which suit do we like? That's all any bid ever says. Every convention, every expert sequence you'll ever hear about, is just a fancier way of discussing those same two questions.

In this step you'll learn to answer them well enough to make your first real bids. And true to our promise, there's a printable cheat sheet — keep it beside you at the table or on screen. Nobody expects you to memorise anything, now or for months to come.

Three ideas, as always: counting your points, what a bid means, and your first openings.

Idea 1: How Strong Is My Hand? (Count to 40)

Bridge players size up a hand with a beautifully simple points system:

Everything else counts zero. Add them up and you have your high card points (HCP). The whole deck contains 40, so an average hand is about 10.

That's the entire arithmetic of beginner bidding. If you can count to 40, you're qualified.

The one number to remember: 12. With about 12 or more points, your hand is strong enough to open the bidding — to speak first for your side. Fewer than that, and you'll usually pass and let others talk (passing is a perfectly good bid — even experts pass on roughly half their hands).

If you've played 500, notice what just happened: you already knew how to evaluate a hand by instinct ("is this worth eight hearts?"). Bridge just gives your instinct a number.

Idea 2: What a Bid Actually Says

A bid has two parts: a number and a suit (or "no trumps"). For example: one heart, written 1♥.

Why skip the first six? Because winning half the tricks is nothing to boast about — the auction is only interested in how many you'll win beyond your fair share. You'll stop noticing the "+6" within a week.

Like any auction, each bid must outrank the one before it — a higher number, or the same number in a higher-ranking suit. The ranking, lowest to highest: ♣ clubs, ♦ diamonds, ♥ hearts, ♠ spades, then no trumps (NT). (Handy memory: the suits are in alphabetical order.)

The auction ends when a bid is followed by three passes. That final bid becomes the contract, and the side that made it must now deliver those tricks — everything from Lessons 1 and 2 kicks in.

Idea 3: Your First Openings (Cheat Sheet at the Ready)

You have 12+ points. What do you actually say? For your first sessions, two openings cover most hands you'll pick up:

1. Open your longest suit at the one level

With 12–19 points, bid 1 of your longest suit — 1♥ with five hearts, 1♣ if clubs are your longest, and so on. You're telling partner: "I have a proper hand, and this is my best suit." That's all it means. Partner will take it from there.

2. With a flat, even hand, open 1NT

If your points are 12–14* and your hand is balanced — no very long suit, no missing suit, roughly even shape — open 1NT. It's the most descriptive bid in bridge: partner instantly knows your strength within a couple of points and your shape.

*This 12–14 "weak no trump" is the Acol style, standard across Australia and New Zealand. If you later play with Americans, theirs is 15–17 — the cheat sheet covers both. Not a problem for now.

And when partner opens? For your very first games, one guideline carries you: with 6+ points, keep the conversation going — support partner's suit if you hold three or more of them, otherwise mention a decent suit of your own, or bid 1NT with nothing better to say. With fewer than 6, pass with a clear conscience.

Is there more to bidding than this? Of course — that's the lifetime of gentle discovery we mentioned in the first article. But these few agreements are genuinely enough to sit down, bid, and land in a sensible contract most of the time. Plenty of happy social players never use much more.

The Secret Nobody Tells Beginners

Every bid you make gives your partner information, and every bid partner makes gives you some. That's the whole game within the game: two friends building a picture of 26 cards, a sentence at a time, in a language with about a dozen words.

Poker players — this is your inference muscle. You're just reading a partner instead of an opponent, and they're trying to be read.

A 30-Second Check

Count to 40. Twelve to open. Longest suit, or 1NT when flat. That's your first bidding system, and it fits on a coaster.

Next lesson, we close the loop: what happens when the auction meets the play — making your contract, defeating theirs, and why bridge players get so excited about the word "game."

Nearly there. No panic in sight.