How long does it take to learn to play bridge?

How long did it take you to learn to play bridge?

When I look at sites like the ACBL and their many teaching programs, I can’t help wondering if they are making a mountain out of a molehill. It looks to me like kids take about 28 weeks to learn to play. They start of with bits of bridge, other bits are added slowly and the whole thing takes forever.

I learnt bridge when I was at primary school. I didn’t know what Stayman was. I could do no more than navigate myself through a game legally. I learnt it just like I learnt Snap, Switch, Scrabble, all the games one learns as a kid. Or did. Still, I had no recollection at all of the process of learning, which made me think it must have been a simple painless process. None of my siblings could recall learning either, only playing. So I asked my mother how long it took to teach us. She replied ‘If it had taken longer than about half an hour we wouldn’t have bothered teaching you’. There you go.

Why not teach kids in that way? Why not have them playing a proper game of bridge (and by proper I mean legal, rather than good) in 30 minutes and let the relationship between the game and the kids develop from there. Some of them will want to learn what Jacoby transfers are and some of them won’t. But if our society was full of people who knew the legal basis of a game of bridge this would be the best promotion the game could possibly have.

If you make bridge a thing that takes half a year to learn, you will automatically lose a huge number of people who might learn to play if it took a few minutes. I fail to see the logic of discouraging those other people from playing.

I wonder, though, if it isn’t all about the teacher? The more lessons the better for the employment rate of teachers. Is that the point of making a mountain out of a molehill???