Learn Bridge, One Lesson at a Time
A free, structured course in contract bridge for absolute beginners and improving intermediates.
Bridge Game is a free reference course in contract bridge. Whether you are picking up a deck for the first time, or sharpening your intermediate game, work through the chapters in order or jump straight to the topic you need.
The course chapters
Five chapters, forty-six lessons, all free.
Meet the teacher behind Bridge Game
Peter Steinberg, founder of Club King
Peter has been a full-time bridge teacher for more than forty-five years. In that time he has taught over 18,000 bridge classes, launched more than 9,000 beginners, and helped upwards of 60,000 players at every level sharpen their game. His first book, Play Bridge in Four Hours, ran multiple editions. His second, Improve Your Bridge Fast, was co-authored with former world champion Alan Sontag.
What makes Peter’s teaching different is that he takes it seriously. Each class is built around one idea, paced so the lesson actually lands, and anchored to real hands you will meet at the table. Students do not just get answers, they get the reasoning behind them, which is why so many come back for a second, third and fourth round of classes and walk away playing noticeably better bridge.
Peter now runs Club King, an online school that makes his full curriculum available to anyone who wants to learn. If the lessons on this site resonate, Club King is where to go for the deep, structured version with Peter himself.
How this site came to be
Bridge Game is the work of Josh Morley, a WordPress developer who originally started working with Peter to grow traffic to Club King and send more leads to Peter’s online school. Along the way Josh started learning to play bridge himself, using Peter’s classes, and quickly became hooked.
This site is the side-project that came out of that: a free, structured reference course that pulls together the same ideas Peter teaches in class, written up in plain English so a complete beginner can follow along. It is not a replacement for Peter’s classes, it is a companion, and a way of saying thank you to the teacher who made the game make sense.
Josh runs Marketing The Change, a Liverpool agency that builds and supports WordPress sites for small businesses, charities and non-profits. If anything looks wrong or unclear, the contact page is the fastest way to reach us.
What you will learn in each chapter
A short tour of the five chapters and what each one teaches.
How To Win Tricks
Bridge, at heart, is a game about winning tricks. This first chapter strips it back to first principles: the only three ways a card can take a trick (it is the highest card left in the suit, it is a trump in a trump contract, or your opponents make a mistake), the difference between a winner and a skater, how to count winners and losers in your hand before you play the first card, and the basic finessing techniques that turn losing cards into winners. Thirteen short lessons. By the end you will be able to look at any new hand, count its winners, identify its losers, and form a rough plan in under a minute.
Bidding
The bidding system here is a beginner-friendly version of Standard American with five-card majors, the most widely used system in the English-speaking world. Across ten lessons you will learn how to evaluate your hand using a points system, what each opening bid promises your partner, the responses that move the auction toward the right contract, and what to do when an opponent overcalls or doubles. Each lesson covers a single situation in isolation so the conventions do not blur together. By the end, you and a partner can bid the most common hands without consulting a book.
Declarer Play
Once the bidding settles and you are responsible for making your contract, the real work begins. This chapter covers the planning step you should always do before calling for the first card from dummy, how to count winners for a no-trump contract, how to count losers for a suit contract, the difference between a stopper and a stopgap, and tactics like the hold-up play, the dangerous opponent, and finessing to reduce losers. Thirteen lessons. By the end you will have a repeatable thinking process you can apply to almost any contract you find yourself in.
Defense
Defending a contract is harder than declaring one because you only see one of the two defensive hands. Across seven lessons you will learn opening leads, how to signal to your partner using the cards you discard, second-hand and third-hand play, how to read declarer’s plan from the bidding and the opening lead, and how two defenders work together as a single unit to defeat the contract. Defense is where a partnership shows its quality, and these lessons give you the language to make defending feel like a conversation rather than guesswork.
Intermediate Topics
Once the basics feel comfortable, the intermediate chapter introduces the conventions and techniques that experienced partnerships rely on. You will work through the Lebensohl convention, used to handle interference over a 1NT opening, and the simple squeeze, a play that wins extra tricks by forcing opponents to discard from too many suits at once. These lessons assume the foundations from the earlier chapters and move at a faster pace. New intermediate topics are added as we hear from readers about which conventions they want covered next.
Ready to start? Begin with How To Win Tricks, or browse the latest lesson updates on the blog page.