Free beginner class grows to 22, new cohort set for the fall

The Sedona-Oak Creek Duplicate Bridge Club‘s beginner class met for the last time, April 29, at the Jewish Community of Sedona and the Verde Valley Synagogue. The class has been meeting for 18 months, with instructor Mark Ducharme, 71, introducing a new group of players to the game. A fresh cohort is set to begin this fall.

“Mark loves teaching and he’s good at it. It just comes natural, and so it’s the way he gives back to the club,” club member Peg Cook said. “He’s a total volunteer, he will not take a cent. When you’re in there, you see how much he loves it and how he’s just natural at it. The students really love him. When he started 18 months ago, he had nine students, and now we’ve had 22. The word’s out.”

“Every day is a completely new experience” playing bridge, Ducharme said. “Last week, myself and my partner finished first. Yesterday, we finished dead last. And I can’t say that I played any better when we finished first than when we finished last. But I try to learn something every time. There’s always something new to learn. The more you study it and learn, the more you realize there is to learn.”

Ducharme took up bridge nine years ago, and has been using his background teaching college algebra and statistics to pass on his love of the game to others, which helps since everything in bridge is tied to those subjects. At Hewlett Packard he also worked as a software engineer, then in marketing and sales.

“After growing up in the Boston area, and in New Hampshire all the rest of my life, I moved out to Sedona in 2012,” Ducharme said about that decision based on the climate and the readily available golf courses and trails. “I worked in high tech, specifically retiring from HP about 20 years ago. After that, I ended up teaching at a local community college in New Hampshire. There, I taught college algebra, probability and statistics. I had always been an avid card player, but never bridge until after I moved out here.”

While the beginner group is on hiatus, Ducharme said in two weeks he is gearing up for a trip to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard to take in the glaciers and Arctic wildlife.

“Not sure of the exact date yet, because I have a very busy travel schedule, but sometime in the fall we’re going to start a beginner’s class,” he said. “There are some good advantages to learning bridge: It’s good mental exercise, you get to improve memory, you get a lot of cognitive benefits and it’s social, you get to meet a lot of new people.”

Ducharme credits his teaching approach to the Audrey Grant methodology, the same system he learned from when he first took up the game. One of the core principles he was instilling on Wednesday is the rule to never underlead an ace — which means if you hold an ace in a suit, you always play it first rather than leading with a lower card.

“If you follow it 100% of the time, you’ll be right 99% of the time,” he said. Away from the card table, honesty follows suit. “In life, it would be to be honest with people, and 99% of the time that’s correct,” he said. “Sometimes you have to make a white lie — that’s the 1%.”

Those moments of clarity at the card table have been among the most rewarding parts of teaching, Ducharme said. He recalled one instance where he could tell by a student’s expression that he had finally grasped a concept, so he asked him to explain it to the class.

“He stood up and did a better job of explaining the issue than I could have done,” Ducharme said.

While the next free beginner class doesn’t start until the fall, the club will continue to have its regular in-person games at 1 p.m. at the Jewish Community of Sedona and the Verde Valley Synagogue located at 100 Meadow Lark Drive throughout the summer.

“They basically know as much about bridge as I do at this stage, at least from the academic perspective,” Ducharme said. “That means they could go in and play bridge with any group anywhere in the world and be competitive. The nice thing about bridge is it’s a worldwide game. I can go to any country — I don’t have to know the language, I don’t have to know anything — but the bridge rules are always the same.”

For more information visit bridgewebs.com/sedona or call 760-317-0900. If you’re looking for a bridge partner, call 928-274-6161.