Any Dopers Play Bridge?

Looking for ideas re: on-line play. I am a novice.

Thanks

Hi longPath, I play a lot of Bridge online. The place to play is bridgebase online (www.bridgebase.com).

It’s free and the most popular site worldwide for bridge as far as I know. You just need to download a small application from the site and that’s it. Once you’re in, the site is easy to use and you can choose from 100s of tables to play in.

I could post more about how it works but it’s better to just try it and figure it out. Like I say it is very simple, the key to it is to find a club that suits with partners you’re happy playing with. If you play standard American then this is quite easy, as it is the de facto standard on bbo.

You can log on on your own and play with complete strangers (using the language of Bridge to talk to people from Papua New Guinea :)), or you can arrange to play at a given time with friends etc. I usually play in the Acol room under the name el mister, post back if you have any questions on it.

Thanks Busy!

I had a look at BBO and it was a wee bit confusing at first glance. The only other one I looked at was on Yahoo Games.

I will suck it up and give BBO a try. My username is kartwood.

I used to play duplicate. Haven’t played in several years now. You may want to check out:

American Contract Bridge League

There is a way to play duplicate for points online…or at least there was when I played. Also tournament info, local club info, etc.

I used to play back in college, occasionally in duplicate tournaments. In our dorm, about noon every day someone would yell out “forth” and the game would begin and go all day as players dropped in and out.

Did a bit online, but not seriously – I don’t have the time.

Wahoowa!!

Charlottesville is hosting our first ever Regional Tournament next week. I had to sell my soul to get off from work Thursday through Saturday…but I am so looking forward to this.

I have toyed with playing online…but I’m afraid it would suck up too much of my time. Don’t want my wife to become an internet bridge widow.

Regionals are fun. There’s sure to be a full schedule of novice events, and if you don’t have a partner, there’s a partnership desk that may be able to find someone to play with you. You don’t have to play in the novice events. You can enter the regular open events, which award more points, and have divisions for players with various limits of masterpoints.

BBO isn’t that complicated once you’ve figure out a room that your comfortable with. You can always kibitz just to get a sense of the room and its players. They range from relaxed and friendly to hyper-competitive and non-talkative. From novice to expert (it’s self-reported), and it’s not always correlated.

Pay attention to the bidding cards of the players, which will tell you the conventions they play. To learn about bidding and bidding conventions you can check out a book or go on line for explanations of the most common bidding “rules” and conventions, which is what will improve your play most in the end.

After you’ve been playing for a while, try to find the people who you’re most compatible playing with and establish regular partnerships. But the good thing on BBO is that even if you’re playing with all strangers you can request or give explanations of bidding conventions as a nicety during the bidding; in live tournaments you have to lay all that out beforehand on a convention card.

Are you interested in purely social (rubber) bridge, or competitive (duplicate) bridge?

guizot

Thanks for all the help. I have played bridge socially for a number of years. It’s always the same group (two tables) and we only get together once a month at best. This has not afforded me the chance to improve my bidding and play skills.

We don’t use any conventions and I would be over my head pretty quick if BBO expects that I would be bringing these tools to the table.
I have been playing against the computer with Hoyle Card Games 2009. Today I will gird my loins and try BBO.