A friend of mine loves to play bridge and wants to use a bridge program on his computer for online games. I know nothing about bridge, and instead of taking my chances with google, I am asking you: what would be the best program? Free would be good.
I don’t know his level of expertise, but my guess is it’s at hobby level.
http://www.bridgebaron.com/home.html gets good reviews.
I bought it as a present for a bridge player, but due to computer phobia she never used it, so I can’t give this a personal recommendation.
I have used Bridge Baron, and can recommend it highly. It’s easy to use, has decent AI, and allows you to customize bidding cards with many common conventions. Been a while since I used it, but the version I had also had options for duplicate or party scoring, and allowed you to play the actual hands from major tournament sessions. It’s not free, but it’s well worth the money for a serious bridge player.
Here’s a list of programs & reviews. Bridge Baron does seem to be at the top of the list:
http://www.prairienet.org/bridge/link-sw.htm
As a newbie to this field, tell me something – does a player compete with the computer or other users thru the Internet? The person I am trying to help has been using a free MSN program (sorry, no link) and it looks like he is playing against other people, but I’m not sure.