Bridge Base Online

A couple of times in the last couple weeks I've played bridge with Robb, Lino, and other people online. We get in a Skype call and play on Bridge Base Online and it's been pretty fun. Bridge Base is free to use and has a web interface so there's no client to download or anything. It's a little like playing on Yahoo except instead of being a generic bad interface it's a reasonable bridge specific interface.

The site is set up so you can enter in a convention card with different partners like if you were at a real life bridge event. You can site down and play with friends or with random people on the internet and the site will deal you the same hands it deals to other similar tables. This lets you see how other people played the same cards and compare results as if you were playing in a matchpoint tournament (like the thing I'm running on Jack Bridge every Sunday). I really like this feature because it lets you know what you might be doing wrong and gives you a way to compare your crazy bidding systems with what is presumably more standard fare.

It also has some other features like tournaments you can pay to join and a Vugraph setup so you can watch big real life tournaments live with commentators.

In short, it's a lot better than Yahoo for playing bridge! It also looks like they have some ACBL beginner tutorials on the site which might be worth checking out if you want to learn bridge?

We've been mostly playing when the League of Legends servers start sucking and we give up on playing laggy 3s. When this happens getting a 4th is useful, but can be tricky. My initial thought the first time was to try posting in the old Comfy Bridge group we had on Facebook but it turned out that group got purged during a Facebook group change a couple years ago. The group still existed, and I was still the administrator of it, but I was also the only person in the group. Everyone else got kicked or something. I think resurrecting that group could be useful? Maybe? Would people want in on some sort of pick up bridge group?