Playing on BBO

BBO is my alternate server to play on. That is a great service with a huge and impressive community. It offers a lot which IntoBridge does not provide. But it is lacking some main features that I love on IntoBridge, namely the daily challenge, the ranked games, and the ability to play different systems. 

The board above is from one of the services of BBO that I like, the instant tournament. You have to pay 0.89$ for 8 boards, which I find a bit on the expensive side. It used to be much cheaper before, and at that time I climbed to rank 8 and learned a lot along the way. Now, I play this kind of paid tournament only rarely, just enough to keep the ads away. There are also free tournaments and cheap ones. A nice feature are the problems in Bridge Master. Then there are the vuegraphs of  international tournaments. 

The casual tables are no fun for me. Players often stop playing or lose contact. Many players are downright unfriendly. I gave up playing there.

Saving the board and the play locally can be done via the Bridge Solver, an online service which features a plugin for the Chrome browser. The game then appears as below. You can click the contract and replay it, or play it on your own.

If you save the board as LIN, you can replay and discuss the board with my Bridge Replay program. This will allow a double dummy analysis, shuffling E/W or creating hands based on the current hand, and a statistical analysis of possible results. The diagram at the start was also created with my program.

The hand above is a bit strange, because I got an unexpected top. Most other boards opened either 1♦ or 1NT. Degrading the hand to 1NT is not necessary here because opening a minor and then jumping to 2NT describes the hand perfectly. I also prefer 1♣ over 1♦ because I am spoiled by Acol where you mention your suits as soon as possible if you are that strong. Moreover, you might not be able to tell your partner about the club stopper if the bidding gets hectic.

Anyway, here are my results of this instant tournament which look quite impressive. But we must not ignore that the competition on IntoBridge is much stronger once you are ranked high enough or play the daily challenge. On BBO, you are only compared with a few other players, and those are selected randomly from the pool of players.