Unless you have four players in the same house, you may think you cannot play bridge while sheltering in place but not so… There are places to play online – two of them are Bridge Base Online (BBO) and Okbridge.

On BBO you can play with robots, with strangers, with your regular partner or in tournaments! Some duplicate bridge clubs are even open for business online. I am not familiar with Okbridge but it claims it also has ACBL tournaments.

screen shot from the support your club page at the ACBL web site

Click here for the tutorial videos at the ACBL to help you get started at BBO.

If you miss going up to to the players at your club and saying “you hold” (giving them a hand and an auction and asking what they do), never fear you can set up a poll at Bridge Winners and get plenty of opinions. You can discuss any and all bridge topics there as well. Yes it’s social media for bridge players!

However I personally like doing bridge problems by myself. Bridge Today has made all their quizzes free this Spring. My favorites are the card combinations.

One of my favorite combinations, shown to me in 1973 by Bob Cohen on the DEC bridge team.

Another thing I enjoy doing is the Bridge Master interactive play problems; you can find them in the practice area at BBO. The suits never break well, so try to figure out how to make the hand anyway.

Take 12 tricks in 6!S. This hand is one I got wrong in the original Bridge Master years ago and again yesterday!

Actually what I like best is just bidding hands with my husband against the robots at BBO. After setting up a practice bidding table for the two of us and robots, I click on Deal Source in the left hand menu indicated by the three lines, then click on constraints, and make sure we always have at least 22 points in the combined hands. The red arrows in the image below show where to click in order to set that up.

Disclaimer: I do some web programming for Bridge Today in return for coaching.