Improve Your Game: Watch the Greats Play It

Bridge may not play well on TV but you can find all recent major championships in stored online movies and you can watch online with expert commentary as they are played, using the BBO vugraph interface. The term for watching bridge is “kibitzing,” although a bridge kibitzer is expected to remain silent at all times.

These are not movies with people’s faces but screens which show all four hands, the bidding, and the cards played in order by clicking next.

If you do not have an id at BBO sign up now! The USBF senior and women’s championships start tomorrow, Friday July 12, in Florida and they will be vugraphed starting Saturday. Click here for the vugraph schedule. Of course you can also play bridge at the BBO site …

To find old play records as “movies” you can go to the BBO archives or you can go to the USBF site and look at results of recent tournaments.

Click here for a sample from the third segment of the recent finals of the team trials to select the USA1 team for the world championships in Bali. Click on any score to get a screen like the one above and play the the hand through. Think about how you would bid it playing with yourself and then how you would play it. You can use the Options button to change your view of the playing card,s if you prefer, to pictures of the cards.

Warning, these expert pairs often play many conventions and at least one pair plays a strong club system. All the convention cards and system summaries for the pairs in the finals can be found by clicking on the player names on the team lists at USBF:

• List of Open Teams: USBC 2013
• List of Senior Teams: USSBC 2013
• List of Women’s Teams: USWBC 2013

If you have not been playing Bridge long then watch the Seniors as they tend to have fewer conventions. Some of them play very slowly. Try watching Marc Jacobus or Mike Passell of the Lynch team, to see a more reasonable pace of play.