BridgePal Forum

It's a question of the effort involved and whether there would be a sufficient demand for the capability. At the moment we are still busy with software development to assist online bridge (i.e. BBO Extractor/BBOtoXML, Bridge Solver Chrome extension), and probably not likely to get back to doing more development on BridgePal until (if) the majority of clubs get back to playing face to face bridge.

Even when players do go back to clubs, I wonder whether it will be with physical cards or playing bridge on tablets. After playing online bridge, where bidding and card play are recorded automatically, it seems a big hassle to have to use a system where all this information has to be entered manually. It would be a lot more convenient if clubs played using tablets rather than physical cards, and there are an increasing number of online systems that will handle club bridge. The latest of these is RealBridge, which has just been launched and is being used by the English Bridge Union for their Autumn Congress. It also incorporates video/audio integration, so players can see the others at the "table" if they are playing remotely. Bridge Club Live is also rumoured to be incorporating video/audio. Perhaps BBO will do do eventually. Availability of such systems may reduce the rate at which people return to the clubs.

Just prior to lockdown I had released an initial version of the BridgeDealer app - see https://mirgo2.co.uk/bridgepal_forum/index.php?topic=197.msg555#msg555. This app is able to deal a predealt hand using the phone/tablet from camera or read a deck of cards. My intention was to integrate it with the BridgePal app, and the reading capability could be used to record the play of a hand after the hand has been completed (providing the cards are not shuffled and are stacked in the deck in the correct order). That still doesn't handle recording of the bidding though.

Hello Gavin,
Have a look at stepbridge.co.uk which is what we are using.

Best regards
Neville

John

Many thanks for the reply. There are many who would argue that BBO isn?t proper bridge, as defined by the laws, because that software will not allow you, for example, to revoke or make an insufficient bid. I believe further that BBO implements the US version of the rules, not the EBU?s. There is a case to be made for having an English bridge engine, and I don?t see why that engine need involve the Internet, just as BridgePal scoring doesn?t use the Internet.

Best wishes

Gavin

I am slightly disappointed that no-one has replied on the viability of this idea.

A couple of months has elapsed since I proposed it, and face-to-face bridge looks as far away in the distant future as ever. Bridge holiday companies, for example, face the difficult conundrum of whether (and how) to run holidays booked for September/October of this year in continental Europe. Most likely, the Foreign Office will have by then allowed beach holidays to resume, but there will be no way that face-to-face bridge, a standard component in the afternoons and evenings of these bridge holidays, to be safely run.

A pairs bridge-plaing app would remove any need for playing cards, it could observe the two-metre rule, and yet keep everyone in the same ballroom/conference room, thereby minimising the risk of cheating which is so widely suspected oN online venues such as BBO.

Sounds interesting - thanks.