Woohoo the Canadian Bridge Federation gets an A – Surprise (Part 5 of the web hunt)

I wasn’t planning to featured any more national bridge sites in my review but by chance I looked up the CBF website and I was shocked.  It was vastly improved.   Congratulations to all of you.  The new home page features spiffy pictures of Canadian bridge players  in the banner.  It is well designed with nice graphics and well organized.  I can find everything I want with ease.  Information about the Canadian championships for next year is already up and I can see it is in Regina Saskatchewan (that’s the middle for you foreigners).   There are news stories on the front with pictures.  I see that Daniel Lavee was on the winning Mixed Swiss Teams in Philadelphia along with Lynn and Dale Johannesen, Connie Goldberg, JoAnn Sprung and Greg Hinze.  Well done all.  They have done a good job of keeping the news current and and have an archive of news which I happily flipped through including a reference to  The Globe and Mail article about Fred Gitelman features prominently on the front page. A link to the CBF Bulletin Board reveals that so far people are not using it very much as a forum to discuss things.  Going over to CBF news I find it has a lot of useful stuff which is a surprise including a link to an article about the cross Canada Simultaneous game starting in September 2011 to raise funds.  (I am working on that event).  There is much more so.  Great job.  An A site.

One link on the site lead me to  Inside Bridge an attractive website belonging to Dave Willis.  Dave who has played for Canada internationally writes the bridge column for the Toronto Star and one for the Ottawa Citizen but this website is about his club in Ottawa.  He posts problems, perhaps they are from the daily game.  There is no archive so there is a bidding problem and a play problem.  Some nice photos.  He has results from the duplicate.    Suggestion since this is a club site (even if that wasn’t your original intention) you might want to list game times and location.  Recommended for club members only and therefore unrated.

Perhaps one of the best bridge sites on the web is Jonathan Steinberg’s photo albums.  So far Jonathan has 132 albums each with between 50 and 100 images almost all of bridge players.  Jonathan attends a lot of tournaments and he takes his camera and takes pictures.  Each photo is labelled.  This is now the best source of photos of bridge players (famous or not) on the web.  Jonathan has given me (and anybody who asks) permission to use his pictures in his blog as long as I give him due credit.  Thanks Jonathan you have provided a terrific resource to all of the bridge community.  Appreciates.  An A+ effort and an A website.

Photo courtesy Jonathan SteinBerg: Connie Goldberg, JoAnn Sprung, Lynn & Dale Johannesen, Greg Hinze, Daniel Lavee won the World Mixed Swiss Teams

Now on to one more site and then I have to go out with my girl friend for a Halloween lunch.  Spiders and newts tails probably.  I have always liked the name the Bridge Bum.  Probably because I love Alan Sontag’s book by that name.   Jeff Tang has a website with that name.  Jeff is a self described non-expert but he has collected a lot of interesting material.

He has a fairly extensive list of basic conventions with a brief description.  This might be of most use to an intermediate to advanced player who is thinking about upgrading their convention.  However what is written about some of the conventions is not detailed enough to use as the only source of information (others are better descibed).  The article collection is more interesting (to me).  Some of them are stories that he participated in or witnessed at the bridge but it is an eclectic collection with lot of different things including two interviews one with Mike Lawrence and one with Fred Gitelman who must be the most frequently interviewed guy in bridge today.  Some Snoopy bridge cartoons and an article about Dwight Eisenhower and bridge from Sports Illustrated called Ike’s Favorite Bridge Hand.  Worth a C-.

Happy Halloween and Welcome Great Pumpkin!