The New Kid On the Block – Part 6 … bridge web crawl

Within the last year Gavin Wolpert, Jason Feldman and Steve Weinstein with Kitty Cooper and others have developed a new website for bridge players called Bridgewinners.

Gavin is a friend who I have known since he was a bridge playing child.  His mother Hazel Wolpert runs a very popular bridge club in Toronto.  There will soon be a package of Gavin recommended books  available on ebooksbridge Keep an eye open for it.

The site is well laid out and it is easy to find things with lots of interesting components and lots of content.  They have a group blog with a few others contributing (it appears that guests are welcome to blog).  The most recent one when I looked at it was a plea for the ACBL to restore Multi 2D as an allowed convention in national pairs events.  Yes, go guys.  I don’t even play it with most of my frequent partners but I think it is silly not to allow it.  One problem hands in a blog did not show up.  I just got a big box.  (Maybe something to do with my browser but it should work for everyone).   I notice that some of the blogs have got comments from many interesting people.  Lots of fun and interesting things, almost more like a Bulletin Board than a real blog but fun.

They have a bridge store connected to Amazon. The must read books are not ones that I would have picked .  For experts I would have included Roy Hughes Building A Bidding System or a book or two by Marshall Miles or Bob McKinnon’s wonderful new book on Bridge Probability and Information and many others.  For advanced players any of Eddie Kantar’s books. Overcalls by Mike Lawrence and many others.  I am pleases to see that they did pick Bridge Squeezes Complete.  But then again we all have our own favorites.

There are a number of interesting technical articles mostly written by the quartet (Gavin, Jason, Steve and Kitty).  I like the fact that the articles are classified by level and type.  Gavin has written one in the intermediate section on the defense against 1NT.  The comments are more interesting (to me) than the article which is just a one line description of responses to Meckwell and Woolsey.  I think for intermediates there needs to be more narrative describing how you use it, what types of hands and how you should respond when your partner makes one of these bids.  Is any follow up bid forcing and son.  The classifications need some work too.  The articles for beginners are not aimed at any beginners I know.  Maybe they are beginning experts!

The site covers major tournaments.  For example they have coverage of the 2010 European championships.  It includes articles and a set of useful links.  Obviously most useful during the tournament it is still fun to have a quick look after the event too (and here I can actually read the hands).

An innovative and popular feature of the site are the polls.  They all have lots and lots of responses.  You will have lots of fun responding to the polls and reading the comments.  Polls are often what do you bid but there are defense and other problems too.  This is the best part of the site for me.

Another mainstay is a couple of tools the most important being a convention card editor.  It comes with three preloaded variations, standard, 2/1 and Eastern Scientific which you can modify to suit your partnership.  There is a also a counting game.  It actually took me a minute to figure out what it is.  You enter 4 numbers and as I realized they represent bridge distributions and have to add up to 13.  At one point I remember before I went to sleep going 5-3-3-2, 5-4-4-0, 5-4-2-2 and so on.  This is a more fun way to do it.  I have tried it before but today for some reason it wasn’t working.

There is also an interactive help (most of the questions and answers are about the convention card editor).  Players of all levels will want to visit this site.  A.

Good luck with your venture, fellows.