jeb1248

Long story...An old friend of mine, Andy, and I are long-time "Fishing Buddies". I live in Chicago and he's in upstate Michigan so I visit him there several times a year for fishing. His small town has a 'Senior Center' where they had once-a-week bridge tournaments and he wanted me to brush up on bridge so I could play when I came over. All that stopped with Covid. I had found Bridge Base Online and started to play the robots to knock the rust off my game, so I suggested maybe he and his wife could round up a few of the Seniors and we could get up a game on line once or twice a week. We tried it a couple of times and now he's the defacto bridge game coordinator for me and the rest of the Seniors. I usually play once or twice a week, but he'll set up games three or four times a week. The hardest part is getting the Seniors, who are not very computer-literate, set up on Bridge Base and indoctrinated in its use. We also use Skype sessions to add a social aspect. It helps a lot to make it more convivial. We play 20 games (pass-outs don't count) or two hours, whichever comes first. If we get to 18 hands and hit the time limit and nobody has anything pressing, we'll usually finish out to 20 games. The end result is a number of people, who are otherwise fairly isolated, getting together in a friendly atmosphere and doing something they enjoy (while still being socially-distanced). One problem we ran into once we got into it is that we're playing Rubber Bridge, or Kitchen Bridge as they like to call it and the scoring on Bridge Base is Duplicate scoring. Not everyone knows how to keep Rubber Bridge score nor do they all use the same scoring rules. Go figure. So I wrote a program that runs under Windows, since most of them are using Windows laptops, that is a snap to install and super easy to use to keep score. That seems to have alleviated that situation. So this is just one "success story". I'm sure there others. Oh, and a big THANKS to BBO for having a great site.

Three friends and I have been playing 2-3 times a week for over a year. The problem we had was that we were used to Rubber Bridge scoring and didn't see an easy way to convert from the BBO Duplicate scoring. To remedy that, I've written two programs to run in Windows: one to keep Rubber Bridge score (BridgeScores); and one to to download hands from BBO sessions to import into BridgeScores (BBOImport). I'm willing to share with others for free if there's any interest

First: Thank you for addressing my last topic. The answers were very helpful. Now the current topic: I would like to write a program to parse the contents of a .LIN file. Is there already such a program? If so, where can it be found along with its documentation. If none currently exists, where can I find the documentation for the .LIN file format? If I have that I can write my own parser. As always, thanks for your attention.

I haven't been using BBO for very long, but in looking at the Hand Records for any days on which I played a number of hands with friends, I see two column: Points and Score. At first I assumed that the Points column would be the Rubber Bridge score for that hand. Upon further inspection I found that was not the case. How could the first hand, bid 2♦, made 3, earn a point score of 110? Shouldn't that be a total of 60 points, 40 below the line and 20 above? Obviously, then, it's not Rubber Bridge scoring. What is it? I've Googled and looked everywhere on BBO for the answer but it evades me. Also, I assumed that the Score column is a Duplicate Bridge score for the play of the hand. Is this correct? Thank you for your attention.