Bridgebrowser

[eamongall]

Good morning folks

 

Last night I was thinking about the possibility/usability of Bridgebrowser in making a database of hands/bidding from vugraph matches. I had a quick look but could not see a way to import pbn files which is the standard way of saving bridge matches/hands.

 

What I wanted to do was track hands played by the Ireland team over the last few years and compile some data on bidding effectiveness.

 

We have loads of LIN files which are easily convertable to PBN or whatever format might be required.

 

I am sure Stephen Pickett , the author can help me as regards Bridgebrowser but I am also interested in any other bridge database type tools that exist.

 

I wanted to use vugraph lin files or say the Cayne matches as the standard here is exceptionally high.

 

Any thoughts

Thanks

Eamonn Galligan (eamongall on BBO)

[inquiry]

Bridgebrowser is an indexed database. These indexe's make many of the searches much, much faster than if it was not indexed. For example, it is indexed by player so player searches are fast. It is indexed by final contract, so contract searches are fast. But not all features are indexed. Search for each singleton King opening lead, and well, it will take a long time.

 

What this means is to build your own bridgebrowser database, you have to not only put hands in, you also have to build the indexes. And, this is important, the player names used from viewgraph have to be the "same" each time they play. So player names will be the first problem.

 

With Bridgebrowser you CAN build your own databases, but not with the online version. I guess this makes a hell of a lot of sense. Anyone can download and use that version. But to the best of my knowledge, to build databases using the off the shelf version of bridgebrowser, you have to build them from hands already contained within a bridgebrowser database. That is, I could make a database of all the hnad I have played, or ones from the cayne versus star matches etc. To see an example of this, there is a database of just papi hands (and all the duplicated hands at other tables) online.

 

Obviously Stephen has tools to import and index hands and he might be willing to help you with this. In addition, if there was a commercial market in having access to such a database, he might be willing to pick off all the vugraph hands from the bbo webpages and build a database of them. However, I speculate the name problem mentioned earlier will be quite a pain.

 

There is no other equivalent database. You could import the hands into Dealmaster pro, but i am not sure it keeps play or not. But even if you did,you would not have searching ability and replay abilities that are in Bridgebrowser.