I've been looking for just the right time to introduce a team game at BridgeMojo. I think July 2 is that perfect day.

It's the start of the Los Angeles Regional "Bridge Week" in Long Beach, with team events every day.

The Pasadena-San Gabriel Sectional will be playing Swiss Teams on July 29.

It's sort of a holiday week.

Team-of-four games at bridge use somewhat different scoring from the matchpoint pair games we usually play. It's actually much better in terms of "pure bridge." Matchpoint scoring tends to distort and magnify very small differences in score, and reduce the impact of large differences.

Looking for results from The Longest Day game? Click here! https://results.bridgemojo.com

My desk with computer monitor and Dealer4 machine. On the screen is the Dealer4 software with a hand displayed.

Most players take my word when I say, "The hands are randomly generated and dealt to the boards by a machine." That's all true as far as it goes, but what does it really mean?

Let me give you a peek behind the curtain and show you what it takes to make pre-dealt hands and hand records for a duplicate pairs game1.

Since the early days of generating bridge deals by computer, quite a bit of research has gone into the mathematics involved. Early random number generators were woefully inadequate for being able to replicate a hand-shuffled deck of cards.

The big winner this month was Ron Lu with 1.81 masterpoints in May. Fred "Big Fred the Mischief Maker" Nelson was second with 1.53.

In all in May, 44 players earned masterpoints, and a total of 27.22 points were awarded. That includes a bit of silver for the May 7 STaC game.

June will be a short month with two Monday night games, but the extra benefit game for Alzheimer's Association on June 21, The Longest Day.

I have two summer classes that focus on everything but bidding! Join us for four weeks on declarer play, and four weeks on defense.

Play of the Hand

Join Mojo for four Thursday evenings at the beautiful Oneonta Congregational Church in South Pasadena for four classes focused on improving your play of the hand as declarer. Learn and practice techniques used by expert players to plan the play and win more tricks when declaring.

Topics include:

Lynn Sager and Adam Barron picked up almost two silver points for their 65% game in the May 7 BridgeMojo STaC game. Close behind were Rosemary Schroeder with Hilary Clark, and Dona Clark with Carolyn Buzin.

From the posted results, it appears that there were two clubs playing 749er games on Monday evening, BridgeMojo and the Bridge Gallery in Northern California. The table count was 16.5 total tables.

The full Monday evening STaC results can be found at this link.

The next Unit Game with lunch is Sunday, May 6, 1:00 p.m.
May 1, 2018

April featured not four but five Monday evenings to play bridge in San Marino. Here are a few happy statistics:

Bonnie and Angela take on the robot pair.
Photo by Roy Wilson, April 2018
Roy's article on the Unit web site here

Last week was our first trial-run for having a pair of BBO (BridgeBase Online) robots fill a half-table at the BridgeMojo game.

What's wrong with having a sit-out?

Normally when the game has a half-table, on every round there's a pair who can't play. That pair has a 15-minute break. For the BridgeMojo game, that means seven pairs in the game will play twelve boards, and the rest will play fourteen.

To compensate for the difference, the total matchpoint score for those pairs is factored before comparing it with the other pairs in the game. Their final score is multiplied by 14/12 (7/6, 1.166). (Remember your fractions?) That brings every player up to a common baseline score.

Mailing label for an ACBL Bridge Bulletin

When I applied for the sanction for my bridge club, one of the questions on the application form asks for a seven-character code for your club to appear on masterpoint reports.

For my club, it had to be BRGMOJO, of course.

So when I got to see it in print for the first time (yay, Jane!) it was a bit of a thrill. :)