BridgeMojo is ACBL accredited bridge teacher Morris "Mojo" Jones, offering games and bridge classes for the greater Pasadena area and San Gabriel Valley.
While all of the area bridge clubs are shuttered, come play on Bridge Base Online with your local friends! Welcome to our Virtual Bridge Club.
I have classes and practice sessions based on Audrey Grant's Better Bridge series for small groups online. Contact Mojo for more information.
The Unit 556+ virtual bridge club includes players from several north Los Angeles County bridge clubs:
All games are hosted on Bridge Base Online (BBO) https://www.bridgebase.com.
RealBridge from the UK - see and hear your table mates while playing bridge!
While we have some Tuesday evenings free between PCC classes, let's get together for some relaxed bridge with a lesson following.
Here's what you need to participate:
Before joining the game, test your camera and microphone here on the RealBridge web site.
Dragon helps with most bridge classes.
Enjoy eight Sunday afternoons studying and practicing declarer play! Learn the timeless techniques experienced players use to develop extra tricks in trump and notrump contracts.
Here are the weekly topics:
This is an online interactive course using Zoom for class discussions, and a virtual bridge table where you will play actual hands and experiment with card play. Required for this course:
When we first learn to play bridge, we learn to count our high card points, add in distribution points. If the total is 13 or more, then we should open the bidding — that is, make the first bid in the auction at the 1 level.
Later when we start playing in formal or informal groups, we discover players opening 12 point hands, or even weaker! What's the deal?
There are indeed subtleties to deciding whether to open and what the opening bid should be. This course addresses those subtleties with effective guidelines and great practice deals that touch on all aspects of bridge.
This is an online, live, interactive bridge course. We will meet online using Zoom, and you will practice playing at a virtual bridge table with other students.
How better to spend New Year's Eve than playing bridge online? I put out the call for a bridge game that would be just for fun -- no sanction, no director, no masterpoints. We would use RealBridge, the platform from the UK which integrates audio and video into the bridge table.
Many of us have been missing team games. It's my favorite format for duplicate bridge, and by far the best way to hold a game with an extreme range of bridge experience.
RealBridge does a beautiful job of team game support. They offer round-robin, swiss, and head-to-head (knockout) formats. Their one current failing is that an odd number of teams requires one team to sit out a round. Every round is played in a "barometer" style, with all teams playing the same boards at the same time -- which inherently limits the ability to support a three-team round-robin in a larger game.
The American Contract Bridge League supervises and sanctions clubs and tournaments throughout the U.S. and Canada. Membership is required for sectional and regional tournaments, and while not strictly necessary, it's helpful in club games as well (virtual online clubs included).
A guest membership is free, and your player number will be yours forever. Think of it much like a membership in the USGA for golf, where they can track your golf handicap.
Bridge players are not rated as they are in chess, or handicapped as in golf, but a collection of ACBL masterpoints is a reasonable measure of experience at playing and doing well in sanctioned bridge tournaments.
Guest memberships are only available to players who have never been an ACBL member.
Here's how to get your ACBL player number with a guest membership:
Now is the winter of our bridge defense!
Enjoy eight Sunday afternoons studying and practicing all of the best defense strategies used by expert players. Every hand is a new puzzle to solve with your partner. Here we study not just the common aphorisms of bridge defense ("second hand low, third hand high") but when it's right to break these rules based on the situation.
Here are the weekly topics:
This is an online interactive course using Zoom for class discussions, and a virtual bridge table where you will play actual hands and experiment with card play. Required for this course:
Join us for this special four-session class that's all doubles! The double is the most versatile call in a competitive auction. This class will let you practice making doubles and advances in all sorts of competitive bidding situations.
Bring your favorite partner for these four interactive online sessions. Participation requires a reliable broadband internet connection and a good Mac or Windows laptop or desktop computer. (An iPad alone is possible but not recommended.)
We'll meet for four sessions over two weeks, Monday and Wednesday at 3:00. Space is strictly limited to 16 students!
I think you'll find there are many advantages to taking an interactive bridge class online, but it's not without its technical challenges!
Besides a good device (or two) to use in class, you should have a reliable broadband internet connection. If you're using WiFi, be sure you're in a location with a good signal, on a channel with no interference. You need to have at least a microphone on the device you use for Zoom. A camera is encouraged, but optional.
These videos will help you with your platform of choice. There's even a way to do it when all you have is an iPad.
You've just discovered bridge, and can work your way through a hand! Now what?
All over the country, most of the face-to-face brick-and-mortar bridge clubs are closed right now, but that doesn't mean we're not holding games and tournaments! Bridge has moved online.
Right here we have a "virtual bridge club" that serves players in three local ACBL (American Contract Bridge League) units. It's the Pasadena Pomona Downey VBC. You might have noticed it elsewhere on this site.
Twice a week we have a bridge game for newcomers to bridge: Saturdays at 12:20 p.m., and Wednesdays at 7:15 p.m. We play 12 hands, and the game lasts about an hour and a half. The games are held on Bridge Base Online (BBO). Each game has "card fees" of $5, deducted from your BBO account.
