| Interesting Deals | ||
| Date and Link | Title | Topic |
| July 3, 2025 | Forests and Trees | A lengthier one, emanating from a fill-in session in the newcomer game, where players are having fun playing and learning, but in some cases missing the bigger picture in their attempts to master the details. |
| June 21, 2025 | Great Moments in Directing | A few directing stories from the 2025 Penticton Regional, taking great care to keep the offenders and non-offenders anonymous... |
| February 27, 2025 | Bad Day At The Office! | The Worst Play You Will Ever See (until I outdo myself). My only defense? I had just discovered from comments at other tables that I had screwed up the movement by putting the wrong boards at every table! |
| February 1, 2025 | An utterly mundane deal with one amusing feature! | How far will you get through this deal before you see the surprise ending? |
| December 15, 2024 | Holiday Doldrums | No excuse for lazy thinking at the (virtual) table though... |
| November 14, 2024 | A Rule Everyone Should Know | What to do (and what not to do) when your partner's explanation seems to come from deep space... |
| August 30, 2024 | Memories of Toronto | McBruce Directs At the North American Bridge Championships! |
| August 29, 2024 | Giving You Some Advice You Can't Refuse | Michael Corleone's Bridge Advice |
| June 4, 2024 | The Key to Defending Well | Seeing Through Declarer's Cards! |
| December 14, 2023 | A Tool For Bidding Practice | Bid hands on the phone or via text or e-mail with your partner! |
| September 7, 2023 | Improve Your Bridge By NOT Playing Bridge | Puzzles are the key and we have an unlimited free online source |
| February 17, 2023 | A Bridge Play Named at Yankee Stadium! | And how to make it work for you. |
| February 15, 2023 | More Bridge For Your Buck? It's Up To You! | The lecture I balked at presenting at the Future Stars tournament, since the players there are nice eager people, and this is more of a rant mostly against things perpetrated by more experienced players as live bridge continues its slow return! |
| February 11, 2023 | Twelve Bridge Truisms | Simple Tips to Get You Out of Jams. (Mini-lecture given at the Future Stars tournament on this date.) |
| February 8, 2023 | Seeing The Whole Deck | Or, Possibly, A Moment Of Insane Optimism... |
| February 4, 2023 | A Short History of Highcard Points | And the Notrump System that derives from it... |
| January 28, 2023 | What Just Didn't Happen? | Reading what your opponents have is not just about what they did, but also quite often about what they didn't do: especially if they don't do something that everyone would do with the expected hand... |
| January 24, 2023 | Conventional Knowledge | Partnership building is about not just knowing what conventions you play, or when to use them, but also the details about auctions after they are used, whatever may happen. Do you really know the conventions you play? |
| January 21, 2023 | Playing For The Miracle Layout | When it is apparent that you're going down, keep looking and you may find a possible layout to hope for. Even a 5% shot is better than going down one 100% of the time — unless the gamble risks going down more. |
| January 12, 2023 | A Unique Opportunity (Except, maybe not) | Pulling the goalie on the last board of a team match is a risky strategy since teammates may have won it at the other table and your heroics may backfire, turning a win into a loss. But sometimes it works! |
| 2022 began with the few club games that had re-opened shutting back down for six weeks, then live bridge began to return. The Deal of the Week project suffered somewhat as I began to venture out far more often.... | ||
| December 23, 2021 | The Zach Garber Swindle! | A 70s movie inspires a bridge strategy. What do the opponents not know and how can it help me? |
| November 5, 2021 | What's The Worst That Could Happen? | A nice bridge app that doesn't drain your online wallet deals up a team game hand with some traps to escape from. |
| November 1, 2021 | The Lesson No One Can Teach You | Elation kills when you least expect it. A sad story of how an optimistic grand slam slipped away just as it seemed sure to make. |
| More to come.... | ||
| Bidding Concepts and Drills | ||
| Date and Link | Title | Topic |
| November 10, 2021 | Misunderstood Bidding Concepts | Part 1 of infinity: Short Club. Includes 16 drill hands to correct the misunderstandings many players have about opening short minor suits. |
| More to come.... | ||
| Bruce's Bridge Basics | ||
| Date and Link | Title | Topic |
| BBB-A2R | Author to Reader | An introduction and a description of this section's goals. |
| BBB#0 | Bridge Rudiments | If you have never played bridge before, read this first, several times if necessary, to get started! (If you have played bridge, there may just be something in here you never learned.) |
| BBB#1 | Establishing Useful Habits | A strange starting point? Perhaps. But bridge is a game of decisions, and the basics of keeping score (everyone should!), sorting cards, counting points, using bid-boxes need to be second-nature so you can concentrate on those decisions. |
| BBB#2 | How Duplicate Scoring Works | A 1925 cruise through the Panama Canal was the starting point for the game we all play today. The nitty gritty of how the scoring works is here. |
| BBB#3 | The Bridge World | A look at the world of bridge (from a North American standpoint); clubs, tournaments, and one amazing bridge story that I think tops all the millions of others ever told! |
| BBB#4 | Bidding Concepts and Frameworks | Some general overviews on bidding objectives, a new way to organize your options in any bidding situation, and a look at some of the most popular conventions (one of which dates back almost four hundred years!). |
| BBB#5 | How To Take Tricks As Declarer | New players tend to focus on the language of bidding and many develop the notion that if you get to the right contract and play normally, the result is pre-ordained. The craft of taking an extra trick than others is key to good scores! Plus, a feat that only took the author 35 years of playing to pull off. |
| BBB#6 | Defense: It's All About Tricks! | A quick look at the defensive toolbox of signals, and what the defenders should be thinking about while trying to come up with enough tricks to prevail. You'd be surprised how far a few logical leaps can take you, even after only a few tricks are played — and we have an example of seeing almost the whole deck before you play a card to trick two! |
| More to come.... | ||
"Do you ever actually play bridge?"
I get that a lot. I guess many directors do.
The answer is, yes I do, but not very often against human opponents! I probably play about 50-200 deals a week against computer programs on PC and on iOS. Not talking about the BBO Robot games, although I have occasionally played in those.
On PC my bridge program of choice for the past two decades has been JACK, which is an expensive one-time payment, unlike most bridge apps these days, but worth it in the long run. All kinds of systems and ways to play are supported in JACK; my favourite is a team league where you play with computer players and opponents and move up or down to harder or easier tiers based on your results. A demo version is available on the JACK website linked above.
On iPhone or iPad you will find my current choice mentioned and linked in the November 5, 2021 hand. There are many options, but too many are slow wallet drains charging a few pennies per deal played, or offering some fake awards system that just distracts you from concentrating on bridge, or apps with huge one-time costs and no guarantee they will be around in five years, or apps that interrupt play with ads far too often.
Playing against decent bridge AI is very good practice for the real world! But it is not the only source of deals here. Directing online games keeps me closer to tables than in live games as I watch for tables falling behind the pace, so in addition to the dozens of hands I play every week, I also see a lot of bridge hands, and many, many, mysterious bridge mistakes.
In November 2021 I began writing up a deal approximately every week using Bridge Base's Handviewer program. This makes it easy to add a bridge deal complete with commentary to basic HTML. To view the deals, you will need to have JavaScript working and not disabled, but it should be viewable on any device. (If you decided JavaScript was more trouble than it was worth in 2003 and disabled it from your browser preferences, it really is time to change and join the rest of us.) On some screens you may wish to increase or decrease the text size to make it all fit. Most browsers follow the CTRL/+, CTRL/-, CTRL/0 (hold down the CTRL key and type plus, minus or zero) to increase, decrease, and normalize the size of screen elements. Tablet- and phone-based browsers use two-finger 'pinches' and 'stretches' to accomplish this, but are usually better at fitting things onto a screen whatever its dimensions.
My project is quite similar to the process another fine local player, Joel Martineau, took to create a well-received bridge book, so much similar that I should plug the original book, Hand Of The Week. Check it out (there is a link to order it in an e-book version as well)!
There's no program here beyond "this is an interesting deal, let's write it up, and maybe someone will enjoy it." If that is you, great: more will follow. When the deals are played by actual players who should have done better, we will omit the names and we do not encourage you to search for the hands to find the culprits, but that is admittedly possible. The focus here is on discovering the reasons behind these errors and how to fix them, rather than giving out blame as far too many players spend their time on.
We'll also feature two other types of bridge writing here: Misunderstood Bidding Concepts focuses on auction concepts that are widely misunderstood and uses Richard Pavlicek's Wheeler Dealer utility to deal suitable hands of the type for practice. Bruce's Bridge Basics are a set of reading materials for people actively taking bridge lessons, carefully designed not to interfere with the lesson content, but to provide a bigger picture of the bridge world as a break from your studies. About half of the planned series is written and is now being converted to an online format.
Deal Diagrams and iOS: The deal diagrams on this site come from Bridge Base's Hand Viewer software, and Safari, the Apple browser included in iPhone and iPad software, must be tweaked in order to display it. The route to do so (on each of your iOS devices) is: Settings, Safari, Preferences, Privacy and then uncheck "Prevent cross-site tracking." An alternative is to download a different browser (Chrome for iOS works fine.)