Just a simple webpage for stuff created by McBruce
(Last update: April 16, 2026)
I direct bridge games and tournaments and create stuff for my bridge work which people seem to want. So I set up this web page to slowly put the things (essays, programs, information) I’ve created into the public domain. If I were a better writer or programmer I would not be giving them away, but since I am not, I trust you will not descend upon me in anger should they not interest you or work for you...
Nothing on this site has ads or asks for a credit card number (some of the external links might). Since I maintain this site for information and entertainment purposes only, there is no security layer and some browsers may get antsy. I’ll do my best to ensure none of these pages is infected with something transmittable so you can safely ignore the warnings that today's browsers insist upon, and we can keep this all free and simple.
Among the other things you may currently — or eventually — find here (pick a tab):
Online Daily Bulletins for District 19 Regional tournaments:
Up Next: Leavenworth Regional — April 13 - 19, 2026 in Leavenworth WA, a Bavarian-themed town about two hours drive east of Everett WA.
The red link above goes to the Welcome page with tournament information. There are also daily updated pages for Masterpoints that are updated daily and also show previous tournament leaders, a Photos page (send me photos and I'll post them online!), and a Table Counts page with a graphic schedule of events and attendance information.
Daily pages begin with a detailed list of events for that day and winners from last year's Whistler tournament and the last one in Leavenworth in October of 2023, then, once the day is complete, are revised to include results from the events on that day and masterpoint leaders:
The tournament begins on Monday Evening (7pm) with a three-session Bracketed Knockout Teams that continues Tuesday Afternoon, and the Dudley Brown Memorial Pairs, the first Evening Side Game session. Tuesday thru Friday has 9am, 1pm, and 7pm starts with daily round-robin bracketed team events (starting Wednesday), Open and Gold Rush 0-750 Pairs, and single-session Side Games. On Saturday and Sunday the site also hosts the Grand National Teams Flight A (0 - 6000) and Flight C (0 - 750 non-Life Master) District Finals, and the event schedule for the regional events changes slightly, with different start times and slightly different weekend events.
Please be sure to bring a credit or debit card to pay for entries (no cash will be accepted).
More material will be added to the pages as the tournament gets closer. Until then, and especially if you’ve never been there, you can view this video, from the 1990s Seattle comedy show Almost Live!, where they did hilarious versions of COPS in various Seattle communities, and then travelled to Leavenworth for what may have been the best one!
How These Work: Each link takes you to the Welcome page for that tournament. There are links from each page to the seven daily pages and the photos, masterpoints, table counts, and ACBL Live links. The daily pages begin with a list of events with detailed descriptions, and the winners of them at the last tournament, but at the end of that day morph into results and updated masterpoint leaders and occasional news items.
Whistler Regional October 27-November 2, 2025 in Whistler BC, Olympic ski resort about 80 minutes drive north of Vancouver.
Puget Sound Regional August 18 - 24, 2025 in Lynnwood WA, north of Seattle. Possibly the DINO regional site with the most variety in nearby eateries!
Penticton Regional June 10-15, 2025 in Penticton BC, the lovely Okanagan city between two lakes. (A problem with my ISP prevented people from easily getting to the site late in the week, quickly fixed upon my return and working now.)
Victoria Regional April 7-13, 2025 in downtown Victoria BC, a few blocks away from where provincial laws are passed.
Final 2024 Kirkwood Trophy Standings, the District 19 annual masterpoint race, after Regionals in Penticton, Lynnwood, and Ocean Shores. Congratulations to Ray Miller of Seattle! (Looking for the 2025 race? There has only been the one tournament so far, so check here.)
Ocean Shores Regional November 4 - 10, 2024 in Ocean Shores WA, 75 miles west of Olympia, on the Pacific Coast.
Puget Sound Regional August 19 - 25, 2024 in Lynnwood WA, north of Seattle. Possibly the DINO regional site with the most variety in nearby eateries!
Penticton Regional, June 10 - 16, 2024 in Penticton BC, still Canada's largest Regional, this year with the added Canadian Championships running alongside the tournament.
(The 2024 Vancouver Regional was canceled when the venue became unavailable.)
Leavenworth Regional October 23 - 29, 2023 in Leavenworth WA, a Bavarian-themed town about two hours drive east of Everett WA.
Puget Sound Regional August 21 - 27, 2023 in Lynnwood WA, north of Seattle. Possibly the DINO regional site with the most variety in nearby eateries!
Penticton Regional, June 17 - 23, 2023 in Penticton BC, recovering towards the pre-pandemic status of Canada's largest Regional.
NEW! After the 2023 Victoria Regional I did some programming and created a new set of daily pages with round-by-round leaders for all pair and Swiss Team events. Following the usual list of overall winners, each strat has its own leader table which lists the top X pairs in that strat. (X is a bit less than double the number of overall places in that strat; I figure those who did worse than that don't need the details of their struggles publicized...). The tables are colour-coded by current percentage after each round and include popups that appear showing even more details. These will appear in the Penticton Bulletins and the Victoria Bulletins with them are also online (add a 2 before '.html' in the address: tue.html is the original page; tue2.html is the new version with the round-by-round details.) A full explanation and an example is here.
Three different sources for material on this page: old facebook postings (blue background), old bridge articles (green), new stuff (gold). They're all on this page and most have been featured at the bottom of the mcbruce.ca main page. You can scroll through and read them all if you have several hours, or pick and choose from this contents table, for which there is a link back here separating each piece from the next:
Many of these, especially the old bridge articles from the Matchpointer, were originally printed in a format that makes me cringe today: semi-condensed fonts at small sizes, carefully chosen to maximize the amount of reading material I could get onto a certain number of pages, to encourage people to take the free magazine home with them, rather than read it at the club and leave it there, so that a few weeks later, when they needed some bit of key info it would already be in their homes. The internet has changed all this, of course, we can recast the text with a decent-sized and spaced typeface, and need not worry about the space it takes, since everyone can easily scroll down when their screen space runs out.
This also gives me a chance to make minor touch-ups, small corrections, or occasionally write an introduction explaining interesting facets of an article. I'll try to limit this to the smallest of edits rather than a complete re-write to conform to current standards. One nice advantage for the bridge articles is that we can use better looking suit symbols that the monochrome ones I used on paper.
Remember that you have options for reading as well: on a computer you can use CTRL and (plus) to increase the size of the text, CTRL + (minus) to decrease it, and CTRL + (equals) to return it to the original size. The text will reset itself to the screen space you have, based on the size you choose. On a touchscreen device, there are options for doing this as well, but pinching and two-finger unpinching doesn't work; that simply magnifies the text off the right edge. Check your device for options.
Just Watch Me — (November 2000 Matchpointer) — A clever re-write of the Pierre Trudeau classic quote to make a point.
Deregulators Beware! — (September 10, 2012) — Getting rid of regulations without understanding them is asking for trouble.
Waiting Here In Allentown — (August 9, 2014) — Do you remember what they were waiting for? I didn’t....
A New Version — (August 5, 2025) — As we wait to see if the Whitecaps are actually going to sign a German star....
Exhibits in Bafflegab — (September 10, 2014) — Referendum questions that are incomprehensible do not fare as well as simple, clear ones.
Hurry Up And Think — (October 1995 Matchpointer) — An early McBruce article that has travelled the globe!
Eight Days of Movies — (January 8-16, 2015) — McBruce sees most of the eight 2014 Best Picture nominees in just over a week
HHIT Goes For The Million — (August 2000, November 2000, December 2000, and March 2001 Matchpointer) — The Hideous-Hog-In-Training visits an NABC where they have staged a bridge version of the popular game show.
Dream Interpretation — (January 14, 2026) — McBruce wakes up and attempts Freudian analysis.
From The Archives
I've stopped posting to Facebook but have kept a big file of stuff I posted there over about a decade (link), and I'll post some of the best ones here from time to time, as well as on a new site here, along with some of the things I've written for other publications. The following, however, is original and recently composed....
Ups And Downs
Late in the 2025 season I wrote a program to track each Major League Soccer (MLS) team's chances of finishing in or out of the playoffs and in which of the nine spots allocated for each of the two divisions. The program read in the results so far, computed the standings and assigned ratings to each team, then used those ratings to simulate the rest of the season's matches many times, counting the number of times each team finished in each possible spot. For 2026 I have started the project at the beginning of the MLS season and the current progress is here.
The program works from two formulas: one is a simple algorithm to produce scores that look like soccer scores: from 0-0 to 2-0 to 1-1 to 3-2 and beyond. The program first rates each team's chance of winning, and the chance of the game ending in a draw, then produces a random score that matches the result. The second formula is the one that compares the ratings of the two teams and works out win chances, and also tells you how much to transfer from the loser to the winner, or from the favorite to the underdog if the result is a draw. This is a variant of the formula Arpad Elo produced for the US Chess Federation, the one a recently-dumped and frustrated Mark Zuckerberg got from his roommate to produce a website where illegally-obtained photos of female students at Harvard were pitted one against another, and users were asked to choose one, creating an ordered list of faces that got him into trouble, but eventually became Facebook.
As I write this the MLS prediction page for 2026 is not saying much yet only two games into the season, since there are so many possibilities and our initial guess as to the strength of each team is a guess based on last year's results and pre-season predictions made online. Even the top team has a tiny chance of finishing dead last at this point, and the lowest-rated team has a 1.2% chance of winning the MLS Cup. As more games are played, leaving fewer to simulate, there will be more of a difference between the top and bottom teams and we will begin to get a picture of who is safe and who needs more good results. As the program records the results already in, it adjusts the ELO ratings of the teams, so that the farther into the season we get, the more the ELO ratings will depend on 2026 results and not on our pre-season guesses as to who would be good in 2026. I'll post a weekly update at the link above.
Bridge Results
I’ve been developing an online widescreen display combining the results, the BridgeMate data, and the deal data, showing overall and section results, and scores and contracts on each board, and it is starting to come together. On a tablet or monitor it looks really good, and I've recently improved the smaller screen version so you can see it more easily on your smartphone screen turned sideways. The files are large enough (not nearly as large as a video, but may take a second or three to load) that we can't keep them online for more than a month or two before removing the oldest ones. You may need to update your browser version if you haven’t in a while to see these properly, there is some newer tech that may not work in older versions. When you click on the button link below, you will at first see only a row of clickable tabs, for overall awards, sections, one for each board, and a help tab at the end. It looks sparse at first until you realize you can just hit the various tabs like old-style car radio buttons to jump around without all that scrolling! The board results include a variable colour for the HCP and FRK boxes below West and East and beside the South hand, to show you which side (N-S orange, E-W purple) had the balance of the HCP (highcard points), and whether the deal was a red spicy one in terms of FRK (freakness), a gray average one, or a blue boring one with mostly three- and four-card suits. In the most recent versions I have added the FRK colours at the bottom of each board tab and the HCP balance colour at the top of each tab, so you can quickly find, for example, the deals where your side had most of the points or the most spicy ones! One cool trick for you to try on your monitor is to use CTRL + (plus key) and CTRL + (minus key) to adjust the size of screen elements so that the hands appear to the right of the results, and not below. (CTRL + zero goes back to normal.) Games below are colour-coded as follows:
Club Games:
Vancouver Lawn Tennis (Monday Evening), Section A - Open: red
Vancouver Lawn Tennis (Monday Evening), Section X - Newcomers (with comments!): pink
Capilano G&CC (Tuesday Morning): green
West Vancouver Seniors Activity Centre (Wednesday Afternoon, names withheld to comply with club policy) orange
Shaughnessy G&CC (Thursday Morning): blue
Other Games:
Monthly Unit Games (various clubs and weekdays): purple
Other Unit Games (Mentor-Mentee Games, limited sectionals): light blue
Unit 430 Sectionals: silver
(Buttons without underlines link to nothing yet, they are games to be added soon....)
Unit 430 Stuff
Unit 430's Web Site, with information on tournaments and events, is here
Starting in 2024, Unit 430 began rotating Unit Games among several clubs so that everyone in the Unit can more easily play one, and the news about where the next one is should be at the Unit 430 site (link). Club directors running the games are sending files to me for processing: the game results on ACBL Live are here, the updated list of free plays given out to Board Members for their service and masterpoint winners is here, and instructions for Unit Game directors are here.
NEW: recent Bridge Results, including local sectionals and Unit Games, now posted on this site: click on the words Bridge Results above to check it out!
Mentor-Mentee Hand Analyses by McBruce: special web pages where the 22 boards in the Mentor-Mentee Games are played and commented on by McBruce, who usually gets trashed by the computer players he plays them against, making it fun reading for all! I returned and ran the one on November 29 at the Vancouver Bridge Centre: deal comments are here.
Starting in November 2021 I began using Bridge Base's Handviewer program to create quick reads containing one deal and comments on the bidding and play. The initial idea was to try to add one of these a week, based on hands I see online as a Director, and hands I play when fighting against various bridge programs and apps. This has taken a back seat to my Directing schedule now that the pandemic is over, but I add a few more from time to time. There is an index and next/previous links on each page. Check it out!
Bridge Utilities
I sometimes write programs to help bridge directors which may be of interest. I am by no means any damn good at this, if fact my tendency is to abandon a program once it works for me rather than fix the remaining niggling bugs, so use these at your own risk. Select from the following:
I finally got the time to move from Phase 1 (read as much as you can about JavaScript from as many sources as possible and try to get your head around at least the basics) to Phase 2 (actually write some [censored]ing code) and my first project is Gametime3, an improved version of the bridge round timer I wrote in the 90s in QBASIC and then in the 2000s in PerlTk. You can try it out here, and view some screenshots and read about it here. Next project is a new version of "sdaphr" - the program that allows you to enter shuffled hands and get a PBN (Portable Bridge Notation) file. I've been using it but it's not really ready for general release: entering cards on a numeric keypad seems to interfere with many common browser shortcuts and changes to your browser setup are required to avoid having the program go off in an unexpected direction...
