Nerja Bridge Club
Bridge Software

Scoring and Movement software

The two programs we use for this are:

• Soxoft Duplicate Scorer
  The free version allows scoring and semi-automated production of the HTML results pages for regular duplicate sessions, but we also have a permanent Club Licence, which amongst other features allows us to upload results for eCats competitions automatically and to prepare our own table cards and movement-specific travellers. If you wish to help with the scoring of club sessions, please download the free version and join the members' only group - see the Membership Benefits page - for access to the Club Licence code, our movements and our names database.
• Jeanie – the movement Wizard
  This is entirely free, has virtually all of the movements we're ever likely to need, and links seamlessly with the Soxoft Duplicate Scorer to produce very explicit and informative table cards.

Playing software

If you have accessed this page, you're reasonably computer-literate and may be interested in playing or learning bridge on-line or in the privacy of your own computer. For on-line play against human opponents, Bridge Base Online is the place to start, especially as it no longer needs downloaded software and can be played entirely in a web browser. For more privacy, you might care to download some or all of the following programs:

Freeware:

• Easy Bridge playing software. Very good user interface, reasonably flexible regarding conventions used  and can save its own deals in PBN format, but has difficulty opening PBN files created by other programs. Quality of automatic play is not the best (especially in defence), but should provide a reasonable challenge for less experienced players.
• RoboBridge playing software. This excellent free program has been quite successful in previous World Computer-Bridge Championships and its latest version can open and play virtually all PBN files but not create them. Its playing ability is excellent and very flexible by choosing how long to let it think. It will also accommodate most conventions you are likely to want. It has a good user interface - perhaps less intuitive than Easy Bridge - but is well worth trying if you want computer play against a tough opponent.
• WBridge5 playing software. 2nd in World Computer-Bridge Championship 2010; Mainly English instructions but some notation in French. Its playing ability is as good as you would expect. Do try it, it may also help improve your French! It can open many PBN files but has the excellent extra feature of being able to create full "Bridge Movies" recording not only the deal but the bidding and play with a very straightforward user interface - very useful for authoring hands (see below).
• Deep Finesse interactive hand analyser for solving double-dummy problems.

Free demo versions - both very limited but with good tutorial features:

• Q-plus Bridge
• Blue Chip Bridge

All of the programs listed above have some ability to read (and some can write) Portable Bridge Notation (PBN) as provided here for the ECats boards and for each of the unusual hands shown on the NBC home page, but not all can read all versions of PBN. Most PBN files can be opened by the free BridgeVu "Bridge Movie Viewer" provided by Bridge Base, which can display complete tournaments recorded in PBN board by board including the full bidding and card by card played. Note that PBN is a plain text format and can also be edited using notepad.

Authoring Bridge hands

Before embarking on bridge writing, you may wish to look at this Bridge Writing Style Guide. Conventions don't apply only to the bidding, and this has some useful ones!

If you use the PBN format (see previous section) for your hands, there is a very useful website to help you to follow the conventions - Creating bridge card and bidding diagrams for Word or the web. It will allow you to build diagrams and will convert PBN files to diagrams which can be pasted into word documents or web pages. For an example of a web page built using these tools and which also contains a full "Bridge Movie" PBN, see NT bidding and suit establishment.

♠ ♥ ♦ ♣
A useful trick for building web pages and documents not usually mentioned in the documentation is the fact that the UTF-8 character set includes the symbols for the four suits: ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣, and most true type fonts also support them, so you can make them as big or small as you need in both documents and web pages. Obviously, you'll usually prefer to colour ♥s and ♦s red, giving ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣! For web pages, you may need to set the page properties as UTF-8 rather than the Windows or ISO most programs assume by default. If this is not obvious in your editing program, make sure the following line appears between the <head> and </head> lines near the start of your HTML code, or add it yourself in code view:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">