Tenace

In contrast to chess, there is very little free software for bridge players. Some deal generators have been around for years, but basically, that was all.

Nowadays major online bridge site is bridgebase.com. Their windows client actually runs quite well in cedega (and wine), with the notable exception that the built-in double dummy solver doesn’t work there. (A double dummy solver is a program that computes the optimal line of play with all four hands open (both sides dummy), and hence can compute the theoretically optimal score for a given board.)

Furthermore, viewing records of played boards is a bit tedious as launching the viewer of course requires wine as well. Editing boards is not possible. This is where I started writing some perl scripts that would at least dump the board records as text files. At the same time I thought about doing something interesting with Gnome’s glade UI builder. Over the past two years, I have been working on a GTK+ version of a bridge hand viewer and editor I called tenace.

When Bo Haglund released his double dummy solver library as GPL software, I packaged it for Debian and worked on integration into tenace. It will compute “best” cards to play, determine par scores.

Now tenace should be stable enough so I can risk announcing it to the world.

Coincidentally, the screenshot shows a board from last week’s club championships. East can beat 3NT by returning a Spade, but at my table they didn’t and so the board became my first squeeze hand :)

• Bridge
• Debian