I have just released version 0.11 of Tenace, my bridge hand viewer/editor for Linux/Unix (and Windows, if you have Gtk installed and get it compiled).

The new “Open in web” feature will send the current hand to bridgebase online’s handviewer to share with other on the web. The parallelized parscore computation (if you have multiple CPUs) has been improved, thanks to Bo’s work on making DDS multi-threaded.

Updated Debian package are on the way to the mirrors, the source code is on the Tenace homepage,

I post rarely myself to Planet Bridge, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from suggesting new feed additions. I’ve just added Catchall and Phillip Martin aka the Gargoyle Chronicles. Welcome!

It has been a while since the last update for tenace, my bridge hand viewer. The highlight in version 0.10 is version 2.0 of the double dummy engine dds which has been updated to support parallel computation in multiple threads. The parscore computation in tenace now uses all available CPU cores. Even my notebook has two CPUs :).

More on the technical side, the GUI has been switched to use GtkBuilder which comes with Gtk so there is no external library needed anymore (previously libglade). The looks are pretty much the same as before, though.

The previous version 0.9 had added windows support via mingw. I would still appreciate if people could test it and tell me which bits I need to improve.

After a bit over half a year of having moved, I finally took the opportunity to play real-life Bridge here. Thanks to BBO, a partner was found surprisingly fast, and even we knew each other from the juniors bridge camp at Rieneck, but we were unsure who actually the other one was from the folks there. So, the evening started with a friendly “Oh, you are Christoph :)” at the entrance.

Bridge-wise the event wasn’t very spectacular, just a teams tourney with the average club players (though of course a teams event in the evening pushes up the level a bit). We agreed on some 5M system, and the only real misunderstanding was after opps had opened 2♥ (both M), 2♠ from Pd (no agreement), ppp, which lead to a glorious 4-1 fit, and -150, but that didn’t cost much (if at all).

We had the feeling we started well, and reached the final round, but then lost the remaining matches. To the great surprise of the whole team, we still won. Of the 4 teams in the final round, VPs were distributed 46-46-46-42, with the 46s all 1:1 against each other, and it was us who had the better carry-over from the first round. Thanks to Uschi for the good Bridge start here :)

Following a mail from Becky Young I’ve updated bridgeblogging.com’s URL and added about a dozen links to their individual blog feeds. The subscription list on bridge.df7cb.de has some 50 entries now. If your bridge (or bridge-related) blog is not included here, please drop me a mail. I’ve added their Mastering Bridge Blog for beginners, and Thomas Andrews’ deal release blog, I hope the technical content doesn’t disturb the otherwise “human” blogs too much.

On real-life bridge notes, I played my first German nationals last weekend. We finished 61st out of 94 pairs with 47.65% - could have been better, but given the number of tricks I wasted with bad defense, I’m not really unhappy. Smirnov

• Piekarek won the first two sets by a comfortable margin, but 60.1% in the third set weren’t enough as Elinescu - Wladow scored 73.1% there and finished first with 66.05%.

As 90 boards in two days aren’t enough, we spent Sunday evening with another 32 boards to finish this year’s round of league games. Our team did win all matches (this one 19:11 VP), but we are still only second in the overall scores.

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 :)

In January I discovered Bo Haglund’s double dummy solver, called DDS. I had been looking for an open source solver running on Linux ever since I started playing Bridge, so this was a very nice finding. It is very fast and the API is nicely documented.

Of course, there are Debian packages, one for the (static) library (libdds-dev), for the ddd driver frontend (renamed to dds as there's already some other package called ddd), and for the python extension (python-pydds).

I am working on a GTK2 frontend called tenace. So far it features a basic hand editor, can play cards, and compute double dummy/par scores. The .lin import/export is not yet complete, but basically works.

Das 2. Wochenende konnte natürlich nicht so gut laufen wie das erste: 10:20, 11:19, 10:20. Wir haben souverän den Einzug in die Pik-Gruppe, d.h. die Aufstiegsrunde geschafft, das ist auf jeden Fall schon ein Erfolg.

Etwas Stress gab es wegen folgender Hand:

[Update 2006-04-11] Ich habe mich endlich aufgerafft, den Eintrag fertigzustellen. Immerhin ist die Aufregung von damals jetzt weg...

4♣ ist systemgemäß die Assfrage auf ♣-Basis. Mein Partner fand das in der Sequenz nicht sinnvoll (ich bin ja limitiert), und hat deshalb gemeint, ich hätte damit sowas wie "Aufforderung zu Cuebids gemeint". Seine 4♥-Antwort habe ich dann natürlich als 3/0 verstanden und mit 5♣ abgeschlossen. 6♣ sind natürlich drin...

Diskussion im Bridgebase-Forum

A few days ago on BBO, sitting North and E-W vulnerable, I hold ♠AKJ2 ♥QJ862 ♦3 ♣642. Partner passes and West opens 1♦. Now I don’t like to double with 5-4 in the majors, but this hand looks right for it. East redoubles, and my partner bids 1NT. At point I thought “50 points at the table”. West and myself pass, and East doubles. We are at 60 points. South passes, and now East bids 2NT himself, doubled by South (70 points), and again redoubled by East (more points).

After the dust settles, I lead the ♥6, won by South with the 7(!). South returns a ♠ to my J, I cash ♠AK, play the ♥2 to dummy’s K and partner’s A. Partner cashes the ♣A and returns another ♥. I cash another 2 rounds of ♥. Now West claims the rest of the tricks for -2200, 4 down.

I don’t claim that this was good bridge from either side, but how often do you get +2200?

Dank zweier guter Ergebnisse am letzten Wochenende konnten wir uns nochmal auf Platz 4 vorarbeiten. Den Kampf gegen Saarbrücken 84 2 konnten wir daheim spielen und so eine Übernachtung sparen. In der ersten Halbzeit lagen wir noch 22 hinten, um dann aufzuholen und mit 18:12 SP zu gewinnen.

In Frankfurt spielten wir gegen Makkabi 2 eine brauchbare 1. Halbzeit (6 hinten bei moderaten Umsätzen). Die 2. Halbzeit war dann mehr oder weniger katastrophal für Makkabi (zumindest an unserem Tisch lagen die Fehler fast alle beim Gegner), so dass wir mit 22:8 SP gewinnen konnten.

Das Liga-Movement wurde immer wieder diskutiert. Die Kritik ist, dass man nicht gegen alle Gegner spielt, sondern das ganze einen Pokal-Touch hat. Ich habe mal die Gesamttabelle ausgerechnet - hier liegt der Gewinner (Hanau 2) nur noch auf dem 4. Platz, wobei die nächsten drei um jeweils eins aufrücken. Da Hanau 7 von 8 Kämpfen gewonnen hat (die 15 ist eine 15+), sei ihnen der Sieg natürlich gegönnt.

I should have started this blog about a year ago or so just to have something that documents my progress learning this fascinating game. I haven’t decided yet whether this should be in English or German. I guess it will be a mix with English for the more general stuff and German for tournament results, schaun mer mal :)

It all began in May 2004 with Sigi talking about Skat and Doppelkopf in his dancing club, when a friend told him to try Bridge. He then joined a beginners course and asked me to join. After the second session (too much Minibridge in the first one ;-) I knew I loved the game. Together with a few others we (Sigi and I) quickly went through a crash course in bidding and basic playing techniques in a few weeks that would normally have lasted over a year. Thanks Regine :-)

I don't remember exactly when we played the first tournament in the club, but it must have been something like August '04. Our goal was not to become last one, and from memory, we exactly did that. The expectations quickly raised, soon we scored around or above 50% most of the time. I won my first club tournament in January '05 with Regine. A very nice result was in August '05 when we scored 8th in a field of 91 pairs at a pub tournament in Koblenz (Regine and Frederic were 1st).

I guess since about 3/4 of a year I can really tell the difference between MPs and IMPs. Having soon discovered BBO (I'm Myon there), and regularly playing team events in Dudweiler, we learned to love IMPs and very much prefer that scoring. We now playing for team 1 of the Saarbrücken 65 club together with Klaus and Arno, and absolutely unexpectedly, have just won 72 out of 75 victory points at the first three matches in Frankfurt. We probably won't benefit too much from that, though, since these three teams probably won't make it into the final round, and the remaining two teams seem to be stronger. Judging from the recent team results in the Dudweiler club, and the (few) butler results in the Saarbrücken 84 club, we seem to be good at IMPs. Compare that with the 32% MP result last week ;-)

We are currently playing a 5 Majors system with a 15-17 NT, developed by Thomas Schmitt. He trusts us enough that we edit the system script and will usually accept new stuff. We were having a look at Moscito recently, but at the moment I don't feel like going into bidding more, at the current level I'm at, declarer play is much more important (you have to make the contracts you bid, after all...). Defense also could be improved, though I should practise declarer play much more judging from the hands that I could have made had I given more care to the opponents' discards.

Together with teams from Halle/Saale and BUM Mannheim, we were playing team matches on BBO in the past weeks, usually on Sundays. I'd like to have more teams join us there, if you are interested, please subscribe to the bbo-team list.