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BBO Insider News: April 2019

Warmest April greeting to all our BBO insiders! This is the second issue of our monthly newsletter, where we’ll loop BBOers into all the BBO buzz and share what Team BBO has been up to.

Memphis Robot

The North American Bridge Championship (NABC) may have had its early start as a North American competitor to the various European Bridge powerhouse championships, but has since become quite an international affair. Each NABC is now increasingly well-attended by top internationalists eager to hone their skills and test their wits against the best of the best.

Take the recent Spring NABC (Memphis 2019) as an example. The top ACBL Masterpoint winner was still American great Steve Garner (Garner) with 304.51 MP after a stunning Vanderbilt victory, but his Vandy teammates the British pair Peter Crouch and Alexander Hydes were a close second with 284.57 MP each.

Many readers already know BBO hosts the only online NABC event and our NABC Robot Individual is the opening event in each NABC calendar. This Spring 2019’s championship attracted a total of 1920 BBOers. Mimicking the international flavor of the real life events, almost 5% of our NABC Robot Individual participants were international ACBL members (which means they are not from USA, Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda, the 4 ACBL countries) representing 39 countries. International players have to jump through far more hoops than local players to accomplish equivalent results – if you think it’s hard to win silver points, try doing it from Bulgaria. 🥴 BBO is international and all our players are equally appreciated and welcomed, but I think a special recognition is due to the 90 or so players who went out of their way to participate in essentially a North American event.

Memphis 2019 stats

About 2000 BBOers (that we know about!) participated in either the BBO hosted NABC Robot Individual or travelled to Memphis for some real life fun at the NABC. We did a piechart of Masterpoints won in the entire NABC (Online and Offline). Surprising absolutely nobody, the NY powerhouse district (D24) won the most masterpoints this time. District 9 BBOers were second, and District 10, fueled by home field advantages, powered to third place. International BBOers easily placed in the top half with a ninth place showing. 

Double crowned

The final result of 2019’s first NABC Robot Individual can be found here.

By now we all know Alex Perlin (Ashdown4) has seized the title again in an unexpected victory, making him the first two time champion in the short history of the event. Alex was also the winner of the Summer 2018 NABC Robot Individual and is an accomplished player from New Jersey.

Don’t miss his post event interview.

Pizza Party

Pizza Pizza Pizza!

Who likes pizza? Who doesn’t!

In the past we’ve usually stuck to giving away the traditional BB$ prizes that can be used on anything in BBO. A few select players have won a rare T-shirts or pens and such. But we’ve never given away mmm…pizza. Some crazy things happened at the beginning of this year that we didn’t actually get to tell you. To make a long story short, we were strongly warned BB$ prizes were not kosher and may be considered gambling, which we want no part of.


Instead of the morally ambiguous BB$, our first ACBL Daylong contest gave away the unequivocally delectable pizza prize to two winners, Microcap and Daun212. Both players are longtime BBOers who have earned enough BBO points to be be awarded “BBO Royalty” titles – Microcap is a BBO Queen, and Daun212 a BBO Jack.


Daun lives in Indonesia where his prize should buy a veritable feast for his chosen bridge club. That’s going to be one big BBO party for our Indonesian BBOers!


Micro was the first of the two winners to respond and is very excited about earning the prize for his local club, the Rockville [MD] DBC. He says “My actual name is Jay Weinstein, and apparently, when food is the prize instead of masterpoints, I am the best bridge player in the world.  The numbers don’t lie. If the next prize for the NABC Online tourney includes a trip to an all-you-can eat Indian buffet, then I am guaranteed to take down Alex Perlin.” His full winner feature can be found here. 


Well, the next NABC Robot Individual will be held in conjunction with everyone’s favorite destination, the Las Vegas NABC extravaganza, so you never know Jay – your buffet wish may yet materialize. Until then, you can be proud of being your club’s…gluten-free breadwinner. So to speak!

The Next Big Thing

If you go to our website, www.bridgebase.com, you’ll see a message urging you to try the new BBO. That’s our next big thing. If you actually start using it, what you’ll notice is this version is extremely similar to the mobile app version. In fact it is the same code base so the 50% of BBOers who already use our mobile app will have no trouble adjusting. The changes are mainly behind-the-scenes; instead of the universally panned Flash code, we redid BBO completely using HTML. The end result is an ultra lightweight BBO client that loads lightning fast and uses much less bandwidth.


This month, we’ve even thrown in a secret sauce sweetener. If you play on BBO using this brand new client, you will not be subject to the Free Daylong tournament limit (other clients limit to 3/week). Don’t miss this chance to switch to the new client and get some extra games in! Uday is planning more nifty stuff for the first wave of players so you may see even more goodies soon if you start using the new client.

Cheating investigators

Behind The Scenes – Cheating Investigation

We believe in protecting the integrity of this beautiful game. Practically, I hope everyone understands that with 100,000 people playing millions of hands a day, there is no way we can supervise every single hand. If we try to be everywhere, we will be nowhere, so we have chosen to prioritize the premium tournaments that award BBO points.

For many years now, we have relied on 2 experienced investigators who happen to be expert players in their own right and supplement them with our own Fred Gitelman.


And then 2 years ago we realized deal security can be enhanced and premium games made extremely cheat resistant with the introduction of “Deal Pool” games. Deal pool means in a given tournament, there may be 20 or so instances of board 1, 2, 3 etc, so your board 1 may not be the same as your friend’s. It’s like taking the SATs or GMATs, kinda, sorta. We refine this concept for our big event, the NABC but I don’t want to really publish all details here. 🙂 Games with deal pools are as safe as they can get, from the security point of view.


More recently, we decided to augment our procedures. Two more experts were added to the roster (essentially doubling our investigative capacity). Our most interesting cases were then written up for the team to study, and our most experienced investigator begin to decant his decade of experience and methodology for us. All these to emphasize our determination to keep these games safe. We are, all of us, stewards of Bridge and need to do our part to preserve the sanctity of the game for the next generation.

Mollo Quiz

Once A Year, on April’s First…

If you have not read Victor Mollo’s Bridge in the Menagerie, here’s a strong (redoubled) recommend. Beg, borrow, but don’t steal. Just read it. This classic tale depicts unforgettable characters like the snarky Hideous Hog, fortune’s favorite the Rueful Rabbit, the generationally-cursed Karapet and more as denizens of the Griffins Bridge Club. Do you know which of those characters you are closest to? Take our special quiz to find out! 

In case you missed it, that was our annual April Fools Day joke, a tradition I began in 2012 with the “BBO Beer/Scotch Program”. I feel expansive. Anyone up for a stroll through memory’s lanes?

April Fools

2012

Welcome to the Beer/Scotch (BS) Program, the program that started it all.


2013

We announced BBO SimCity Edition. (Unfortunately our “cutting edge” BBO city graphics were lost. Maybe global warming ate it.)


2014

This was an amazing year. Where did all that youthful energy go?

First we announced BBO Organics – the world’s healthiest bridge club.

Next we introduced our new BBO Jewelry collection, a limited edition holiday special (buy one get one fee!)

And then the new Artistic Bridge event to be added to the WBF official competition calendar.

Finally we released the official news for the “Six Degrees of Bob Hamman World Championship”, an event easily won by BBO comedian Slothy.


2015

This was the year we told everyone about our upcoming Character Robot rental. The cute supporting pictures have vanished, pity. This was one product I really hoped to see produced.


2016

In 2016 we debuted BBOFlix, the world’s biggest collection of on demand bridge movies. Comedy, Horror, Drama. It’s all available right on BBO.

2017

This was the year we gave you Bridge Base Fast Forward (Bridge BFF), the option to skip all the boring bits and jump to the interesting stuff rightaway. Turns out not everyone likes having a Bridge BFF.


2018

Last year we made it snow in BBO. If you happened to be playing on the right client, at the right time, you would experience an interesting weather effect. Better online than in real life!


That concludes our quick tour of the funny side of BBO town. See you all in May. And since some folk wrote in last month to say the editor has to sign the newsletter, I remain,


Yours truly

Rain Lan (BBOer Rain)

(BBO Product Manager)