I might be too young to have been there, but even I can tell that bridge isn’t the same game as it was twenty or thirty years ago. Other than what I’d imagine are changes in what bidding style is most popular where, bridge today has the advantage of technology.

Here are a few technological boosts the game didn’t have way back when.

Free Bridge Lessons

If you wanted to learn bridge decades back, it meant you had to know someone who played – and someone who was a decent teacher. Sure, you could teach yourself from a book, but the lack of a bridge partner or opponent would limit your learning pretty fast.

Today, bridge lessons and teachers are easier to access and there are some truly great free bridge lessons to get new players started on their journey (or more experienced players to up their game).

ACBL Learn to Play Bridge

Speaking of free bridge lessons, modern times has also given us software to make learning the game easier. One of the best options is the interactive ACBL Learn to Play Bridge teacher – free to access online.

(Source: ACBL)

Scoring Smartphones

The addition of smartphones to bridge might very well have changed the game – or at least created an entirely new facet of being able to play online. At the same time, it’s also made things like scoring a lot easier.

MyACBL

Record-keeping and accessing these records in the blink of an eye is easier today than it ever was before. The advent of MyACBL, accessible online, means that you can have statistics to brag with right off the internet: In the fifties the  first question would have been, “What in the hell is an internet?”

YouTube

The introduction of YouTube means you can watch bridge – or learn bridge – anywhere you want. It also means that really embarrassing moments in video form can last online forever, but hey, there’s a downside to almost everything.

Streaming

Can you imagine what ancient times would have been like if we had streaming? We either would have evolved at a faster rate, or sat around our screens watching other people doing cooler things.

Streaming means you can watch or broadcast a bridge game without as much effort as you might imagine. It comes with the same downside of YouTube, though: Stupidity can also be broadcast, streamed, recorded and voted upon.

Better Bot Bidding

Today, we have bridge bots: Decades back, the closest we got were automatons or tables that looked like they were heavily haunted. We also have better bot bidding, with bidding and AI thought improving regularly. Just one example is a newer 2019 study called “Competitive Bridge Bidding with Deep Neural Networks” available at the link. (Source: ARXIV.org)

Trolls

Not all technological advances are great. There have always been unpleasant people out there – and certainly unpleasant people at the bridge table – but today, it’s easier for them to be frustrating. Trolls aren’t just under bridges, but sometimes at the bridge game too.

Luckily technology has also given us the banhammer (and report buttons everywhere) to deal with trolls when and where you spot them.