An individual bridge game can be a very powerful teaching tool for the bridgeur who has learned to make use of it.

Perhaps more than players of games like Monopoly, bridge players eventually learn to pay attention to singular games and how they were played.

As bridge players, we view our past games, and sometimes we play through them more than once.

If you have never done so, there’s plenty of good reasons why you should – replay the same games from time-to-time, that is.

Thanks to the internet, individual games and boards are easier to share than ever before.

Here’s why it’s a good idea for bridge players to replay their online bridge games from the past.

1. Retrospect

Retrospect is defined as the action of looking back at something, usually with the thought of how you could have done things in an alternate way – and to achieve a different result.

Life doesn’t have rewrites, replays, or try-again chances in many situations.

I can’t go back in time and prevent my uncle from being shot.

But I can replay a previous bridge game for the retrospect and playing experience.

If you play the same game twice, odds are you’ll undergo an important learning experience.

2. Levelling up

Even though there’s no official progress bar for getting through life, imagine that your experience grows by a few percentiles every time you play another bridge game.

If you practice more often, you’ll eventually get better at something.

There are other factors involved in physically improving, but that’s the simple way to place cause-and-effect into a single paragraph.

Are you a superior bridge player than you used to be five or ten years ago?

Replay an old game and find out.

3. Record your mistakes

Replays are important to view for the good moves you can make now, but also for the mistakes that you might still play going forward.

There’s a point in every game where you might have thought, “Well, that was bad.”

I’ve had it, and I could bet that you have, too.

Replays are where we record these mistakes, and how we get to improve them on the next try.

It’s bridge, not skydiving.

Have you gone back into the past to replay any of your past, electronic bridge games before – or will you make your first replay pretty soon?