Bridge players are more familiar with technology than ever before . A bit like learning to walk – instinct and hunger for what we want to do, be and have, leads us to search, try & repeat. And with practice, necessity turns into familiarity, brings confidence and soon becomes a habit we don’t even realise we have.

The evolution of technology supporting competitive bridge has been rapid.

Players are now extremely familiar with how to buy, attend sessions and review multiple pages quickly

In the early days of lockdown, we ran a number of club duplicates online to the prescription by the organising committee – short term solutions replicating the club experience – one set of deals shared through the online session, no results until after play, some form of upload to the club’s website.

Live rankings are becoming the norm for club sessions as well as tournaments

The second lockdown brought out the later adopters. Strengthened by their friends playing online, most got on board as well. Perhaps the tales of great deals, maybe confidence built watching friends play, or maybe it was simply desire for some access to our great game. For certain, by the time 90% of our players in the club were trying some form of online bridge, competence and access to assorted smart devices and laptops had reached an unprecedented level. Doctors appointments, grocery shopping, family contact and online courses mean that today every bridge player is using a smart device – we cannot avoid it!

All of this has meant a tremendous speed of change for bridge. And I lament the withdrawal of access to our fix when we return to face to face.

Firmly believing that there can only be a strong future for our wonderful game if we keep with the times, here at IBE we have invested in our own brand of a SMARTPHONE APP to electronically score duplicates.

We are very excited  about it. Not only can it score easily any game, but it alleviates any need for table cards and paper travellers and scorecards.

The App is free for players and operates from a cloud server giving a low cost solution that means any game can be set up and run from any smart device reducing the need for a laptop, printer or display screen.

The game output can be uploaded to the national association for masterpoint processing. Deals can be added as a file, or manually if hand dealing. Support links  go direct to a bridge specialist – available to help with in-session scoring & movement queries and simultaneous online/f2f integration & rankings, director consultations, player table money queries etc.

And it can integrate with other tools we offer to give players a access to view their wallet status, top-up, book to play in the club, or online at sessions and score. Players will have a dedicated web space to do this.

So that’s CASH-LESS, PAPER-FREE, INFORMATION-RICH bridge to bring to your players

All in all we think it is a really simple way to get the game necessary done in a hassle-free way so that everyone can get on with the important job – playing cards well!