What are Instant Tournaments?

Instant Tournament is a new take on bridge tournaments - play a tournament anytime and earn points without waiting for partners or opponents!

Choose from ACBL or BBO, MP or IMP

Instant Robot tournaments combine the best of a tournament and a single player game. When you start an Instant Tournament game, you will be dealt deals from a past tournament you have not played before, and have your scores compared against 14 players in those tourneys. If you do well, you receive masterpoints.

• BBO Instant Tournaments award BBO Points, are 8-board long and have a small BB$ entry fee.
• ACBL Instant Tournaments award ACBL masterpoints and BBO Points. You can play up to 2 ACBL Instant Tournaments an hour, they are 12-board long and have a BB$ entry fee.
• You can choose to play IMP or MP versions of the tournament.

Weekly Free Instant Tournament

Once a week on Friday morning, a new, free instant robot tournament is uploaded. You can play as many times as you like. The free version does not offer points.

Game specifics

• This game is Best Hand - your hand will always contain at least the same HCP as the next highest HCP hand.
• It is also Human Declare - when North wins the contract, South(you!) will declare instead.
• There is no time limit for the tournament. However, if you are idle for a long time, you will be disconnected from BBO and the game is forfeited.

About the robots

The robots used on BBO are called GIB (Ginsberg's Intelligent Bridgeplayer). GIB is widely considered to be one of the best computer bridge programs ever created. It is occasionally capable of brilliance. It is also occasionally capable of some really poor bids and plays (just like all human players).

Some players may find it frustrating if a particular robot partner plays especially poorly (or if a particular robot opponent plays especially well) on a given hand, but, these things will even themselves over time. We think that our robots plays at least as well as the average BBO member. In simulations, our robots currently average over 55% in a duplicate tournament setting.

The GIBs used on BBO play a relatively simple and natural 2/1 bidding system. You can find out the meaning of any bid by clicking on that bid as it appears in the bidding diagram. Furthermore,when it is your turn to bid, moving your mouse over the buttons for the various possible bids will cause an explanation of the bid you are considering (as your GIB partner will understand it) to be displayed. These explanations can be somewhat cryptic, but reading them carefully before you bid will help you to avoid misunderstandings with your robot  partner.

You can find out more about GIB's bidding system by clicking here.