Option 1:

Option 2:

Option 2 is more consistent with the order of the suits in tournament bidding boxes, where as option 1 is in reading order.

Which would you prefer for your blogging tools?

To submit your vote you can visit our facebook page at www.facebook.com/BridgeBlogging or you can comment to this thread with your vote.

If you are a blogger and you have a generic face and would like to rectify this with sending us a photograph, please do so! You can email a picture to myself (luise@masterpointpress.com) or lisa (lisa@masterpointpress.com) and we will add your photo for the world to see.

I formally apologize to anyone who has sent an email to support@bridgeblogging.com since last Sunday, as your email has vanished into the internet black hole. The email address is fully restored now and if you resend your mail, I promise you, I will receive it this time! However, just to be safe, you could also cc luise@masterpointpress.com and one of us will tend to your blogging needs as soon as possible.

Oh boy… what a headache this move has been! There is a bright side to all of this — I do believe that we are nearing the end and thanks to the help of our very talented programmer, I believe the final result will be an improvement to the old design. Thanks, John, for all of your hard work!

Some of you may have noticed some strange behaviours on the bridge blogging website this weekend.  Our planned maintenance did not go as smoothly as we had hoped.   The upgrade took slightly longer than anticipated and we still have a few kinks here and there to work out.  We appreciate your patience while we work out the last few kinks and get everything running as smoothly as it was before.

We hope that in the end what we will be left with is a faster, more reliable server with updated blogging software.

If you are experiencing any difficulties with your blog, please contact us at support@bridgeblogging.com to let us know of the problem that you are experiencing.

I don’t really know much about bridge players or where all the talent is, so I am basing my decisions on which countries to pick based solely on the nationality of the majority of the faces that are present in the monthly publication BRIDGE Magazine for which I am given the honour of creating and beautifying every month.  I frequently see names of the following nationalities, so these are my picks for the contest!  (In case you are wondering… Employees of MPP are allowed to ENTER the contest, but we’re not allowed to win any of the wonderful prizes .

USA (everyone gets the USA)

Italy

Germany

Sweeden

Netherlands

Norway

I have some news regarding changes that I recently made to the way our hand diagrams are generated from the blog editor.  Clicking on the spade symbol in editing mode to edit your hand diagrams works the same way as it did before, but the resulting diagram is slightly different in the way it is coded and displayed.  Hopefully this change won’t have any negative impact to you in the way that you compose your blogs.  The change should result in hand diagrams that are slightly easier to read, since I have reduced the font size to a normal size.

Another benefit of this change is that your blog posts will now be more readable to those viewing the blogs on our facebook page, as the hands, suits and suit symbols will now be displayed in a more logical order when viewing the blogs from facebook.

These changes will only take effect to any new blog posts that are made.  If you with to manually edit your previously created blog posts, you may do so by creating a new hand diagram and copying and pasting from the old to the new, and then highlight and delete the old diagrams.

If you encounter difficulties with the recent change, or if you just have any questions or comments, feel free to post those to this blog, or email me at support@bridgeblogging.com.

Did I ever tell you why I quit playing bridge in the first place? I remember I was in university at the time. My parents and grandparents had tried to teach me bridge numerous times prior, but it was not until I actually saw my peers playing at the card tables that I actually took an interest in the game in the first place. Anyway, I took a few lessons from Eric Sutherland, who was a senior at the time that I knew him… I learned enough that my friend and I used a simple system, and there was a university tournament being arranged in the “big city” (Toronto) and we were all going on a field trip! As a small-town girl, it sounded like great fun to me. I was looking forward to it.

I was so nervous that I would make a mistake (This was well before I learned the lesson that every mistake is merely an opportunity for learning). Anyway… on the second or third board that we played, the dreadful sound “DIRECTOR!” emitted from my opponents mouth. I had never heard this before… What does it mean? The harsh tone that it was spoken with clued me in that this was not a pleasant word and that something very bad was about to happen. A very tall and intimidating gentleman appeared, spoke to my opponent, spoke to me (which was impossible because my brain shut off and I was rambling jibberish by then) and the director ruled against me.

It didn’t help matters that this particular director behaved inappropriately, was curt and rude to me, and said directly “I don’t believe you” after I gave him my explanation for my line of play.  Eric Sutherland was also a director at that same event.  When he noticed the goings on at our table, he came by.  I proceeded to give the same explanation, and he made the same ruling as the first director, but at least he had a meaningful explanation: When you said “Ace, no small…  No, play the ace”,  you paused after you said “play small”, so that must be the card that we accept”.

I was distraught with the whole experience. It took all the strength I could muster to make it through the rest of the board, going down in a cold 3NT, before I had to excuse myself and go have a good cry in the hallway.

That was my one and only experience with playing in a bridge tournament.  It will be a very, very long time before I choose to go back to that situation again.

Album: Live Bait  1997

When I look around me,  I can’t believe what I see.

But we can still stand proudly ’cause Canada’s really big!

We’re the second largest country

Then soon we’ll be first! (as long as we keep Quebec)

The USA has tanks, and Switzerland has banks

It isn’t what you do with it, it’s the size that counts!

Most people will tell you that France is pretty large,

But you can put fourteen Frances into this land of ours!

(it’d take a lotta work, it’d take a whole lotta work)

We’re larger than Malaysia, almost as big as Asia

But we often go to other countries for vacations…

Our mountains are very pointy,

But, man, do we have a lot!

(we gotta lot of land, we gotta whole lot of land)

So stand up and be proud

Canada’s really big!

Phase 1 Includes:

• New Places: We’ve divided our Bridge Bloggers from the rest of the feeds we carry, to make it easier for you to follow your favorite bloggers. If you don’t have a favorite blogger yet, you’ll be able to read posts from our new Featured Bloggers section, now appearing at the top of the page!
• New Spaces: The old, narrow Bridgeblogging.com is a thing of the past. We’ve expanded our site to fill the whole screen (and we’ve made the text bigger, too)! We’ve also moved a few things around – you can now find our list of bloggers at the bottom on the page, while syndicated newspaper columns are all in the sidebar.
• New Faces: Besides all the wonderful new color on the page, we’re going to be including pictures of our bloggers with all their posts. So sitting down to read Aces on Bridge, for example, will be more like having a face-to-face chat with Bobby Wolff. Exciting!

In Phase 2 (coming soon!), we’ll be adding more photos, archiving old posts on the main page, decreasing page loading times, and implementing a few other neat tricks to improve your Bridgeblogging experience.

Do you have a suggestion for Phase 2? Be sure to e-mail us at support@bridgeblogging.com! Or, you can post your ideas on my blog, or on our BridgeBlogging Facebook page.

Partner led the ♥3 and here’s what I see:

Dealer: Vul:		North (me)
		♠	Q632
		♥	106
		♦	K962
		♣	432
West (Dummy)				East
♠	AKJ10			♠
♥	J5			♥
♦	54			♦
♣	KJ1096			♣

The declarer plays the ♥ J from dummy which holds, (declarer contributing the 7), and leads the ♦4.

What do you play, and why?

I was thinking about the problem and I couldn’t figure out why Declarer played the ♦4.  What was he thinking?    Is this a quick trip to his ♦A so he can finesse in spades or clubs?  And what does Partner have for his 1♥ bid?

Of course, all of these questions needed to be answered before I played to the first card…  I’ll continue the story later.