[helene_t]

Not sure if this belongs in this forum.

Sometimes my p and I meet at home with another pair for some friendly bridge. To play duplicate with only four people we borrow a suitcase with cards that have been played at a local club so we can compare our score to the traveler. Obviously the logistics of this is awkward and would be impossible if we didn't live in a city with a local club that provides this service.

I was thinking of a way to integrate play with physical cards with the online duplicate environment of BBO or a similar online bridge site. It would go like this:

1: Download a sesion of recently played boards (from vugraph or main room or whatever) into a tablet.

2: Shuffle a standard pack of cards.

3: Deal the cards by presenting each of the cards to the tablet's camera. The tablet names the player that gets that card.

4: Bid the board, using the tablet as a bidding pad (alternatively, use bidding boxes or verbal bidding and just enter the final contract on the tablet if you prefer).

5: Play the board by presenting each card to the tablet's camera (alternatively, play them out normally and just enter the number of tricks won by declarer.

Such an app could be used in many scenarios:

One of the four players unable to attend physically: he could sit at home playing the cards on bbo while the three others play in the normal playing area.

Or, say, North-East in one house and South-West in another.

Serious tournament: One could use this to mimic screens by having one tablet in each room, as discussed on bridgewinners at the moment. The cards would then be machine dealt rather than dealt manually using the tablet.

Obviously this is more awkward than just playing on BBO, but you get to play with real paper cards, and you only need one tablet per table.