If you’re brand new to BBO, this tutorial may help. Jim Negro wrote it for his winter club in Albuquerque (thank you, Jim!), so substitute “Westwood/Puritan/Cape” for “Duke City.”

When you’re ready to dive in, first register on BBO:

• Go to bridgebase.com
• click Login / Register
• click Become a member (free!)
• be sure to enter your ACBL number*

Play is quite intuitive, but you might benefit from some other tutorials and/or some “Solitaire” or “Casual” play to learn the ropes.

If you’d like more help getting started, please contact Tim Hill by phone (781-929-7673) or email (thill75@wesleyan.edu).

*(If you don’t have an ACBL member, you can click here to get one for free.)

Registration opens two hours before game time. Best to register early, especially the first time. Both partners must be logged into BBO. One registers, inviting the other. The other accepts the invitation.

• On the BBO Home page, click Virtual Clubs and then ACBL—North America. (Alternatively, click Competitive and then ACBL Virtual Clubs.) It should show you just the games you’re eligible to play in.*
• Click Westwood/Puritan/Cape. Type your partner’s BBO user name. Optionally tick “I will pay for both myself and partner.” Click Invite.
• You should see “Invitation in progress. Please wait…” Your partner should see “… Do you accept?” and should click Accept. The game title should turn yellow.*
  • (The invitation will go away if it isn’t accepted in about 30 seconds. Try again.)
• Be sure you’re back logged into BBO a few minutes before game time.
  • The game won’t start on time if anybody is offline. If we can’t find an offline player within a couple minutes of the scheduled start, we have to unregister offline players so the game can start promptly for everybody else.

*If you don’t see our game, or you get an error message indicating you or your partner isn’t eligible, see below.

Warning: Buy BB$ via a browser, not an app (unless you like paying outrageous surcharges to Apple or Google).

Need a partner? Go to the registration page for our game (see above) and click Partnership Desk (at the right end of the line above the registration form). If you don’t hook up with someone immediately, then put your name on the list, stay logged into BBO, and watch for an invitation or a message.

The online alert procedure works very well if you know how to use it efficiently, but it’s radically different from the face-to-face procedure. The basic idea is that you alert and explain your own bids. Never alert or explain your partner’s bids—that’s her job. Your alerts and explanations are shown only to your opponents, never to your partner. With self-alerts, you can fully inform your opponents about your agreements (as required by Law and “Active Ethics”) without making unauthorized information available to your partner. Here are the details:

• Alert by clicking Alert in your bidding box before clicking your bid. Type a concise explanation in the space provided. (As in face-to-face play, it’s better to say what a bid means, not name a convention.)
• “Alert” anything that requires an alert or an announcement in face-to-face play (including the range of a 1NT opening, a Jacoby or Texas transfer, and a forcing 1NT response). Feel free to “over-alert.”
• If you forgot to alert, then, as soon as you remember, click on your bid (in the bidding diagram) and type a brief explanation.
• To request further information about an opponent’s bid (alerted or not), click on the bid.
• If asked about your bid, please answer promptly.
• If you need to explain something with a message, chat →Opponents, not →Table.