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Hand of the Week

Gordon Bower published a "hand of the week" column for the members of the Farthest North Bridge Club from 2008 to 2010, and revived it for a while in Idaho in 2014.

The column is currently on hiatus — in fact, it may or may not ever resume — but bridge players around the world stumbled across the column, and the past few years it has been one of the leading sources of traffic for the TaigaBridge website.

The original columns are all still available (unedited from the form they originally appeared, and not converted into modern CSS-formatted HTML) at their original URLs, via the links below.

Attention webmasters and bridge teachers: if you want to reprint these columns on your website or in your newsletter, write to me and ask for permission unless you want me to come at you with a chip on my shoulder and a big precision club in my hand.


Browse previous hands of the week by year of publication:

2014: 407 406 405 404 403 402 401
2010: 310 309 308 307 306 305 304 303 302 301
2009: 232 231 230 229 228 227 226 225 224 223 222 221 220 219 218 217 216 215 214 213 212 211 210 209 208 207 206 205 204 203 202 201
2008: 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Index by level and theme:

BeginningIntermediateAdvanced
Bidding 405 311 307 301 231 227 222 215 214 210 202 33 30 19 17 15 8 6 4 407 403 402 310 309 304 232 220 216 212 211 205 204 201 27 21 19 18 16 9 2 224 221 219 32 26 5
Declarer Play 306 206 26 404 305 230 225 223 217 207 203 31 29 27 24 20 3 1 209 13
Defense 229 218 34 25 401 311 308 302 226 213 208 28 23 22 14 11 10 7 406 303 228 12

Index by specific topics:

What's different about writing bridge hands in modern HTML?

In the old days, the only way to post suit symbols was by saving four suit symbols in your Images directory. This works fine, as long as your suit symbols happen to be the same size as the text next to them.

But these days, the preferred way is to use a font that includes the Unicode symbols for the four suits, and use the ♠, ♥, ♦, and ♣ strings directly in your text. That way, the suit symbols always scale with the text — even the suit symbols in the TaigaBridge logo at the top of the page are text symbols, not graphics. It also makes pages load faster, if they require fewer HTTP requests.

In the old days we used <nobreak> tags to "glue" the suit symbol to the number before it or the cards after it, so that a line break wouldn't come between the "3" and the "" of 3. Now we do this by placing the "3" and the "" inside a <span> that has had the white-space: nowrap; property set in the stylesheet.

This page last edited 26.04.17
(last new hand: 29.04.14)