¶ Tournaments
Tournaments are the heart of competitive bridge on Bridge Champ: pairs, individuals, teams, team matches, bots-only events you play at your own pace, and vugraph broadcasts.
📋 At a glance
What it is: Scheduled events with rounds, movements and rankings, run by a director or by the platform.
Who it is for: Every player. Many events are free; some charge a small entry fee in credits.
You will need: An account. A partner for pairs events, a team for teams events.
¶ Overview
Open Tournaments in the left menu. The page has six tabs: All, Running, Kibitz (events you can watch), Scheduled, Over and My (everything you registered for or created, including team matches, which do not appear in the general lists). The filter column narrows the list by date, club, scoring method, bots, type, price and number of boards. Tournaments that repeat automatically carry a ⧉ mark.
¶ Tournament types
- Pairs: you and a fixed partner against the field.
- Individuals: partners rotate every round.
- Teams: several teams of four or more compete; each team leader seats the players from the tournament page.
- Team Match: one match between two teams, arranged on a single page. See Start Team Match.
- Bots: you play against bots within a time window, at your own pace.
- Vugraph: a live broadcast of a match for spectators. See Vugraph.
Any type can be set to Minibridge, and a Goulash option deals wilder hands. Pairs and teams events can run with virtual screens, which separate North-East from South-West the way real screens do, when the organiser switches them on. Spectators of a running tournament see the play with a delay, so kibitzing cannot influence a board in progress.
¶ How to join a tournament
¶ Step 1: Open the tournament page
Click a tournament card. The page shows the organiser, when play starts, the directors, and a strip with the club, date, time, fee, bots policy, rounds, boards, Deals (random, preset or template generated), board time, scoring, type and movement. The organiser's description is shown on phones too.
¶ Step 2: Register
Click Register. Depending on the type you register alone, with a partner, or with your team. When you pick a partner, players who are already registered are not offered. Once registered you appear under Registered Users and two buttons replace Register: Cancel Registration and Join the Lobby. If your registration is cancelled, you and your partner are notified.
Events with an entry fee: when the tournament charges credits, Register opens a small window that says Playing costs so many credits, shows your current balance, and has a Pay button. If you are short, it tells you how many more credits you need and offers Open wallet, where you can buy credits by card. Cancel your registration and the fee goes back to your balance. See Game Credits.
ACBL sanctioned tournaments: some play-with-bots events award ACBL masterpoints. They carry an entry fee set by the number of boards, and Undo and the suit split are switched off for everyone. The registration window tells you whether the masterpoints will reach you: your Bridge Champ account needs a linked ACBL number that is verified and present in the ACBL roster. See ACBL Masterpoints on Bridge Champ.
Teams events: the team leader creates a team, or seats an existing one, right on the tournament page, invites players, adds bots where the event allows them, and can change who plays each round. Invited players are taken straight to the tournament. This also works in the mobile app.
¶ Step 3: Play
When the lobby opens, join it and wait for the director to start. In a Bots tournament you are taken to your table as soon as you register and can start at once.
¶ Step 4: Pause and continue (flexible-time tournaments)
Bots tournaments run for a long window. Click Leave to pause: the board you are on is stored. When you come back to the tournament page it says you are already registered, and the button reads Continue instead of Play Now. Click it to go on from the exact board where you stopped. The same applies to challenges.
¶ Good to know
- Cancelled tournaments. A director can cancel a tournament before it starts. Everybody who registered is refunded automatically, and the event disappears from the lists.
- Tournament chat. The Chat button on the table has four tabs: TABLE, TOURNAMENT, CLUB and PRIVATE. Directors can message all players and post announcements in the tournament chat, and the greeting they wrote when creating the event is shown to you. Stand-in players can use the chat too. In a Private chat, click the other player's name or picture to open their profile, where you can follow, message or challenge them.
- Leaving a tournament table is allowed, but leaving others stranded mid-board is recorded on your profile with the reason you give.
- Results open on the standings over all rounds. Once you have finished your boards, the results open by themselves as soon as you leave the table. Pairs that played only some of the boards are listed below the full field, and Butler standings show the IMPs per board. In an ACBL sanctioned event the results also show a Masterpoints column, the section and the strat, a note that the points are reported to the ACBL at the beginning of next month, and a link, View your ACBL masterpoints. See Game Results.
- Creating your own. Click Create Tournament and pick one of six tiles. Bridge Champ opens the new tournament's page as soon as you save. See Create Tournament.
¶ Related guides
- Game Results
- Sharing and QR Codes
- Teams
- Create Tournament
- Tournament Settings: every field explained
- Challenges
Questions? Write to info@bridgechamp.com.