Micro Bridge 13.40

by Tomio and Yumiko Uchida

The Creators

At university, Tornio majored in computer science and Yumiko in Yumiko in mathematics. They both learned to play bridge while at university and they used to go to tournaments, although they are self-confessed average players at most. Micro Bridge, which is their private project, began as a network play tool to help them improve their own bridge skills and partnership.

Micro Bridge takes Gold for first time, Synrey Bridge takes Silver third year in row. Wbridge5, Yves Costel developer and Q-Plus Bridge, Hans Leber developer settle for Bronze. Gérard Joyez, developer of Bridge Monitor, accepts the Gold Medal for Micro Bridge, Tomio Uchida developer.

The Software

They started developing Micro Bridge in 1982. "These were the days before DOS, and they used BASIC for the user interface, but that was too slow for play engine so we wrote it in Assembler. In 1984, they completed the double-dummy algorithm, and year later produced their first DOS version. Micro Bridge 3.0, in 1986, was the first commercial version.

They introduced a duplicate-game mode to Micro Bridge in conjunction with the JCBL. This enabled users to compare their results with actual teams matches or pairs tournament results, The JCBL each year offers data disks that contain hands and results of major tournaments. I think Micro Bridge was the first program to have such a feature.

In 1986, they adopted the Monte Carlo simulation method to produce fair play. This was their original idea, but it was impossible in 1982, so we had to live with the double-dummy (cheating) algorithm. As PCs became much faster, so we introduced the fair play algoritm. (from 1999)

Micro Bridge has won the the World Computer Bridge Championship once (2019) and been runner up 5 times.

Micro Bridge is a commercial software

Micro Bridge is only available for Windows.

Micro Bridge home page

Demo available for download.

Description of Micro Bridge 13.0 Systems and Features.

Information about the 13.2 & 13.3 upgrade

Upgrade to 13.3 does not work with the demo version.

Micro Bridge (CD only option) is available at Svenska Bridgeförlaget. and Jannersten Förlag

Other buying options

Micro Bridge is not available for Mac, but can be run with a suitable Windows emulator.

Version 13.3 is the version that won the World Computer Bridge Championship in 2019.

Version 13.40 has been released.