Using Hand Records

If your club is uploading hand records to go along with the results, there will be links on the main result page to give you access to these.

There are several links available related to hand records.

Hand Record is the link that will display the page intended for human consumption. It displays all the hands played in the session, optionally showing the best contracts possible for various sides of the table (North, South, East, West). If you'd like to have a printout, we recommend that you click on the printer friendly link, that is more suitable for print medium, putting roughly twice as many hand records on a single page than the original page, if you tried to print it. Then you can use this printout to go over your actions in bidding and play with your partner over a cup of coffee, or with a pair of boxing gloves, depending on your style.

Other links are providing the same hand record, only in a different form, that is more suitable for consumption by various bridge programs. These programs, like Deep Finesse and Jack, for example, can provide you with a computer analysis of the perfect declarer's play or a perfect defense, starting from the opening lead, or after a few cards have been played. These programs need to know the hand you played, and entering the hand manually into these programs is a boring, tiresome and error-prone process. Luckily for you, we generate data that is understandable to these programs, and you can import the whole hand record (not just one, but all the boards) into these programs.

In an ideal world, clicking the link should transfer the data to one of these programs automatically. However, in real world this won't happen (for now) and you need to do a few simple steps. You need to usually perform a right mouse click over a link you're interested in (eg. over Deep Finesse) and then choose an option that allows you to save this link into a file. Pay attention to name the file with an extension that the program expects ( txt for Deep Finesse, pbn for Jack. Then start your program and import the file into it.

Q: Deep Finesse show that the contract was 1C by South on all the boards - why is this?

A: Deep Finesse format requires that we provide the contract. Naturally, on the SAME board, various tables may have arrived at different contracts. We can't guess what they were, as this is meant for all players. It's very easy to modify the ACTUAL contract. Just think of how much effort we saved you in sparing you from typing in all the hands in :-)

Q: I'm trying to import the hand into Jack, but it keeps failing to read it?

A: make sure you saved the file with an extension PBN. One user of Jack program provided me with the following instructions:


Hello Milan,
Following our emails I have elicited the following from JACK, which might be helpful to others trying to download .pbn files to Jack3.

  • Right click PBN on the session results window and Save Target as..... Give it a name xxx.pbn
  • Open Jack and go to CREATE Tournament select -Use deals from a .pbn file Documents open , choose the name (xxx) you allocated
  • A new window opens, click Selections and Select All, Go to File and ....Create Tournament with replay Jack.
  • A new window appears ...close it, and another window appears. Name your tournament. (xxx)
  • Jack now processes the information (10-20 minutes).When Jack has finished... Go to Tournaments. on the Jack window. Your tournament will be at the bottom of the list of Tournaments. Click on it.
  • The tournament is loaded. Go Actions and ...Replay Deal ... select Bidding and Card Play.


You can now replay the tournament that was mussed up!!!! otherwise you would not be doing this
So there was nothing wrong with your program
Yours sincerely
Bill Hearn