Jack Six Times Computer Bridge World Champion 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2009!!!
$59.95		(WinXP/Vista/Win7) (DVD Case) (JACKBRIDPR) Version 5.0
$29.95		(WinXP/Vista/Win7) (DVD Case) (JACKBRUPR) Upgrade from Version 4 to 5.
$19.95		(WinXP/Vista/Win7) (Jewel Case) (JACKBR02PJ) Add-on with 1749 Tournament Deals (mainly from 2002). Some are annotated and quite educational.

Publisher: Kuijf & Kuijf Software

Packaging: Both Jack and the Jack upgrade are packaged in DVD cases and include a printed manual with the appropriate activation code. They normally ship by First Class Mail within the US and by international airmail outside the US. They are all in stock at this time but during the Christmas season you may wish to select Priority Mail, especially for international orders.

Game / Card

The Best Bridge Program In The World

World Champion Computer Bridge 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2009!

Jack is a computer bridge program developed by bridge players for bridge players. One of the developers is former world champion Berry Westra (Bermuda Bowl, Chile 1993). Jack uses state of the art computer algorithms and is the current world champion of computer bridge. Jack's possibilities exceed those of all other bridge playing programs. Besides its exceptional bidding and playing strength, Jack offers a very user friendly interface with many interesting features.

User Friendly Interface:

• The fully graphical user interface was developed by bridge players for bridge players. Jack comes with a manual so you can sit down and read about the most important features. Above that the program has a built in interactive help with many examples. The tip of the day will help you master Jack's possibilities faster.
• The program is very friendly. You can play with all cards visible, take back cards or restart a deal at any time. Settings were not only developed to change the appearance on your screen but also to adjust Jack's behaviour. You can even set the tolerance with which Jack has to accept your claims.
• After you completed a deal you can have Jack replay the deal and instantly compare your result with Jack. You can store the bid and play to look it over again at a later moment. Your own deal annotations can be incorporated and stored with the deal in Jack.
• You decide if you want announcing bids and plays switched on, in which case you'll hear the voice of Berry Westra.

Bidding and Play:

• The powerful deal profile allows you to generate deals that meet certain criteria. Specifying for example auction, distributions, combined values for North and South, playing tricks or points enables you to create almost any situation. Very usefull for practising purposes.
• Deals can be printed directly to the printer or exported to HTML files. You can specify in detail what to print (diagram, auction, play, footnotes, alerts, annotations). The HTML- (internet-) format allows you to directly bring the information online, look at it in your favorite browser, email it to your partner or edit it with a word processor.
• Inputting a deal is very easy; have Jack show you how he would have bid and played the deals from your local competition.

Special Features:

Extensive tournament environment with many tournaments. Jack offers the functionality to create your own tournaments. Match Points, imps, imp pairs and more. Just enter the number of rounds/contestants. Jack will play the tournament for all participants whilst varying its play to generate the necessary variation in the results. Also almost any PBN can be converted to a tournament. The same tournament can be played by more than one user. This enables you to compare with other people. Neat reports with tournament results can be printed.

To start your own tournaments collection the CD contains 25 tournaments (totalling over 100 sessions), in which you play partnering Jack. These tournaments all appeared on Jack's website earlier. New tournaments will continue to be made available in the future. For more tournaments the Tournaments 2002 CD with annotated tournaments is on sale. Extra for Jack 4 are the finals of the last six Worldchampionships Computer Bridge.

Jack has a built-in virtual bridge club, the JackBridge club, complete with promotion and demotion. You compete with Jack as your partner amidst computer personalities. There are six different skill levels (flights) and in a higher flight the computer players will be tougher to beat. Of course you can specify the length of the competition, the strength of the other players, and whether your opponents use their own convention cards or yours. Your goal is to move up the ladder of skill levels. Try to become the champion of the club!

Jack has a very extensive convention card environment. Major convention cards from all around the world are built in, amongst others: Standard American Yellow Card, Dutch Acol, 2/1 GF, Bridge World Standard, Jack Verona (the exact card that was used in Verona 2006), Moscito (a strong club system developed by the Australian international Paul Marston) and Jack's own convention card. Of course convention cards for novices are available as well.

You can compose your own convention card using adjustable conventions. Jack now has over 80 adjustable conventions including: Variable 1NT, additional defences against 1NT, Puppet Stayman after 1NT. Many other bidding additions as well, e.g. you can specify the style of overcalling you would like Jack to use and it is possible to count an extra trump when using RKC Blackwood).

Jack contains the fastest double dummy solver in the world. Jack will instantly show you how many tricks can be made with each card.

Jack is completely multi-lingual, you can dynamically switch between English, Dutch, French, German and Polish. Within any of the supported languages you can also use the English, Dutch, French or German playing cards. If your language is not supported yet, we offer the possibility to translate the user interface.

The Top 10 Improvements Incorporated in Jack 5.0

Here is a list of the most significant ways in which Jack 5.0 has improved upon Jack 4.01.

Interactive Professor Jack. The Professor will look over your shoulder as you play, making helpful comments about your bidding and card play on the spot. He is flexible. At your command, he will comment about whatever aspects of your play you specify.

Bidding contests. Jack provides about a hundred bidding contests that you can enter to improve your bidding and compare your contracts to those of many pairs that have bid the deals previously.

Jack's Washington 2009 bidding and play engine: In Computer World Bridge Championship of 2009 at Washington DC, Jack played better and faster to regain his title. Now you can use the same methods with and against Jack.

Expanded levels of playing strength: Now there are 100 different levels, ranging from weak to expert, with sophisticated options for detailed tuning.

More versatile deal profiles: Now you can specify almost any kind of deals that you may want to examine or practice, e.g. deals with 1NT openings, deals with wild distribution, and so forth.

Built-in provision for updating: Now you can download improvements to Jack and new tournaments as they become available on our website ... free of charge until we create Jack 6.0.

Jack 5.0 is now usable on "notebook" computers (laptops without a CD drive) and with Windows 7.

On-screen playing cards are digitally enhanced and now available for even the highest resolutions.

Jack can now be linked directly to the Jannersten Duplimate software.

Improved and fully printable help, along with other interesting documentation, is easily accessible.

Jack 5.0 provides dozens of other improvements and enhancements, of course, including more tournaments, more deals in competition, new bidding conventions, Jack's Washington 2009 convention card, reviews of played deals in the game-viewer, and changes in Jack's partnership approaches.

List of Jack 4.0 Features (some upgraded even more in Jack 5.0)

Completely rewritten bidding and playing engine, used at the World Championship Computer Bridge in New York 2004. More options to control Jack's bidding and play and his thinking time. Jack 3.0 is considerably stronger than Jack 2.

New method of scoring when playing random deals: Compensation scoring (also known as Russian Scoring). The stronger side gets penalty points depending on their combined HCP strength. Penalties are user adjustable.

New convention cards. Amongst others: Bridge World Standard, Jack New York (the exact card that was used in New York 2004) and Moscito: a strong club system developed by the Australian international Paul Marston. Please refer to www.jackbridge.com/moscito/moscito.htm for a brief summary.

New bidding conventions. Amongst others: Variable 1NT, additional defences against 1NT, Puppet Stayman after 1NT. Many other bidding additions as well, e.g. you can specify the style of overcalling you would like Jack to use and it is possible to count an extra trump when using RKC Blackwood.

Fit points. After discovering a fit it is good practise to re-evaluate your hand. Jack does this by using fit points. It is based on Berry Westra's teaching methods of adding and subtracting points in fit situation. You will quickly learn to correctly re-evaluate your hand in fit situations. The fit points are entirely user adjustable.

Deal annotations. You can add comments to a deal (and store them). Printing is possible but you can also redirect the output to HTML. This is the internet file format and allows you to directly bring the information online, look at it in your favorite browser, email it to your partner or edit it with a word processor.

Deal profile. The powerful deal profile in Jack 2.0 is made even more flexible. By adding distributions, combined values for North and South, and playing tricks it is possible to specify almost any situation. Export to PBN has been improved.

PBN file maintenance. It is possible to copy deals from one PBN to another and delete deals from a PBN.

Creating tournaments. Almost any PBN can be converted to a tournament in Jack 3.0. The tournament environment has a new file format and it can easily support hundreds of tournament sessions.

Printing. Deals can be printed directly to the printer or exported to HTML files. You can specify in detail what to print (diagram, auction, play, footnotes, alerts, annotations)

Fun and games. A completely new and interactive environment. You will find interesting and amusing facts, teaching material and puzzles like Double Dummy problems. A lot of content available already.

Search for updates. From inside Jack you can search for updates and install them directly. No need for visiting the website and look whether there is new material.

Tournaments. All tournaments available in Jack 2.0 and on our website have been converted to the new format. All the Computer Bridge finals have been added.

New set of Playing cards. New and very nice German cards provided by Carta Mundi, the well-known playing cards manufactor.

Lots of changes that enhance the current options, like replaying a deal in four different ways but also: deals from a PBN can be used for network play.

Requirements:

Windows XP/Vista/Win7: 256 MB memory and at least 100 MB free on your hard disk. A CD-rom drive is mandatory. The processor speed is very important. Jack will run on any Pentium or AMD system 400 Mhz or above but we recommend at least 1 Ghz in order to exploit Jack's full potential. Works on both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of those systems.

Reviews:

JACK RECAPTURES WORLD TITLE - June 22, 2006

Of the seven teams that vied for the 2006 Computer Bridge World Championship in Verona, Italy, June 17th through June 22nd, four emerged from the qualifying round-robin (six 28-board matches. The Dutch program Jack, seeking to regain the crown he had lost to the French program Wbridge5 in 2005 after winning the previous four championships, won all six of his round-robin matches and led the field by a wide victory-point margin. The final standings in the Round Robin: 1. Jack (Netherlands) 124 VP 2. Micro Bridge (Japan) 104 VP 3. WBridge5 (France) 102 VP 4. Q-Plus Bridge (Germany) 99 VP 5. Bridge Baron (USA) 82 VP 6. Blue Chip Bridge (England) 66 VP 7. Shark Bridge (Denmark) 52 VP In one 64-board semi-final match, Jack annihilated Q-Plus Bridge, 239 IMPs to only 41. In the other semi-final, Micro Bridge edged defending champion Wbridge5, 141 IMPs to 133. Both programs had improved substantially from last year, but the highly enterprising style of Wbridge did not succeed against the newly-aggressive Micro Bridge, which had switched from last year's four-card major system to five-card majors. So as in Toronto, Canada, five years ago, Jack faced Micro Bridge in the 64-board final. Jack had won easily enough in 2001, but in Verona he dominated Micro Bridge completely, winning 217 IMPs to 54.

ACBL Bulletin Sunday July 18, 2004

Jack Wins Computer Title

Jack (the Netherlands) retained its title of world computer bridge champion, defeating last year’s finalist, Bridge Baron (USA), 157-97 in the 64- board final. Hans Kuijf’s robot Jack, winner of the last four annual championships, is on top of the computer bridge world.

PRESS RELEASE - JACK RETAINS TITLE ONCE MORE

At the world computer bridge championships in New York City, the Dutch program Jack once again defended his title successfully. After winning in Toronto (2001), Montreal (2002) and Menton (2003), Jack was crowned world champion for the fourth time. There can be no doubt that the brainchild of Hans Kuijf is the strongest computer bridge player in the world.

The 'Jack Team' consists of Hans Kuijf, Wim Heemskerk, Martin Pattenier and former Bermuda Bowl-winner Berry Westra. After Jack won last year, they worked very hard to improve Jack even further, making the most progress in the bidding. That turned out to be necessary, as rival programs improved also. Almost all the programs use simulations and try to plan ahead. However, this championship proved that Jack still has an edge over its competitors. Defense is undoubtedly the weakest point of Jack's game. If he can improve on that he will be very hard to beat in the coming years. More information about Jack can be found at the website http://www.jackbridge.com

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