You probably understand that the convention card is primarily for the benefit of your opponents. You may be surprised to learn that the process of completing your convention card is a great learning experience. Of course, the best way of completing a convention card is to sit down with your regular partner and complete the card step by step. But if you play occasionally with other partners, having a completed card will simplify and shorten the time spent just before a game with a new partner.

Completing all of the sections may seem like a daunting task. What do some of those abbreviations mean? What do the colours mean? Certainly it will take a couple of hours if you are doing it together with your partner. Fortunately, we have located a couple of resource sites on the web which will prove useful:

• The ACBL web site has a comprehensive set of 24 single page articles.
• We recommend the series of 12 two page articles by David Lindop that are on the Audrey Grant web site.

We recommend that everyone playing at our games have a completed convention card available. If you are having any difficulty completing your card, please contact us.

We also recommend that you use one of the available convention card editors that you can install on your computer. These editors allow you to create and save multiple cards. This has the following benefits:

• If you play with a variety of partners, you can save a card tailored to each partnership.
• Having the ability to print out your card enables you to avoid having to complete a new card every time you make a change or having a card full of deletions and messy updates.

A list of some available convention card editors is on the ACBL web site. We recommend the program by Chuck Tesler. Click HERE to download this FREE program. Contact Chuck or Bill Jensen if you need any technical help.