User behavior, social networking, and playing style in online and face to face bridge communities

Traditional games have recently started to become online social games. Once accessible only through face to face encounters or slow mail exchanges, games such as bridge, chess, and go are now played online by millions of gamers. In this work we analyze and compare two communities of bridge players, Locomotiva and BBO Fans. We are interested in duplicate bridge, where the same distribution of cards is played at several tables and the winner is decided by comparing the results at each table.