What Is the Online Supplement on Australian Bridge Magazine?

The Online Supplement is a companion web page that Australian Bridge Magazine publishes alongside each issue. It carries material that either doesn't fit the print magazine or works better online: print-friendly versions of the Bidding Challenge hands, time-sensitive news, and articles that were cut from the issue. If you subscribe to the magazine, the supplement is where you go for the content that arrived too late for print or needed a different format.

What the supplement contains

According to the magazine's own description, each issue's Online Supplement page includes three kinds of content:

• Print-friendly versions of the Bidding Challenge hands — so you can work through the problems on paper rather than reading them off a screen.
• Time-sensitive news — announcements and updates that can't wait for the next print cycle.
• Articles that didn't fit in the magazine — overflow material from the issue.

The supplement is tied to a specific issue. The magazine notes that the supplement for the August issue can be viewed on its own page, which tells you the supplement is issued per-issue rather than as one rolling archive.

How to view it

The magazine's homepage links to the Online Supplement page, and from there you can open the supplement for the current issue. The page is described as accompanying each issue, so the practical route is:

1. Go to australianbridge.com.
2. Follow the Online Supplement link on the homepage.
3. Open the supplement for the issue you want.

If you're looking for a supplement from an older issue, the source material doesn't describe a back-catalogue index for supplements the way it does for the Bidding Forum archive. Treat the current issue's supplement as the reliably available one.

Why it exists

Print magazines have fixed deadlines and fixed page counts. The Online Supplement solves both problems at once: late-breaking news can be posted after the issue has gone to press, and articles that ran long can still reach readers instead of being dropped. The print-friendly Bidding Challenge hands serve a different purpose — they let you attempt the problems the way you would at the table, without scrolling.

What it is not

The Online Supplement is separate from two other online features on the site:

If you're after bidding problems and reader answers, that's the Bidding Forum. If you're after event results, that's the Australia-Wide Pairs pages. The Online Supplement is specifically the overflow-and-updates page for each issue.

Do you need a subscription?

The source material describes the supplement as accompanying each issue of the magazine but doesn't state whether viewing it requires a subscription or login. Subscription rates are listed separately (Australia: 1 year/4 issues $49; NZ/Asia: AU$69; rest of world: AU$79), and the site invites non-subscribers to sign up — but that doesn't establish whether the supplement itself is gated. Check the page directly to see what access it requires.