Playing duplicate bridge against players from some event

Question

I am organizing a Bridge club in my workplace and I want it to be Duplicate Bridge one, but currently sometimes we don't get 8 people to join the meeting (I hope, in the future the club will grow).

So I had an idea, that if there are 4 people beside me, I could duplicate deals from some international event (without saying what event it would be) and make them play these deals.

My questions are:

1. Is the idea fair and will it help players learn?
2. How should it be scored (is it OK e.g. to score always against open room or do I have to use some other way)
3. Do you know of any other people that utilized this way?

Answer 1

There was formerly a product called Doop (which as far as I can tell is no longer printed) that used a similar idea. They would provide hand records from old regional tournaments along with the scores produced for those hands. It would operate like so:

Each player is given a deck of cards and the list of hands for their seat (so e.g. North gets a list of the North hands). At hand 1, each player makes the first hand for their direction out of their deck of cards. The hand is played (duplicate style, with each player keeping their own cards after playing them), and the score recorded. Then hand 2 is played, etc. At the end of play, compare the recorded scores with those recorded for the earlier tournament and record the match point score.

You have some choices with regard to movement. If you have exactly four players, you might choose to play with the same partner throughout. You might also rotate players so that each player plays a set number of hands with each other player.

You can find hand records and scores for tournaments in a number of places. For example, you can find results from recent Allendale, NJ sectional tournaments at http://www.bridge-njba.org/, or from a regional played in New York City in December 2013 at http://gnyba.org/PILOT/wordpress/?p=2596.