Product
Bidding practice for you and your partner.
You bid a deal with your partner or with a robot, and when the auction ends you find out what the hand was worth and how everyone else bid it. On the web, iOS, and Android.
How practice works
You start a session of a few deals. Each one is dealt to you and your partner, and the two of you bid it as you would at the table. When the auction ends, Cuebids shows what the deal was worth, what your contract would have scored, and how the rest of the field bid the same cards.
It does not ask the two of you to be free at the same time. The auction waits: partner bids when they have a minute, and a notification tells you when it is your turn. Four boards can take a coffee break or a week.
Cuebids practices the auction, not the play. Once the bidding stops, the result comes from a double-dummy analysis of the deal rather than from playing the cards out, which is what makes a session something you can finish in a spare ten minutes.
Who you bid with
- Your regular partner — bid a hundred hands together and the gaps in your agreements stop being theoretical
- Lia, a robot who sits in partner’s seat when nobody else is free, playing a system you choose
- A random partner, if you want hands right now and have nobody to ask
- Robots can also sit East and West, so you can practice auctions where the opponents interfere
What you practice
Random deals are how most bidding practice goes wrong: the auction you wanted to rehearse turns up once in twenty boards. Cuebids deals to a shape instead. Pick a deal type and every hand in the session produces the situation you asked for, so a session on slam bidding is twelve slam decisions rather than twelve passed-out hands.
When none of the ready-made types fits, a custom scenario lets you describe the hands yourself.
Scoring
Each board you finish is scored from zero to three stars, measured against what the deal was actually worth. The stars are the fast feedback: you see immediately whether the contract you reached was the one to be in, a reasonable alternative, or the one that cost your side the board.
Alongside them you can compare with the field, which is often the more useful number. A call nobody else found is worth knowing about, in either direction.
Events and groups
- Daily and Weekly events: the same deals for everybody, with a leaderboard
- Ranked challenges: head-to-head against a player near your level, climbing from Jack to Ace
- Groups for a club, a class, or a set of friends, with shared sessions and deals everyone bids in common
- Teachers can set the hands their students bid and see how the class handled them
None of it is required. Plenty of pairs use Cuebids purely as a practice room and never touch the competitive side.
What it costs
Bidding with a human partner is free, however many boards you bid. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the part people assume must be limited: a free account can bid with its regular partner all month without spending anything.
What costs is a robot. Tickets pay for advanced robots, whether they are sitting East–West as your opponents or in partner’s seat as Lia, at one ticket per board each. A free account gets 48 tickets a month, and a subscription raises that or removes the limit.
| You and a human partner, no advanced robots | Free |
|---|---|
| You and a human partner, advanced robots E–W | 1 |
| You and Lia, no advanced robots | 1 |
| You and Lia, advanced robots E–W | 2 |
Read first
Cuebids also publishes a convention library — around sixty convention and system guides, each linked to hands you can practice.
Explore the library