What Cuebids is

How practice works

You start a session of a few deals. Each deal 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 actually 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.

Who you bid with

• Your regular partner. The reason most pairs are here: 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. She plays a system you choose, so practicing with her is practicing your methods.
• 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.

Choosing what to 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.

How your bidding is scored

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 challenges

Neither is required. Plenty of pairs use Cuebids purely as a practice room and never touch the competitive side.

• Daily and Weekly events: the same deals for everybody, with a leaderboard. A short, low-effort way to see where you stand.
• Ranked challenges: head-to-head against a player near your level, climbing from Jack to Ace.

Clubs, teachers and groups

A group is a shared space for a club, a class, or a set of friends: shared sessions, a leaderboard, and deals everyone bids in common so there is something concrete to discuss afterwards. Teachers can set the hands their students bid and see how the class handled them.

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.

• Bidding with your partner, without advanced robots: free, on any number of boards.
• Your first sessions with Lia are free too, until you have some practice behind you.
• Entering a Daily, a Weekly or a ranked challenge costs tickets, because those are played with advanced robots.
• The monthly allowance resets each month rather than accumulating.

Common questions

Where to go next

Next guide

Keep reading