Tools for practising card-play are plentiful. Few exist for the auction, which arguably decides more than half of a good result. BidMaestro is devoted to the bidding alone: a sound way to learn it, and the freedom to practise as often as you like.
Why BidMaestro
Bidding is a language, and its conventions are the vocabulary. Most of us speak it only in part: confident with the everyday calls, hesitant over the rest. Fluency is earned the way it is in any language, through repetition, guidance, experimentation and explanation. BidMaestro provides all four.
Deal after deal, as many as you like, focused on the conventions your bidding needs most.
A hint the moment you hesitate, with the reasoning behind the call it suggests.
Try a call and see where the auction leads. There is no cost to being wrong here.
Every bid described in plain terms: your own, your partner’s and the opponents’.
Features
A considered set of tools for learning the auction and for practising it until the right call comes naturally.
Deal as many hands as you wish, each shown with its shape, high-card points and losing tricks, and concentrate each session on the conventions you would like to strengthen.
Uncertain of your call? Ask for a hint, and BidMaestro will suggest the next bid and explain the reasoning behind it.
Every call explained: your own, your partner’s and your opponents’. You always know what a bid is meant to show.
BidMaestro tells you when a bid should be alerted or announced, so you learn what is expected of you during the auction.
When the auction closes, see the tricks, the contract and the points the hand was expected to make in each suit, a clear measure of how your bidding compared.
How it works
Systems & conventions
The Standard group is always on. Everything else is optional: switch conventions on and off to match how you and your partner play. 2/1 Game Force ⭐ is highly recommended; switch it on in Settings. Tap any convention for a plain-language explanation of what it shows.
Bidding principles
These pages cover judgement rather than conventions: how to value a hand beyond its high-card points, how to describe it to partner, and how high to bid once you have. BidMaestro uses each of these in its own bidding; these pages explain them in plain language. Monte Carlo Double Dummy is how the analysis page judges the contract you reached, and Alerts and announcements covers what you must tell the opponents about partner’s calls. Read any principle to see how it works.
Sources
BidMaestro follows the consensus description of each convention across respected published sources.
Where there is no clear consensus among the above sources, BidMaestro’s choice is settled by evidence: comparison of hand outcomes for different convention definitions using Monte Carlo Double Dummy simulation for more than 350,000 hands with more than 68 million unique Double Dummy solves.
Questions
BidMaestro suits players from improvers through to experienced club and tournament players; a working knowledge of the game is assumed.
BidMaestro is free to download, and you can bid three deals a day without paying. A yearly subscription gives unlimited deals, and the first month is free. The subscription is handled by Apple: you can cancel it at any time in your device’s Settings, and if you cancel at least a day before the free month ends you pay nothing.
iPhone and iPad running iOS 18 or later, and any Mac with Apple silicon.
Tap the Hint button during the auction and BidMaestro will suggest a call and explain the reasoning. Tap the suggestion to read it in full, with links to the conventions it names. Tap any bid already made for a plain explanation of what it shows.
Keep passing until the bidding ends and the analysis page appears, then tap the Redo Bid button. You get the same deal again, with the same hands, dealer and vulnerability, and can bid it from the start.
Use the Deal Bias button to steer the distribution of the deals towards the conventions you would like to practise. Most conventions you play have their own choice, listed under the same headings as in Settings. About two deals in three call for that convention; the rest look similar but call for something else, so you also learn when not to use it.
Tap the Deal Bias button and choose Random convention. Each new deal then calls for one of the conventions switched on in your settings. They come round like a shuffled pack of cards: in each round every convention comes up twice, once for you to use and once for partner to use while you answer, in a random order, so the rarely used ones come up as often as the common ones.
Open Settings by tapping the icon in the top-right corner, and adjust which conventions you play, the deal bias, the order the suits are shown in, and what the review screen reveals.
BidMaestro keeps your settings and history on your device. See our Privacy Policy for details.
Download BidMaestro, and make the auction the strongest part of your game.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad on iOS 18 or later, and any Mac with Apple silicon.