Updates and New Features: the Practice Room, and more accurate coaching
Bid human-reviewed deals with a robot partner in the new Practice Room. Also, behind the scenes, we’ve improved privacy and made your results and coaching more accurate.
Bridge Coach exists to help club players improve by learning from their own results. This autumn we’ve added a new way to practise, and we’ve done a lot of work to make sure the coaching you get is built on the right data.
Introducing the Practice Room
Coaching shows you which parts of your game to work on. The Practice Room is where you work on them.
Pick a theme, such as no-trump responses or slam bidding, and bid five deals with a robot partner. Every deal has been checked by an expert and comes with the auction they recommend. When you finish a deal, you’ll see how your contract compares and what you scored out of 10.
Ask “Why?” about any call. Tap a robot’s call and it tells you what that call shows under the system you’re playing.
A familiar system. Deals are bid in Acol with a 12–14 1NT, Stayman, transfers, Roman Key Card Blackwood and cue bids.
Made for your phone too. The bidding box takes two taps: a level, then a suit. Your hand and the auction stay in view while you bid.
Note: This is currently available for registered members, but we are planning to open up a 'preview' Practice Room for anyone to use, as a taster of what Bridge Coach offers.
More accurate results and coaching
Good coaching depends on accurate data, so we’ve spent the last few weeks checking it closely.
Trick counts. Results files don’t all record tricks the same way. We now check every trick count against the published score, and we’ve corrected older results where they didn’t match. Your coaching has been rebuilt from the corrected figures.
One session per event. Some clubs run more than one event on the same day. These are now always kept as separate sessions, so your coaching only uses the boards you actually played. If we can’t tell which event you played in, your dashboard will ask you.
Pairs, IMPs and teams. We now record how each event was scored. Our coaching is designed for matchpoint pairs, so IMP pairs and teams results are still shown but aren’t coached for now. We’d rather give no advice than the wrong advice.
Your privacy
Results are now only shown to members who played in the session or are linked to it. EBU numbers are kept private and never displayed.
What’s next
We (meaning the humans behind Bridge Coach, not the AI) are manually reviewing the coaching output against our own judgement (and a text book or two), board by board. It takes time, but over the coming months that will make the coaching advice sharper. We’ll also be adding more Practice Room themes, so your coaching can point you straight to deals that practise what you need.
As always, if something doesn’t look right, use the feedback button. We read every message.