Products (all included in package)
All these programs are included in the one low price, whether you order the CDROM, or we email you a download link. This is an excellent suite of programs for any level of bridge player. Place your order here.
Bridge Buff 19
This is our cornerstone product, the primary reason most people purchase our software. Using Artificial Intelligence since 1999, Bridge Buff plays a great game of Bridge. It is highly praised throughout the Bridge Community. It is perfect for all levels of players, with Tutors for beginners and intermediates, and large numbers of conventions (codified deep into the auction), for more advanced players.
It features excellent auction stability. We use Visual Deal to deal out thousands of randomly generated deals, complete with auctions. Then we vet each auction for reasonableness. We find that better than 19 of 20 auctions are completed in a sensible fashion.
There is a matchpoint-style bidding mode, which uses a concept called Simulation Bidding. This features very aggressive bidding sequences around the table, similar to action found in your local duplicate club. It's a lot of fun. Beginning version 12 we extended this concept to slam investigations.
There are two playing modes. In Practice mode, you have full control over every element of the game, and you can redeal, rebid, replay, take back cards, peek, and cheat as much as you want. In Match mode, you play a series of hands against a 'closed room' opponent and can play Teams, Pairs and Individual matches. Match mode also includes matchpoint estimates so you can measure how well you are doing against both Strong and Weak fields.
You can practice specific kinds of deals as explained here.
Bridge Buff looks terrific, and is exceptionally easy to use. It features one-button access to most functions, and includes balloon help comments over most buttons. Here is a look at Bridge Buff Practice Mode and here at Bridge Buff Match Mode. And here is a look at some of the skins you can apply.
Visual Deal 7
Visual Deal is a hugely flexible Deal Generator that stands alone by virtue of its ease-of-use, its flexibility, and the fact it generates auctions and play-of-the-hand with Bridge Buff modules.
Visual Deal includes a FAST Double Dummy solver that uses Artificial Intelligence, so you can see what would be the contract result if every card played at every turn to play, was the perfect card. This is a feature unique to Visual Deal ... you can get a solver with no other Generator. Double dummy analysis actually favors the defence, whereas the opening lead often favors the declarer, so to circumvent this, click here to see Declarer Advantage.
You can watch deals one-by-one, or run a series of deals (10 to 1000) and accumulate statistics, or print a series of deals to a printer or file. The print formats are very flexible.
Properly configured, Visual Deal will help you to answer all of the great Bridge questions. What does this bid mean or show? What should I bid with this hand in this auction? What happens if I bid this? What is partner likely to have if I hold this (and if the auction has gone like that?), what is the best contract with this kind of holding, what is the best lead into this auction or these hands, or any number of similar questions. For a sample of what can be done, look here.
Matchpoint Analyser
This is our newest utility. This is a brief write-up.
Go here for more
information. This
program provides you with the means to track, to analyse
your ACBL matchpoint results, and to investigate
strengths and weaknesses of your bidding, playing and
defending skills. It will help you to identify areas of
concern in your bidding system (maybe those aggressive
pre-empts don’t work after all. Matchpoint Analyzer
will help to make you a better matchpoint player. This
is what it entails:
- When you finish a hand at the club or tournament and score up your result, take an extra few seconds to complete a little more information about the deal. The software provides 'worksheets' for this.
- Later, when the scoring results are known (often from the club website), record your matchpoint score for each hand on the worksheet.
- Using Matchpoint Analyzer, update your matchpoint file for the new session. This will take you 5 or 10 minutes. You might have different files for different partners or bidding systems.
- Whenever you want to, analyze the results to reinforce what a successful and amazing player you are, and to highlight areas that will help make you even more successful !
- For more details go here.
Convention Card Editor
This is a full-featured editor/printer that you can use to save/print your Buff conventions in ‘official’ ACBL format. Or simply use it to edit/save/print convention cards for any number of your favorite partners. More here.
Bid Buddy
This is a bidding utility that you can schedule to pop up on your desktop every few minutes, to relieve the boredom of your day at the office! It uses most of the conventions that you use for Buff, and works much the same way as the Buff bidding routines. You can schedule it to appear every few minutes, and it will appear with an interesting (but random) hand for you to bid. See here.
Bid Sequencer
Bid Sequencer produces bidding sequences for Microsoft Excel for ranges that you specify. The output can be saved to Microsoft EXCEL files (.XLS) which you can edit in any spreadsheet program. It defines all auctions in the range that you specify. This is a useful device for partnerships who want to produce system notes. For example, what does 1N-2C|2H-3S mean in your system? Go here for more information.
Pip Converter
This utility enables you to convert
WORD documents to include suit symbols. For example, it
will convert "4H"
to "4
"
and it will optionally color certain bridge ‘words’ like ‘hearts’
and ‘KQxx/Qxxx/xx/xxx’
(this utility requires that you have a version of Word,
and sorry it is not guaranteed to work, but there is a
good chance it will). We built this program to make our
bridge correspondence look better, and it can do the
same for you. See here for
an example.
System Builder
System Builder is a bid designer integrated with Bridge Buff and Visual Deal. This innovation lets you design your own conventions, your own bidding treatments, even complete bidding systems, or modify bidding sequences to suit your preferences! Look here for details.