Bid and play — against bots or with friends

Sit South at a table with three EPBot/BBA partners — or invite friends onto the empty seats. Pick a topic from David Bailey's practice scenario library (Stayman, Jacoby transfers, splinters, weak twos, Smolen, and a hundred more), bid through real deals with instant feedback when your call differs from the convention card, then play the contract out.

Play against bots, or with friends

You sit South against three EPBot/BBA bots on a 21GF convention card. Want company? Share an invite link and friends take the open seats — any left empty stay bots.

Live convention checking

Every time it's your turn to bid, your call is compared against what the BBA expected. Match it and the auction continues; differ and you see what was expected.

Hundreds of curated scenarios

The same scenario tree the BBO browser extension uses — Notrump Sequences, Major Suit Sequences, Preempts, Competitive Bidding — with 500 pre-generated deals per topic.

Stateless & offline-friendly

Playing solo, state lives in your browser. Each deal makes one stateless call to the BBA service for the auction; nothing is stored server-side. (Inviting friends upgrades the table to a shared session on demand.)

Typical session

Pick a topic from the menu (e.g. "Stayman" under Notrump Sequences).

A random deal is drawn. The bots open and respond at their seats; you see the auction unfold.

When it's your turn, the bidding box appears. Bid; get feedback against what the BBA expected.

Auction completes — then play the hand out against the bots (rules/BEN cardplay). See the result and which of your bids differed, then hit "Next deal" for another.

Open Bidding Practice

The Bidding Practice table: you sit South against three bots, with an Invite friends button, mid-auction after partner's 1♥ opening

You sit South — three bots fill the other seats, or invite friends

Sister services it talks to

• BBA bidding service (bba.harmonicsystems.com) — runs EPBot to compute the auction. Sister repo: BBA-CLI/bba-server.

• Practice Bidding Scenarios (raw GitHub) — David Bailey's button layout file and 500-deal-per-scenario PBN files. Sister repo: Practice-Bidding-Scenarios.

• Future: Bridge Dealer Service for fresh per-session deals instead of pre-generated. Sister repo: Bridge-Dealer-Service.

Prototype caveats

• The BBA service must include this site's origin in its CORS allow-list. Add https://bridge-classroom.com to the AllowBBO policy in BBA-CLI/bba-server/Program.cs.

• Some scenarios in the menu rely on conventions that BBA doesn't model. Those will surface as a BBA error on the first deal — pick a different scenario.

• The full auction is generated up front per deal; if you bid differently than expected, the auction continues using BBA's choice (so you can still see the rest).