Applies to every result table.
On: you play the contract whenever your side wins it — both hands, whether
you or partner North is declarer. Off: the robot plays your side's contracts and
you bid and defend.
Adds a Hint button to the bidding box that asks Brill what it would bid with
your hand. The answer is shown, never played.
Lets you tell us what a call should mean — “Suggest a meaning”
on a call the system does not define, “Not what I play” on one it does.
Saved to your account, so they apply on every device you play on.
Notifications
Only when an opponent finishes a challenge you are in, a tournament round
starts, or the daily event opens. Per device — turn it on wherever you
want to be told.
Daily event
A notification on the devices where you turned notifications on, once a day when
the boards go up. On by default.
One mail at 07:00 the morning after, covering every daily you played: where you
finished, and how Brill and BEN did on the same boards. Off unless you ask for it.
In the results mail: what your bidding and your cardplay were each worth, and your
costliest boards with the reason and a link to the deal. On whenever the mail is.
Administrator
Off, the site behaves as it does for any member: no Admin page, no organiser
buttons, and a daily event keeps its results hidden from you until it closes.
Your account is still an administrator — this changes what is offered on
screen, not what the database allows.
Privacy
Only your username and display name are shown in search — never your email.
Danger Zone
Once you delete your account, there is no going back. Please be certain.
Delete Account
Are you sure you want to delete your account? This action cannot be undone.
All your challenges and data will be permanently deleted.
Session expired
Your session expired. Please log in again to continue - your progress is safe.
Daily bridge events with eleven robots in the field
Every day at 12:00 four eight-board events open, scored in cross-IMPs or matchpoints. In
each one everyone plays the same boards, and twelve robots are entered on them alongside the
humans: Brill, a rule-based engine, BEN, a neural one,
and Lia, RoboBridge, BBO Ben, Bridge Baron,
WBridge5, BBA, PowerShark, Micro Bridge, Pidgin, BRL and Rusty
— with more still to come. Each morning your boards come back judged against the
humans and the robots.
Every call has a reason. Hover any bid to see what it promises. Brill
shows the convention, the constraints and the rule that fired — and where it has no
rule for a call, it says so and shows that it is guessing.
How a day runs. Events close at 06:00 the next morning, and only players
who played every board are scored. While the field is still playing you see a provisional
standing, but no deals and nobody’s board results.
Bring your own robot. The field is open. The
seat API is stateless and
BEN-compatible (/bid, /lead, /play) and is
specified for external implementers — and if your robot only speaks the Table
Manager interface, we can support that too. Either way its result means something,
because the comparison pool is fixed and the deals are identical by construction.
No server to run it on? Ask us to host it.
Brill bids a natural two-over-one game forcing system: five-card majors,
a better-minor 1♣/1♦, a 15–17 notrump and a strong 2♣. Every call it
makes comes from a written rule, and you can read them all.
Top of the sequence, and the ace from AK: A from AKQ or AK, K from KQJ or KQ(x),
Q from QJT, J from JT9, the jack from an interior AJT/KJT.
Honour and two
The honour from a doubleton (A♥4), the higher
from two spot cards, the ace from Axx against a suit contract.
Small cards
Against a suit contract 1–3–5 — higher from two,
third from three or four, fifth from five or more. Against notrump, fourth
best, so the Rule of 11 works.
Following suit
Lowest of touching cards — so an honour played while following
denies the card directly beneath it.
Signals
None yet. No attitude, no count, no suit preference: the message
is in the lead, not in the follow, and discards are randomised among equal cards, so
they tell declarer — and partner — nothing. Signalling agreements are
planned; this is where they will be described.
What the robots read instead is the play itself: which honours your lead places, how long the
suit is from a fourth- or fifth-best card, an honour you bared, a ruff you declined.
The system in short
1♣ / 1♦
12–21 HCP, 3+ cards — the longer minor.
1♥ / 1♠
12–21 HCP, five or more cards.
1NT
15–17, balanced. Stayman, Jacoby transfers, Texas at the four level.
2♣
Strong and artificial; 2♦ is the waiting answer.
2♦ / 2♥ / 2♠
Weak two: six cards, 5–11 HCP.
2NT
20–21, balanced.
Responses
A new suit at the two level is game forcing; 1NT is forcing.
Competing
Natural overcalls, takeout and negative doubles, Michaels and the
Unusual NT, and a defence to each of them.
Over 4♠
4NT is takeout — short in
spades, playable in the other three. Partner picks a suit and may not pass. Double is therefore
penalty, on a strong balanced hand with spade length. Over 4♥
the double stays takeout as usual.
Slam
Roman Keycard Blackwood 0314, Gerber, the Grand Slam Force and splinters.
No control-showing cue-bids — Brill reads one from you but does not
make them; that is planned.
Reading a bid you did not expect
In a game, hovering or tapping a call in the auction shows what the robot meant by it. For the
whole picture — every call the system defines in a given position, and what each promises
— open the rule browser at that auction:
A call explained as “not defined” is one the system has no rule for yet. The robot
still bids — it falls back to the most practical call it can find — and the position
is recorded so a rule can be written for it.
The robots at the table
Brill bids from these rules and plays the cards with its own engine. BEN, when you meet it, is a
neural-net robot with no written system at all — it has learned from played hands, so its
bids come with no rule to look up.
Who wrote the eleven engines in the daily field, what each one is and how it is entered:
the robots in the field.
Eleven engines are entered on the daily boards beside the humans, and they play the same
eight deals everyone else does. One of them is written here and one is maintained here;
the other nine came from elsewhere. This is who they are.
Br
Brill
Thorvald Aagaard · Denmark · rule-based
Brill bids from written rules — a two-over-one game forcing base and more than a
hundred convention files, expanded at load time into roughly a million instantiated
rules — and plays the cards with its own engine. Because every call comes from a
rule, every call can be explained: hover a bid anywhere on this site and you get the
convention, the constraints and the rule that fired. Where it has no rule for a
position it still bids, and says so.
At this table. The house engine. Brill fills the other three seats at
every table, so you and the other robots all play the same partner and the same
defenders — and it is entered in the field itself.
BEN — Bridge Engine Neural — has no written system at all. Its bidding and
its cardplay come from neural networks trained on millions of deals, backed by a
double-dummy solver, so there is no rule to look up behind one of its calls: only what
the models learned. Lorand Dali released it in 2022 and it is developed in the open; for the
last three years it has been maintained by Thorvald Aagaard, while Lorand has continued
the work in a closed environment at BBO.
At this table. A seat robot: asked for one call or one card at a time
over the seat API, and entered in every daily event.
The newest engine in the field, written single-handedly by Luc Bellicaud — a world
junior champion for France — and released on IntoBridge, which now fields it as its
robot. It is reasoned rather than trained, and it explains itself: every call
comes back with an alert and an explanation, which Brill reads and bids against instead
of having to guess what the call meant.
At this table. A seat robot like BEN, but run on a machine of ours
rather than as a public service. A day it cannot be reached is scored without it.
Fourth in the World Computer-Bridge Championship, 2017
RoboBridge began as a bidding trainer its author wrote for himself and grew into a full
program with a double-dummy solver behind it. It is free and it plays in the browser.
What stands out is the convention card: four foundation systems — Acol, Standard
American, SAYC and two-over-one — with more than fifty conventions to switch on
over them.
At this table. A seat robot, entered in the dailies since September 2026.
BEN as Bridge Base Online runs it. It is the same neural-network engine as BEN,
developed further by Lorand Dali in BBO's own closed environment and trained to
play BBO's 2/1 system. Having both in the field shows how far the two lines of BEN
have moved apart.
At this table. A seat robot served by BBO itself and asked for one
call or one card at a time over the seat API. New in the field from September 2026. A
day it cannot be reached is scored without it.
Thomas Throop & Stephen Smith · Great Game Products, now BBO · AI planning
One of the oldest bridge programs still playing: its first version was finished in
1982, and it won the World Computer Bridge Championship in 1990, 1991, 1993 and 1995
and the first official one in 1997. It plans declarer play with hierarchical task
networks, from research with the University of Maryland. Now owned by BBO.
At this table. A seat robot served by BBO, beside BBO Ben, and asked
for one call or one card at a time over the seat API. New in the field from October
2026. A day it cannot be reached is scored without it.
World Computer-Bridge Champion six times — 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2016–2018
The most decorated program in the field, and on its record the strongest engine anyone
has entered here. It is free, it runs on Windows, and it has been in almost every world
championship held since the early 2000s. It plays its own system by default and can be
set to SEF or SAYC instead.
At this table. WBridge5 speaks only the Table Manager protocol the world
championship itself runs on — it cannot be asked for a single call — so it is
not played from the browser like the others. A batch job sits it at a table of its own on
a Windows machine and posts the boards back.
BBA — Bridge Bot Analyzer — began as a tool for analysing bidding systems
and conventions, and has grown into a robot that plays the whole hand; the name
changed from Bridge Bidding Analyser when it started playing. Its engine is
EPBot (the EP is its author's initials), written entirely in Visual Basic. The system it
plays is set by a convention card, a list of switches that turn individual conventions
on and off. Other programs use the engine too: BEN calls EPBot to explain the bids it
meets.
At this table. Like WBridge5, BBA sits at a Table Manager table of its
own on a Windows machine, and a batch job posts its boards back. It plays a two-over-one
card set up to match Brill's system, so the two read each other's calls.
World Computer-Bridge Champion four times — individual 2009 and 2010, teams 2011 and 2014
PowerShark is the robot inside Shark Bridge, a program for playing and practising bridge
on Windows, Mac, iPhone and iPad. It began around 1995 as a bidding program and has played
the cards since 2001. It thinks by simulation — it deals out the hands it cannot see
and tries its options on them — and plays its own five-card-major system with a
15–17 notrump. As PowerShark it reached the final of Machine vs Machine 2024, losing
to WBridge5.
At this table. Like WBridge5 and BBA, PowerShark speaks the Table Manager
protocol rather than answering single calls, so it sits at a table of its own on a Windows
machine and a batch job posts its boards back.
World Computer-Bridge Champion 2019 — runner-up five times
Micro Bridge began in 1982 as a network play tool the Uchidas wrote to improve their own
partnership, and has been sold since 1986. It first played double dummy, looking at all
four hands; since 1999 it plays fair, simulating the hands it cannot see. After five
times as runner-up it took the world title in 2019, beating Synrey Bridge 120–35 in
the final. Its bidding system is built with its own system editor, and in robot play it
uses the championship settings with a weak notrump and Michaels cuebids.
At this table. Like WBridge5, BBA and PowerShark, Micro Bridge speaks the
Table Manager protocol rather than answering single calls, so it sits at a table of its own
on a Windows machine and a batch job posts its boards back. Here it plays a system built
in its own editor to match Brill's two-over-one.
Ray's Bridge Game is a bridge program written in Java by Ray. It bids Standard American
Yellow Card — weak two-bids, a strong 2♣, a 15–17 notrump, Stayman,
Jacoby transfers and Roman Keycard Blackwood 1430.
At this table. Like WBridge5, BBA, PowerShark and Micro Bridge, Ray's
Bridge Game speaks the Table Manager protocol rather than answering single calls, so it
sits at a table of its own and a batch job posts its boards back.
Pidgin learned to bid from scratch. It started from random weights and learned by
playing against copies of itself. It saw no expert auctions and no written conventions,
and nobody labelled its bids. Double-dummy results scored its auctions during training,
but it never sees them when it bids. The system it found is fairly natural, close to
Vienna in places, with its own quirks: light openings, and fewer bids that carry broader
meanings. It plays the cards with a second neural network. Pidgin has no rules to look
up. For its calls, you see what that call meant across a million of its own self-play
auctions.
At this table. A seat robot, run here from its author's own
package and asked for one call or one card at a time over the seat API. A day it
cannot be reached is scored without it.
BRL is a research bidding engine, published at the IEEE Conference on Games in 2024.
It began by learning from WBridge5's auctions, then improved on them with
reinforcement learning, playing against copies of itself and earlier versions of
itself (fictitious self-play), with double-dummy results as the score. Its authors
report it beating WBridge5 in the auction by 1.24 IMPs a board in their own
double-dummy comparison.
BRL only bids. It plays the cards with Pidgin's card-play network,
so where BRL and Pidgin end up with different scores, it is the auction that made
the difference.
At this table. A seat robot, run here from Henning Sperr's Pidgin
package beside Pidgin and asked for one call or one card at a time over the seat
API. A day it cannot be reached is scored without it.
Rusty is a rule-based bidding engine written in Rust, built to run in the browser and
support bidding practice. It bids from a convention card: each convention is written
as a set of rules, and the card chooses which of them it plays. Here it plays GIB's
2/1, the same system as Brill, so where the two differ it is the rules and the
judgement behind them, not the system.
Rusty only bids. It plays the cards with BEN, run beside it on
its author's server.
At this table. A seat robot on its author's own server, asked for
one call or one card at a time over the seat API. A day it cannot be reached is
scored without it.
Authors, countries and championship records from
computerbridge.se,
a catalogue of the playing programs and their results.