Using the Rase App

Every screen, control and feature, one at a time.

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The Home Screen#

You sit South. The robots play the other three seats using the bidding system and conventions you choose in Settings — American Standard 2/1 or ACOL, each with customisable conventions.

The card at the top is the way to the table. It reads Play Rubber Bridge before a rubber starts, Deal the Next Hand between deals, and Resume Deal if a hand is already open — which takes you back to exactly where you left it. Leaving the table never abandons a hand.

Once a rubber is under way the same card carries the score: games, we and they. Tap it for the full pad.

Below that, everything else, in three groups.

Your progress

• Rubber Review — the whole rubber graded at once, and your record across every rubber you have played.
• Hand Archive — every completed deal, with its analysis.

More ways to play

• Diagrams — set up a deal from a book or a hand record and play it, apart from the rubber.
• Live Scorepad — a scorer for a game you are playing with real cards, away from the app.

Set up & learn

• System & Conventions — your bidding system, every convention switch, card colours and the robots' pace.
• Tutorials & Reference — this library.
• Guided Tour — the short walkthrough shown on a first run. It can be replayed at any time, from here or from the ? button in the corner.

Deals continue until one side wins the rubber; then the app offers to start the next one. The rubber, your settings, the archive, the diagram hands and the live scorepad are all saved on the device as you go, so closing the app loses nothing.

Bidding at the Table#

The bidding panel fills the lower half of the screen during the auction. Its header shows your system, and your hand's high-card point count.

The auction grid shows every call so far in four columns, one round per row, with the dealer's column marked. Tap any call — yours or a robot's — to see what it meant. This is the fastest way to learn: the robots explain every bid they make, in your system.

To make a call: pick a level, then a strain. The meaning appears above the buttons before you commit, and you place it with the Place button. If you already know what you want, double-tap the strain (or Pass/Dbl) to bid it straight away.

💡 suggests a call — the engine's own choice for your hand, with its reasoning, pre-selected so you can place it or overrule it. There is no penalty for using it, and no limit.

Illegal calls are disabled rather than hidden, so the shape of the auction stays readable. Changing your bidding system or a convention while an auction is live restarts that auction, because half a hand bid in one system and half in another would be meaningless.

Playing the Cards#

When the auction ends, dummy comes down and the play begins. Your legal cards are bright and tappable; illegal ones are dimmed, so you cannot revoke.

When your side declares, you play both hands — your own and dummy's — even on deals where North is nominally declarer. The table rotates so that whichever of the two hands is to play sits at the bottom. When the robots declare, you defend with South's cards and see dummy as everyone does.

The pills above your hand carry the tools:

• 📋 Bidding — reopen the auction and the contract, with a reminder of how many tricks declarer still needs.
• 🂠 Last trick — look at the trick just completed and who won it.
• 💡 Hint — the engine's recommended card, glowing in your hand.
• ↶ Undo — take back your card, and the robot moves that followed it.
• Claim / Concede rest — when the app can prove the remaining tricks are settled.

Trick counters under the table show WE and THEY. When the thirteenth trick falls, the result sheet appears with the score, any games or rubber won, and a one-line verdict on the deal.

Hint, Undo, Claim and Concede#

Hint behaves differently in each stage, and the difference matters:

• During the auction, it is the bidding engine's recommendation for your hand — from your cards and the auction only. It is advice you could in principle have worked out yourself.
• During the play, it is double-dummy once few enough cards remain: the engine looks at all four hands and names the card that is best against any defence. It is a perfect answer rather than a realistic one, which makes it an excellent teacher and a poor imitation of a partner.

Undo steps back one of your cards, cancelling any robot moves that followed. There is no limit within a deal and no penalty. It is meant to be used: playing a card, seeing what happens and taking it back is a faster way to learn a suit combination than reading about it.

Claim and Concede rest appear only when a double-dummy solve of the remaining position proves the outcome, so accepting one never costs you a trick. Concede is also on the ≡ table menu, on the same terms — greyed out, with the reason, while a trick may still be yours.

Nothing you use here affects the score. The Analysis screen grades what you did, not how you arrived at it — though the sensible way to use the app is to bid a hand yourself, then check the hint afterwards.

The Analysis Screen#

After every deal, Analysis re-examines the hand with all four hands visible. It takes a few seconds, because it is running a large number of double-dummy solves, and it is the most valuable thing in the app.

The Deal panel at the top shows all four hands, the contract and the result, plus a table of how many tricks each side can take in each strain — the double-dummy trick table. Under it sits the par result: what the deal is worth if both sides bid and defend perfectly. Par is the honest yardstick for the auction, because it accounts for the fact that some deals belong to the opponents.

Your grade follows, with its two halves — bidding and play — and, when you open it, the reasoning behind each number.

What to work on gives a plain-language verdict on the deal and then the specific lessons, strongest first: the call that cost the most, the trick that cost the most.

The Auction, Reviewed lists every call against the engine's recommendation for your system and vulnerability, with the reasoning for each. Only your own calls are marked right or wrong; the robots' calls are shown for context.

The Play, Reviewed lists all thirteen tricks with the winner of each. Cards are annotated against the double-dummy best play, and tricks that actually changed hands are marked in place, naming the card that should have been played. Again, only cards you chose are graded.

Replay This Hand deals the same cards again, unscored, so you can try the line you now know was right.

How Your Hand is Graded#

The percentage on the Analysis screen is not "how many of your decisions matched the engine". It is a measure of what your mistakes cost, in points, and it is built from two questions a bridge teacher would ask.

1. Bidding — was the contract you reached worth what the cards were worth? The app computes par for the deal and compares it with the value of the contract you actually reached, played double-dummy. It has nothing to do with how the cards then fell: reaching the right contract and getting unlucky scores full marks.

2. Play — how many tricks did you give away? The exact double-dummy trick count is tracked at every trick boundary through the whole hand. Each time it moves against your side, a trick has just been lost; the app attributes it to the seat that caused it and charges you only for the ones you were responsible for. Your partner's and the robots' errors are never charged to you.

Both are measured in points, and points become a percentage through the IMP scale — bridge's own compressive measure of how much a result differs from another. A one-trick overtrick difference is 1 IMP; letting a cold vulnerable game go down is around 12. A 16-IMP loss scores zero, and everything below scales linearly, so each IMP costs a little over six points.

The design consequence is deliberate: a hand where you threw away a trick can never read as perfect, no matter how tidy the endgame was. Equally, a hand where nothing was available and you took what there was scores highly even if the result looks bad on the pad.

Rubber Review#

One hand at a time, the Analysis screen says everything there is to say. What it cannot say is the thing you actually want to know at the end of a rubber: am I getting better, and at what. That is a question about five or six hands together, and Rubber Review is where it is answered.

It opens on the result — who won, by how much, and off what games — and then keeps two things carefully apart:

• Points are the pad. Who won the rubber.
• Percent is the grade. What your bidding and your play were worth against what the cards held.

The two disagree often, and the screen never averages one into the other. A rubber can be won on cards and lost on judgement, and losing at 84% is being told something true and useful.

How It Was Played gives an overall figure, a bar each for bidding and play, and — once there are at least two hands of each — how you declared against how you defended. Declaring and defending are different skills and few players are equally good at both, but a single hand's sheet can never show it. Underneath is how this rubber compares with your average over the rubbers before it.

Every hand counts once, whatever it was worth. This is how you play, typically, not how this rubber happened to run.

What Went Well and What To Work On are two plain lists, costliest first. Every line is checkable against something you can see — a count of hands, a count of calls, a figure on the pad. A rubber with nothing to praise gets an empty list and says so, which is worth more than a compliment you can tell is automatic. Hand by Hand is a way into the full analysis of any deal in the rubber.

A hand that has never been graded is named rather than quietly left out of the averages, with a button to work it out — that is the one slow thing on the screen, so it is offered rather than done on the way in. Everything else was computed when each hand finished, which is why the report opens at once.

Your Record is the part that is about you rather than about a rubber: win rate, won and lost, your current streak, your best run, and your running averages. A rubber set aside unfinished counts as neither a win nor a loss. Past Rubbers reopens any of them. Clearing the record deletes those figures only — saved hands and their analyses are not touched.

The Hand Archive#

Every completed deal is saved automatically — including passed-out deals and practice replays — with its contract, result and grade. The most recent 50 are kept; older ones drop off the end.

Tap any row to open its full analysis, exactly as it was after the deal. The analysis is computed fresh, so an archived hand from a rubber three days ago gives the same trick table, par and grading as it did at the time.

Individual hands can be deleted with ✕, or the whole archive cleared. Both are permanent — there is no undo for the archive itself.

The archive is the practical way to use the app as a teacher: play a rubber without stopping to analyse, then work through the deals afterwards and look for the pattern in what the grades are telling you.

Diagrams#

A deal in a book, a newspaper column, a club's hand record or a handviewer screenshot is a hand somebody thought was worth printing. Diagrams lets you set one up and play it against the robots, with the same table, hints, undo, claim, debrief and analysis as any other hand.

It is kept entirely apart from the rubber. Its hands go to their own history — the most recent 200 — never to the Hand Archive or Rubber Review, and playing one never touches the rubber you have going.

There are three ways to get a deal in:

• Type it. Tap a hand and enter its cards. Once three hands are in, the fourth fills itself. Any hand the diagram does not show can be dealt at random, and re-dealt until you like it.
• Paste it. A PBN or LIN deal, or a BBO handviewer link.
• Photograph it. On iPhone and iPad, take a photo or choose a screenshot and the hands, dealer and vulnerability are read in for you to check and correct. Reading happens on the device; the photo is never saved, and is held in memory for ten minutes at most while you check it. A cloud reader that copes with more kinds of diagram can be switched on instead — it is off until you turn it on and agree to it. Photo reading is not available in a browser; typing and pasting are.

Then set the board. Dealer and vulnerability are prefilled when the diagram showed them. You can also put a part score on the board: with one, the deal plays as it would in a rubber — the robots bid knowing it, a contract that takes the side to 100 scores the game bonus, and honours count. With none, it is scored as a duplicate board.

Choose your seat — any of the four, not only South — and whether to bid it or start from a set contract. Bidding it grades both the auction and the play. Starting from a contract grades the play alone. If the diagram printed an auction and some hands are being dealt at random, those hands can be dealt to fit what each seat's calls show; when no deal fits the cards you have given, it says so rather than pretending.

If the diagram printed an opening lead, a robot on lead can play that card instead of choosing its own — or you can choose its lead yourself, from its hand. When you are on lead, the lead is yours to find as usual.

The robots bid your system and your conventions here, exactly as they do at the rubber table.

The Live Scorepad#

For a game with real cards and real people. It scores a rubber correctly so nobody has to argue about the arithmetic, and it is entirely separate from the robot game's score.

To record a hand: choose whether it was ours or theirs, the level, the suit, whether it was doubled, and the result — = or +n if it made, or the number of undertricks if it went down. Add honours if a hand held them. A preview line shows what the entry will score before you commit it.

The pad then keeps everything in step: the below-the-line total, the games, the vulnerability, the rubber bonus when it is won, and the unfinished-rubber premiums if you stop early.

Corrections are safe. Tap ✎ on any recorded hand to edit it, or ✕ to delete it — the entire rubber is re-scored from scratch, so games and vulnerability stay right even when you correct the second hand of six. An edited hand is re-scored at the vulnerability it was played at, not the one the rubber has since reached.

There is a timer for the rubber, a Save Part-Finished Rubber option that applies the 300/100 premiums correctly, and a list of past rubbers with their durations and results. Resetting the live scorepad does not touch the robot game.

Settings#

Base system — American Standard 2/1 or ACOL. Choosing one resets the convention switches to that system's defaults, and restarts any auction currently in progress.

Convention switches — the full list is in the Bidding chapter's reference table. Every switch changes the robots, the meanings shown when you tap a call, the hint, and the Analysis screen's judgement of your auction, because all four come from the same engine.

High-contrast four-colour suits — red hearts, black spades, blue diamonds and green clubs on the card faces, with a live preview. Useful on a small screen, where black spades and black clubs are easy to confuse in a fanned hand.

Text size — Normal or Large, with a live sample of the table at the chosen size. It sets the reading size for bidding, instructions and table labels; the cards and the table are laid out to the screen and do not shrink to make room for it.

Pace of play — Relaxed, Normal or Fast. This sets how long the robots appear to take before each bid and card. It does not make them play better or worse: the thinking runs alongside the pause rather than after it, so the wait is the longer of the two, never their sum.

Offline and Private#

The app plays fully offline. There is no account, no sign-in and no server: the bidding engine, the card-play engine and the double-dummy solver all run on your device.

Nothing about your play leaves the device. Your rubber, settings, hand archive and live scorepad are stored locally, which also means they belong to this installation — deleting the app deletes them.

Double-dummy analysis is powered by DDS by Bo Haglund and Søren Hein, used under the Apache License 2.0.