The deal, the auction, the play, and how a rubber is won.
Rubber bridge is the original social form of contract bridge. Unlike duplicate, where the same deals are compared across many tables, in rubber bridge the cards you are dealt are your fate — and the scoring rewards winning games rather than outscoring the field on each board.
A rubber is best of three games: the first side to win two games wins the rubber and a large bonus. A game is made by scoring 100 points below the line, which can be done in one hand (bidding and making 3NT, 4♥/4♠ or 5♣/5♦) or accumulated over several hands through part-scores.
If you play duplicate, three things will feel different:
There is no board number, no field, and no comparison. Every decision comes down to one question: over the rest of this rubber, does this gain?
One 52-card pack. The suits rank upwards ♣ ♦ ♥ ♠ — clubs lowest, spades highest — with no trumps ranking above all four for bidding purposes. Within a suit the cards rank A K Q J 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2, ace high.
The four seats are named for the compass: North and South are partners against East and West. Play and bidding always move clockwise: North → East → South → West. In this app you are always South, so your partner is North and your left-hand opponent is West.
Each deal, all 52 cards are dealt out, thirteen to each player. The dealer makes the first call of the auction. The deal rotates clockwise after every hand — the app shows whose deal it is in the status bar — and it keeps rotating right through the end of a rubber into the next one.
High-card points. Hands are valued with the standard count: ace 4, king 3, queen 2, jack 1. The whole pack contains 40 points, so an average hand holds 10. Your point count is shown in the bidding panel's header so you never have to add it up.
Each hand has two stages, just as in duplicate:
1. The auction. Starting with the dealer and moving clockwise, each player bids, passes, doubles or redoubles. A bid names a level (1–7) and a strain (♣ ♦ ♥ ♠ or no trumps) and promises to win that many tricks over six. The auction ends after three consecutive passes; the final bid becomes the contract, and the player of the declaring side who first named the strain becomes declarer.
2. The play. The player to declarer's left makes the opening lead, dummy comes down, and declarer plays both hands. Thirteen tricks are played; you must follow suit if you can. In a trump contract, a trump beats any card of a plain suit.
Deal rotates clockwise after every hand, and the rubber continues until one side has won two games.
A bid names a level and a strain: 1♣ through 7NT. The level is a promise of tricks over six, so 1♣ contracts for seven tricks of the thirteen, and 7NT for all thirteen. Six is called the "book" and is never mentioned again.
Each bid must be higher than the last. Higher means either a greater level, or the same level in a higher strain — the order being ♣, ♦, ♥, ♠, NT. So 2♦ is higher than 2♣, 2NT is higher than 2♠, and 3♣ is higher than 2NT. The app only offers you legal calls; everything else is greyed out.
Besides bidding, a player may:
The auction ends when a bid is followed by three passes. If all four players pass at their first turn, the deal is passed out: no contract, no score, cards thrown in, next dealer. (The app treats a passed-out deal as a real result and will still let you analyse it.)
The last bid made is the contract. The declarer is not necessarily the player who made that bid — it is whichever member of the winning partnership first mentioned that strain. This is why an auction of 1♥ – 4♥ makes the opener declarer even though partner bid the final 4♥.
Every call carries meaning by agreement, not by law. Which meanings apply is what the System & Conventions screen decides, and both the robots and every explanation the app gives you follow whatever you set there.
The player on declarer's left makes the opening lead — face down at a real table, tapped here. Then dummy (declarer's partner) lays their thirteen cards face up on the table, sorted by suit, and takes no further part: declarer plays both hands.
Play proceeds clockwise. The rules of a trick are short:
Thirteen tricks decide the deal. Declarer needs level + 6 of them to make the contract; anything more is an overtrick. Falling short means the contract goes down by that many undertricks, and the defenders score.
Tap 🂠 Last trick at any point to look back at the trick just played and see who won it — the one piece of table memory that is always legal to consult.
A double is a bid against an opponent's contract that roughly doubles what it is worth — to whoever is right. It doubles the trick score if the contract makes, and sharply increases the penalty if it fails. A redouble by the contracting side doubles it again.
Both are wiped out by any subsequent bid: if you double 2♥ and the opponents run to 2♠, the double no longer applies to anything, and 2♠ can be doubled afresh.
The important thing for a new player is that a double at the table has two different jobs, decided by agreement:
Both are convention switches in Settings, along with the negative double — a double of an opponent's overcall, showing the unbid suits rather than a wish to punish. If you turn a switch off, the robots stop making that call and stop reading it that way.
In rubber bridge a well-judged penalty double is one of the biggest sources of points in the game: 500 or 800 from a doubled part-score is more than most made games are worth.
Three things stack on top of one another, and confusing them is the commonest beginner's difficulty:
When a game is won, a line is drawn across the pad and both sides start the next game from zero below the line. A part-score that has not turned into a game when the line is drawn is lost for that purpose — the points stay in the final total, but they no longer count towards a game.
Vulnerability is earned. A side that has won a game becomes vulnerable for the rest of the rubber. Vulnerability does not change what you need for a game; it changes the money:
This is why the vulnerability shown in the status bar matters on every decision: a save that is cheap non-vulnerable is expensive vulnerable, and a speculative double against a vulnerable opponent pays double.
Ending a rubber early. If a rubber is abandoned unfinished, a side with one game to nil collects 300, and each side holding a part-score in the unfinished game collects 100. The app applies these automatically to a part-finished rubber you save on the Live Scorepad.
When the rest of a hand is a formality, real players do not play it out. The declarer claims — states the remaining tricks are theirs — or a side concedes the rest. Both save time and cost nothing when the claim is sound.
The app offers these only when they are provably right. At the start of a trick, when you are on lead and between two and eight tricks remain, it runs a double-dummy solve of the position:
Because the offer comes from a proof rather than a guess, accepting one never costs you a trick you might have won. The Analysis screen marks the hand so you can see later that some tricks were claimed or conceded rather than played.
Rase plays a full rubber, scores it the traditional way, and grades every bid and card afterwards.
Free, with no ads, no accounts and no tracking. The app plays offline.