I always wanted an app to practice bidding, so I was excited to give bid72 a try after reading about it in ACBL bulletin.
Unfortunately the experience using app fell short on way too many fronts to recommend it.
Here are my biggest issues with it:
- NO HELP, hints or explanations built in the app whatsoever - creators assume that you know how it works and how they score the hands for you providing no built in help or hints in the app with exceptions when they ask you to pay for something. You’re on your own with it, their website is of little help too, emails they send you often have broken links
- GREEDY PRICING with nickel & dime-big being the strategy. You need to pay subscription to be able to do anything AND on top of this you need to pay to unlock EACH topic from a long list (which I think is the most sensible way to practice with your partner, unless you want to only have random hands). You thought you were done? No, if you want to practice the same topic (such as Lebehnsol) with your partner opening (instead of you), she needs to pay for it too! So, prepare to pay 2 monthly fees and unlock each topic twice, so for a decent practice you will be looking at a 100+ between you two to start
- very underdeveloped bare bones interface which needs work to ensure your brain is not cluttered what you really don’t need and providing more help with analyzing results and grouping them together.
- payments processing is a nightmare. After paying them once, it still showed 0 bidding points, so thought the payment didn’t go through and tried it again with the same results. Next thing I’m receiving a bill for both, and had to write to support to get my points activated. They explained that their “communication with Apple is poor”, and that they don’t give refunds, so I got bidding points at worst possible value.
Great opportunity, but unfortunately falling short of what it could have been. The only reason it’s 2 stars and not 1 is for responsive (although not super helpful, like in situations with refunds) technical support.
Verdict: only for pros, and the best way to use is to participate in bidding contests if you’re an ACBL member (if you can figure it out) - at least this nightmare will be free for you for 5 random deals a week.
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