¶ Introduction
We are excited to announce a series of updates aimed at enhancing both our online platform and game experience. These updates include the launch of a new website, a refreshed game interface, improvements to bot performance, and additional features for gameplay and user convenience. Our goal is to provide a modern, user-friendly environment that enriches the overall gaming experience.
¶ Summary
Website: Launched a modern, colorful site reflecting the new game UI, with enhanced content and development updates.
Game Interface: Updated with a vibrant color scheme and intuitive layout for a better user experience.
Player Games History: Added feature to view and replay past games with detailed stats and favorite options.
Bot improvements:
Enhanced algorithms for better signaling, bidding, and game play.
Introduced quick start for games with bots and fixed various bidding issues.
Additional Updates:
Comparison chart between Bridge Champ and other platforms.
Improved tournament scoring calculations.
Fixed seat-switching bugs and released updated mobile apps.
¶ New Website and Development Updates
A new website with playful colors and a modern design that perfectly reflects our new game’s UI. We are improving the content by adding teams’ pictures, our story, and our best features’ snippets. We will also provide development updates with all the new releases.
New Game Interface 💻
Our new game's UI includes a passionate color scheme and sharp layout. It makes the game very user-friendly. We carefully chose the colors to create a visually pleasing and intuitive environment. It helps players to navigate quickly to find the needed information. The layout is straightforward to use. It gives you all information and buttons in logical places. This new UI provides players with an enhanced and seamless gaming experience.
Player Games History 🃏
We added a Games History feature that shows the list of games you previously played (not kibitzed). You can easily access that section from the left-side menu. You can see which users played the game, the winning contract, the final score, total points, and much more. Adding the game to your Favorites list is also possible so you can replay your game-play.
Improved Bot Signals 🤖
We did another round of reviews around the bot signals. We are now working to improve the algorithm for the bot to select the best suit to signal. We created a table of 800+ cases that cover all combinations of "my hand suit + dummy hand suit" (1.6 million combinations in total), the table provides a score for any such suit distribution. The bot uses this table to assign a weight for each sui. It will signal the suit with the highest importance.
Play With Bots 🤖
Now you can quickly start the game without navigating the table creation menu. This makes the experience more convenient for players who want to play the bridge game with bots.
¶ Improved Bots Bidding Features 🤖
Cuebid
A Cuebid is an artificial bid of the opponent’s bid suit to show support for the partner suit. This advanced feature was only partially implemented, and in some cases, the bot used to get confused and pass his partner's cuebid, resulting in a bad score. We now fixed this issue.
Takeout Double
When we double an opponent’s bid, we signal strength and force our partner to bid. We enhanced this feature further and planned additional improvements in the upcoming releases.
Preemptive bid
The bot now treats "weak two" bids the same as three-level preempts after we adjusted some rules related to it.
Jump shift
The existing rules for this convention needed to be corrected (it showed a strong hand instead of a weak one). We fixed this and then implemented rules for the opener to respond to partner's jump shift.
Added support for Cappelletti's response
This scenario introduced some special cases. In some scenarios (like 1N,2C, P,2D), the 2D bid can mean either you hold 6 diamonds or ask the partner to bid its own 6 cards suit (promised by the 2C bid) if he doesn’t have diamonds. We are also introducing chaining between rules. So if a rule fails, a lower-priority rule will be applied.
Improved hand strength evaluation
There are several methods to evaluate hand strength in addition to hcp. The most interesting is called spif. Suppose we already found support with our partner in a specific suit and are short in other suits (ruffing opportunity), we can increase our strength and bid higher than we usually would when counting only honors.
Reduce bot confusion
We have implemented a simulator to test the bidding bot massively on many hands and we are thrilled to see that our bot is gradually improving. When playing with another bot, a bot would sometimes get confused about the other bot's bidding. In this case the simulator alerts us, and we take measures to resolve the confusion scenario.
New Comparison Chart 📊
We have highlighted the differences between Bridge Champ and other existing platforms in a convenient chart that you can find on bridgechamp.com. We are looking forward to add many new and exciting features. We are committed in the long term to bringing many innovations to the online Bridge gaming community.
Improved Tournament Score Calculations 🏆
We improved the code and design of IMPs and MPs score calculation during tournaments. We now calculate victory points from IMPs using the algorithm suggested by the WBF.
Fixed Seat-switching Bug 🐞
There were a couple of issues when requesting an Undo. At the end the game, the bot would not switch back to its original place, and the game and video chat would stop working. Now when you play with a bot partner, you can switch places in case the bot wins the bidding.
Updated Mobile Apps 📱
New versions of the Android and iOS mobile apps with many bug fixes were recently released on the app stores. You can download them and see their respective change-logs here:
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bridge-champ/id1593602680
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jelurida.bridgechampgame
Here’s a preview:
Various Bug Bixes and Improvements 🃏
We fixed other issues related to Bidding, Claim request, Undo request, Chat, Alerts, Tournaments, Users, and more. We are now completing the tournaments module and will soon start extensive testing.
Our Quality Assurance team is always looking for bugs and stability issues. Any feedback from the users is greatly appreciated.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and stay tuned. 📌📡
New exciting features and activities are coming soon. 🔥😎
https://www.youtube.com/@bridge_champ
https://www.facebook.com/BridgeChamp
https://twitter.com/bridge_champ
