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© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
This article was written for the ACBL Bridge Bulletin, but was not published, as there was no room.
I tell people that there is no perfect bridge program. You must decide which features are important for you. You can browse my Bridge Software Review, if the following are important to you: Bidding skill, playing skill, a particular bidding system, lots of conventions, price, Windows/DOS/Mac/CD. Perhaps you don't want the program to peek at your cards (cheat). That information is also in the review. Some of the programs lack some standard features, like printing hands, taking back bids and plays, displaying the hands or the cardplay after the deal is over, or dealing special kinds of practice hands (slam hands, for example). Doing without these features may be just fine for you --- nearly all programs are friendly when you just bid and play.
Some programs have a reputation for being especially fun, particularly Bridge Olympiad and Perfect Partner. The latter will learn your bidding system, over time. Some people are very excited about this, but according to the manual, after it has developed a bidding system, it deals only hands that are similar to those that were used to develop the system.
Bridge Baron enables you to play in weekly tournaments with other people. Q-plus Bridge, Micro Bridge and Oxford Bridge play the cards much better than normal at their really slow skill levels. These slow skill levels are practical only if you have a fast Pentium (faster than 100 MHz).
Perhaps you would like to design your own bidding system. If your system is Standard American with your own personal choices of conventions, many programs have the conventions for you to choose from. Contact the developers of some of the programs to see if they offer your conventions. Oxford Bridge, Blue Chip Bridge, and Micro Bridge let you define your own conventions. I have not experimented with this very much. It is probably fairly difficult.
What I am saying is, choose the program which has the features that you want. You decide if you can live without the features that it lacks. It's up to you.