You do not have to know anything about designing deal recipes or generating deals if you don’t want to. The methods described here assume that you already have a set of deals in one or more files.

PDF Reports

This tutorial shows you how to make your own deal reports. You can then choose how to share them.

On Paper

You can show the deal, an auction, and a Double Dummy makeable contracts table on a deal report PDF. Ideally, you will write a lesson that the deal illustrates. Printed deal reports can be used as handouts or compiled into a booklet for your students.

The deal report includes a QR code. Users may use their cell phone or tablet to scan the QR code and bring up the deal generator web page with the deal loaded into the Deal panel. They will then have access to the other deal analysis tools described further on in this guide.

Electronically

You can share the deal report PDF via email or text, or place it in a shared online folder for others to download.

When viewing the PDF on their device, users can click the URL just below the auction to bring up the deal generator web page with the deal loaded into the Deal panel.

On a large monitor, or via screen sharing in a teleconference

You can share your screen via local screencasting, or in teleconference software (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.). However, while the deal report PDF contains a lot of information, it is static and may not be the best choice for holding the attention of your audience. For better screen-viewing options, keep reading!

The following sections describe web page features that can be shared via screencasting in front of an in-person audience, or via screen sharing in teleconferencing software.

Deal panel

The Deal panel of the deal generator is also static (that is, you cannot interact with the deal). However, it is a great starting point for presenting your deals in a more interactive way.

For a class, you probably don’t want to show the very crowded and busy deal generator web page, as it might overwhelm and distract your audience. For that reason, you should click the “square” button at the top right of the Deal panel:

This will hide the Deal Recipe panel. You can then zoom your web browser in or out as needed to get the Deal panel to the desired size for presentation. Here, I have done just that. This is not a fragment of my screen—it’s the entire web page showing only the Deal panel:

I have loaded only one deal. In a class, you can use the “Load File” button to load one deal at a time. You can also load in a file containing multiple deals, and use the arrows at the top right of the Deal display area to scroll through them.

This display can be your starting point for discussing the deal. Just keep this tab open in your browser. You may click buttons to view deals in other programs while you present your lesson, and those programs will get their own tab in the browser. When you finish explaining a deal, just close that other tab and then load in or scroll to the next deal in your lesson on the Deal panel.

Handviewer web page

For a deal display that many will find familiar, click the Handviewer button at the top of the Deal display area. You will see this:

While this page has the Bridge Base logo and the software is provided by bridgebase.com, you area actually still on the Bridge, Out Ahead website.

The “Play” button lets you step through play of the hand, with you (the presenter) choosing each card to play. You can even rewind and make different choices as you explain things to your audience.

Note, however, that for “Play” to work you must specify a contract. In the above display, the auction panel is empty so you cannot play this hand. So, before clicking the Handviewer button, follow this tutorial to key in an auction back on the Deal display panel of the deal generator.

While you may want to plan ahead and you may even have your auction text stored somewhere from where you can cut and paste it into the Deal display Auction text box, you really only need to provide any valid auction ending in three pass calls. So for the above hand I might key “7n,p,p,p” in the Auction text, like this:

Then when I click the Handviewer button, we see that I can actually play the hand:

The “DD” button at the bottom of the page activates Double Dummy analysis. With it, you will see colorized numbers showing the result of each card played. In this example with “DD” activated, we see that North/South will make their contract if the ace is played from dummy; if they play any other card, they will go down at least one trick:

BridgeSolver web page

The final option for quickly and easily analyzing a deal for your audience is reached by clicking the BridgeSolver button at the top of the Deal display area. You do not need to key in an auction before clicking the BridgeSolver button.

Here’s what you see when you click that button:

To step through and play one card at a time, first click on a contract in the makeable contracts table at the lower right of the page. Here’s what happens when I click “7” in the NT column for South:

The program colorizes each card in the hand whose turn it is to play, and it shows how many tricks that player’s side can expect to win, in total, if each card is selected.

The “<“ button is just like the “Rewind” button of the Handviewer page.

To eliminate the tedious, repetitive part, we have the Permutations feature. It allows you to quickly generate many recipes from a starter recipe.

Before using the feature, you must define a few things in a JSON file.

fileNameFirstNumber: when generating multiple recipe files, you need a filename prefix to make the files sort in a desirable order. I use a prefix of two 4-digit numbers. The first 4-digit number is something like a group code (this is an arbitrary decision on my part—you may call the number anything you like). Every recipe generated from the same starter recipe will have the same group code. The second 4-digit number will be a simple sequential number starting at zero, so you don’t need to specify a starting value in the JSON file.

updateShaperTabIndics: there are 11 shaper tabs. You, the recipe designer, know which shaper tabs of your starter recipe have values that you want to alter. Set the indicators for those shaper tabb to “Y”. In the above example, my goal is to alter settings on the first six shaper tabs. Set the indicators for the unaffected tabs to “N”.

northHCPRanges: this is an array of arbitrary size. Each entry in the array consists of a hash containing the low and high ends of the desired HCP range for the opener.

southHCPRanges: this is an array of arbitrary size. Each entry in the array consists of a hash containing the low and high ends of the desired HCP range for the responder.

If specifying HCP ranges just for North and South seems arbitrarily limited, that’s because it is. It is, in fact, tailored to exactly suit the first use case for generating permutations that the author of this software encountered. There may be more use cases in the future. But for now, I am certain that many, many bridge conventions specify different rules based on combinations of opener and responder point ranges.

My example JSON file specifies 3 opener HCP ranges and 6 responder ranges. The permutation process will make one recipe for each opener range paired with each responder range, so for this example we will get 3 * 6 = 18 recipes. You can specify as many point ranges as you need.

Once you have your JSON file saved off to your file system, make sure your recipe is loaded into the deal generator recipe panel. Here, I have loaded in a recipe for Reverses that uses six shaper panels, all with very broad opener and responder HCP ranges:

I want 18 recipes, with the opener and responder HCP ranges defined in my JSON file. To do that, I click the “Permutations” button of the Save Recipe File panel, shown here. Don’t worry about the file name shown there from when I loaded in the current recipe—it does not affect Permutations processing:

After you click “Permutations” you will see a file chooser dialog. Navigate to wherever you stored your JSON file. Here, you can see that I have stored multiple JSON files, each one tailored for different scenarios. You could theoretically write a new JSON file from scratch every time you want permutations, but I prefer to save my work on the assumption that I will need it again later. I made a separate chapter of my cookbook for permutation specifications, available here.

Select the JSON file you want. The deal generator will quickly generate your permutations and it will write them to a ZIP archive. The ZIP archive will either save directly to your file system, or else you will get a folder selection dialog that lets you choose where to save it, like this:

I chose to save my ZIP file to my Downloads folder. Then I double-click the ZIP file to expand it into a folder, and we see my 18 permutations of the recipe.

The file names do not contain the word “reverse” or any other clue as to the bidding scenario or convention. However, the files are grouped nicely and named logically, and they advertise their point ranges. If you look in the Reverse section of my cookbook, you will see that the chapter and topic headings tell you what convention you are looking at, so the filenames don’t have to repeat that.

The recipes I develop here are in this section of my bridge deal cookbook.

Subject matter

Choose a convention

While you may attempt to define “Standard American” or “ACOL,” those are systems, not conventions. Narrow it down to a single convention. If there are multiple versions of the convention, work on one of them at a time.

For this tutorial, we will define New and Improved Puppet Stayman over 1NT.

Choose your source(s)

You can find dozens of books and articles about most conventions. From those many sources, choose the ones that will guide your recipe development.

I have purposely chosen a convention that, to my knowledge, is defined very succinctly in just one source. Larry Cohen describes our convention in the second half of this web page.

Recipes

First recipe(s): as general as possible

This is the part where you sit down and think deeply about the convention. Read your sources thoroughly. As you read, notice the bridge language that can be turned into recipe setttings. Such language typically contains numbers of points, numbers of cards, and types of hands.

Our source says, “I like to use 1NT-3C as Puppet.” The 1NT is easily converted to recipe settings: a balanced shape with 15-17 HCP.

“[The Puppet Stayman user] will either have a 3-card major, or maybe a 3-card major and a 4-card major. Never use Puppet Stayman with a 5-card major.” Hark! This boils down to response hands with at least one 3-card major, and from 0 to 4 cards in the other major. Easily done with shaper settings.

“Responder should not use Puppet Stayman with 4-4 in the majors, nor with 4-3-3-3 shape.” If in your shapers you use an exact shape of 3 for one major, and limit the other major to 4 cards, you thereby exclude 4-4 in the majors. As for no 4-3-3-3 shape, that is so common that we have a shaper selection for it: No Pancake.

The picture emerges. We can develop a single general recipe for this convention. North has the 1NT opener. I give East a hand that is unlikely to inspire interference. The main action is in South (responder); there, we define the settings that can prompt a Puppet Stayman bid. It takes two shaper tabs (still in one recipe, though) because we define the response shapes once for a 3-card spade holding, and again for a 3-card heart holding:

List the variations you want

Used repeatedly, that recipe will eventually serve up all variations contained in the settings. You could pack up and call it a day. But it is much more useful, for you or for your students, if you can generate deals for specific variations on demand. This is a small, relatively simple convention. What variations might we want?

To identify the useful variations, think about the bidding sequences you would like to produce. Then think about the opener and responder shapes you will need.

Opener shapes

Opener any 1NT shape (the general recipe)

Opener 1NT with 5 hearts

Opener 1NT with 5 spades

Opener 1NT 4-4 in the majors

Opener 1NT with 4 spades and 0-3 hearts

Opener 1NT with 4 hearts and 0-3 spades

Opener 1NT with no 4-card majors

Responder shapes

Responder any Puppet shape (the general recipe)

Responder 3-3 in the majors

Responder with 4 hearts and 3 spades

Responder with 4 spades and 3 hearts

I have not specified any variations that always deliver 0, 1, or 2 cards in either major suit. It’s not that those don’t matter—it’s that I am most interested in the variations I listed above, and I don’t anticipate wanting to generate those with shorter majors (though I will get plenty of those at random with the original, general recipe). When building your own recipes for a convention, feel free to include as many or as few scenarios as you like.

Build the variations

Pop quiz! Close your books and put your calculators away.

Alice leaves Cleveland at 10:05 AM Eastern Time on a nonstop Westbound train going 50 MPH. Marvin leaves Kansas City at 11:05 Central time on an Eastbound train going 35 MPH. Marvin’s train will stop for 5 minutes at 3 stations along the way. While it may seem implausible, when in motion the train will always move at exactly 35 MPH. The occupants, presumably, are immune to the effects of instantaneous acceleration and deceleration.

Question: if I combine each Puppet Stayman opener variation with each responder variation, how many recipes will I have?

Answer: 28

I’m not sure what Alice and Marvin riding on trains had to do with that, but you know it is with word problems. They like to obscure the main point.

For this fairly simple convention, for the variations that interest me, I will need 28 recipes.

I have covered the idea of recipe themes and variations extensively over the years, both in random posts and in user guides. I will not step you through the process for all 28 recipes. I will just say that if you start with the first opener scenario and combine it with the four responder scenarios, you get something like this:

That’s four recipes, all with the same opener scenario. There are also four reports and report texts in there, but you can pick out the recipes thanks to the word RECIPE in bold print.

The first recipe is the one I showed you earlier in this post. The other three recipes change that recipe to fit each responder scenario.

That’s the first four. For the next four recipes, combine the second opener scenario with each of the four responder recipes.

Lather, rinse, repeat until you have all 28 recipes.

Organization

File System

The way you set up the folders and subfolders for your cookbook is the first step in keeping things organized. I use a 4-level folder structure with (conceptually) the book level containing chapter folders, chapters containing topic folders, and topic folders containing recipes and related files and/or subtopic folders. Here’s my file system:

I have no recipes for the “Hadder Modified” or “Original over 1NT” Puppet Stayman conventions, but I will eventually so I go ahead and make empty subtopic folders for them.

File Names

Within a topic or subtopic folder, use file names that cause your recipes to be grouped together logically. You can see that I have put two 3-digit numbers at the start of each of my file names.

The leading “000” is for all recipes with my first opener scenario. I then provide a second number representing the responder scenario that is combined with the opener. So you see files with “000_000”, then “000_001”, “000_002”, and finally “000_003” for the fourth recipe. That’s one group of four recipes.

The second group of four recipes all have the second opener scenario, and start with “001”.

This is a homemade naming convention; nothing in my deal generator knows or cares how the files are named.

Make it easy to use, and informative

Be descriptive

While I used the pairs of 3-digit numbers in file names to cause them to appear in a particular order, I also provide a description in the rest of the file name.

This is crucial, because a recipe doesn’t have any description built into it. You can make a recipe report if you like, and I have done so for some recipes. But for ease of use, ideally you and your users can tell the general purpose of a recipe without opening it and puzzling it out.

You can see that I put little snippets of descriptive bridge language in my file names—the kinds of things that become recipe settings.

Make a cookbook

So far, we’re just making recipe files and getting them organized.

Now make them into a cookbook web page.

Make deals, and do something with them

As satisfying as it is to create a set of convention recipes and make them into a cookbook, at some point we should play some bridge. What I like to do is use the recipes to make sets of playable deals. I then use them in my bridge-playing software of choice. There are many nice bridge-playing systems. I tend to use BBO. Here’s what my deal archive looks like:

“CC Tour” stands for Convention Card Tour. Once I make a file of deals for a convention, I upload it into a named folder in BBO. Then I can use it as a deal source in a bidding table or a teaching table, playing with robots or with friends.

This guide will work with any PBN deal file. Here, I will demonstrate how to load deals into BBO starting at the point where you have received an ACBL Live for Clubs email with your results from a club session.

Click the “View Scores” button to get to the results web page.

In the upper right of the results web page, click on the link that says “Handrecord File PBN)”.

When prompted, save the PBN file where you can find it, such as your Downloads folder.

Note the “.pbn” file extension. You cannot upload PBN files to BBO. You need to get the file into LIN format. One way to do that is with my fantabulous system, at this link.

On the right side of the web page, there is a Deal panel. Click the Load File button.

You should see a file chooser dialog. Navigate to wherever you saved the PBN file. Double-click the PBN file.

After double-clicking the PBN file, You should see a deal displayed in the deal panel. You should also see evidence that there is more than one board—here you can see from the board count at the upper right that you are looking at board 1 of 36.

Below the Deal panel there is a Save Deal File panel with two sets of three buttons. The system has already inserted a name for any file you choose to save from the contents of the Deal panel; you can keep that name or type in whatever you want. Don’t add a file extension—the system will take care of that for you.

Click the leftmost “LIN” button to save the contents of the Deal panel (all 36 boards) to a LIN file.

You should see a file save dialog. Navigate to where you saved the PBN file. Save the LIN file to the same folder.

You now have a file suitable for loading into BBO.

Log into Brigebase.com. On the Home page, click on the “Account” tab at the far right, and use the arrows at the top of the Account panel to shift right until you can see the “Deal archive” label at the top of the panel.

Click the “Deal archive” label. You should see a list of folders. I have many folders, but you may only have the one called “My favorite hands” if you haven’t added any of your own.

Click the plus sign to the right of “Select Folder” at the top of the list of folders.

You should see a new folder called “Untitled folder” near the top of your list of folders.

Click the pencil icon next to the new folder and change the name to something meaningful to you. I use a subject, or the date and location of the session where the boards came from.

After typing the new name, click the check mark to save the new folder name.

Make sure you have the focus/highlight on the new folder, because the next action should affect only that folder.

Once your folder has the focus/highlight, click the blue “Import LIN File” button at the bottom of the Account panel.

A dialog will pop up.

Click the “Browse” button in the Import LIN File dialog. A file chooser dialog should pop up. Navigate to where you saved the LIN file, and double-click it.

After you double-clock the LIN file, click the “Import” button of the Import LIN File dialog. If the file contents are valid, you should see a message telling you how many boards were found, and into which Deal Archive folder they were loaded:

Close the Import LIN File dialog. You might not see the list of boards in your new folder yet, but only because the Bridgebase deal archive panel doesn’t refresh right after you load the boards. Click on a different folder name (maybe the My favorite hands folder), then click on your new folder name again. You should see a list of boards that you just loaded.

Here, with my new folder highlighted, you see a list of boards under the Select Deal label further down the panel.

Now you can set up a bidding table or a teaching table, and you can use your new folder as the source of boards for that table. You can also export one board at a time from that folder into your table—that’s very handy for playing and replaying the same board multiple times when you are trying to figure out a problem.

The Fact: Board Number is Immutable

Professor Pickle may not spell worth a darn, but his point is correct: In a duplicate bridge deal, board number is immutable. Therefore, by association, dealer and vulnerability are immutable.

The dealer bids first. Vulnerability affects the bidding. These are not minor points. They are every bit as important as the cards themselves.

I make this point to explain why the bridge deal generator does not provide a way for users to change the board number of a deal.

You may, of course, turn a deal into a recipe by copying its cards to the Cards panel and generating any number of versions of that deal, with any board numbers from 1 to 2048, each with any combination of dealer and vulnerability that you like.

You may achieve a similar effect by varying a deal some number of times, and specifying dealer and vulnerability rotation for the resulting set of variations.

But those are not the same deal with a different board/dealer/vulnerability. Those are different, distinct deals.

Real Life: You Take What You Can Get in the Real World

With deals made for online play, there is no practical limit to the number of boards you can have in a session. If—as they should—board number, dealer, and vulnerability matter to your bridge deal scenarios, you can create boards exactly to your specifications, with an endless supply of virtual boards.

When using physical boards, though, as in an in-person class, you may have a limited number of boards, and the number/dealer/vulnerability is either manufactured into the board, or applied with a more-or-less permanent sticker.

If you’re lucky, you have multiple sets of 36 boards to work with, and you can make as many exact copies of your boards as you like. But in real life, the club may hand you a bin full of cast-off boards, partial sets with tatty (or no) bar codes, etc. Then, the boards are just an imperfect delivery mechanism for just the cards, with part of their meaning stripped away.

Not to be dramatic about it. Just sayin’.

Teachers deal with this in various ways.

Some don’t mention dealer or vulnerability at all, at least in their written materials.

I don’t believe that they willfully disregard dealer; I think they must know that they may find themselves in a situation where they must simply announce dealer to the room, regardless of the physical boards in use at each table.

I do believe that teachers often disregard vulnerability, especially in lower-level classes. Perhaps if it matters, they will announce it, disregarding what is on the physical board. If it doesn’t matter, they don’t mention it.

I once helped make boards for a visiting teacher. He provided 17 deals, none of which specified dealer or vulnerability (though each of the 17 bidding lessons dictated a particular contract, and presumably you had to get there from some starting point, man). We needed four of each deal—68 boards. Ideally, we would have had four sets of board 01 through 17. But what we actually had was two sets of boards 01 through 36.

Had there been only 16 lessons and deals, we could have loaded two sets of boards 01 through 16, and two sets of boards 17 through 32. The dealer and vulnerability of 17-32 repeat those of 01-16, so all would have been well.

I also could have loaded 01-16 and 17-32 with the first 16 deals, with nicely-repeating dealer/vulnerability, then had boards 33 and 34 each with the 17th deal, with different dealer/vulnerability. Only one board would have suffered the agony of disparity. That would have suited me—but then again, I wasn’t attending the class, and that jump from 16 to 33 in one set and from 32 to 34 in the other would have confused someone, for sure.

Knowing that I never heard anyone else obsess over this issue, instead of wandering into the swamp of the above considerations, I simply asked, “With these 17 deals, do you care about board number, dealer, or vulnerability?”

Long pause (betraying the fact that this was a Non-Issue for the person I was asking), then: “No.”

Well, alrighty then!

What we did was load the 17 deals into boards 1-17, and again into 18-34 in both sets of boards. Dealer and vulnerability therefore did not match for any of the supposedly “same” deals.

The teacher did whatever he was used to doing to get people to play them correctly, and all was well.

All was well, that is, except that the fact of board number immutability had, of necessity, fallen by the wayside, giving me a very mild case of the heebie-jeebies. From a distance, of course, since I wasn’t in the room with those misbegotten boards.

I sound judgmental, I know, but I’m right there on the leading edge of dealing with physical reality, in spite of my wish for board purity.

What to Do When Board Number Really, Really Matters

Sometimes, though, dealer/vulnerability really do matter. Since you can’t change board numbers in my system, what to do?

You may find yourself with a deal that you want to use, but it must co-exist in a set with another deal that has the same dealer and vulnerability. You are going to load both into physical boards, but you only have one of the original board number.

So say you have two deals that want the configuration of board number 01, but you have only 01-36 to work with.

Every 16 boards, the configuration repeats. So load one of your deals into board 01, and another into board 17. Different number, yes, but same configuration.

You can do this on the fly while sitting at the dealing machine. The machine will probably warn you that the physical board number doesn’t match the board number of the input file, but you can force it to load it anyway.

But if you are just providing a file of deals for later use by someone else, you need to get one of those boards into board 17 in a PBN or LIN file.

Since I don’t give you a way to change the unchangeable, what you can do is make sure the Hands panel does not specify any rotations. Turn dealer and vulnerability rotation “on”. Set number of deals to the board number you want—17 in this case.

Now click Vary File of the Deal panel and select the file that contains your deal.

You will see 17 deals pop into the Deal display.

Now use the deal filter to select just board 17, and save it to a new deal file.

When making a multi-deal set where board number matters, you may have to repeat the above steps for several boards. Be sure to save each of your newly-numbered creations to a separate deal file. Once you have everything you need, you can use the Deal Collection panel to turn them into one file, with everything in the desired order.

An Idea for an Enterprising Person

Can someone manufacture a board on which number, dealer, and vulnerability can easily be set with little sliders? One that would still work in the dealing machine?

I hereby grant free, perpetual rights to this idea to anyone who wants to use it for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.

Before now, there were three of them at different levels of the recipe panel. The one next to the Pair settings (top of the Shaper panel) would rotate only the Pair settings. The ones in the 11 Shaper tabs would rotate Shaper tab settings and the Pair settings. The one in the Cards panel would rotate Cards settings, Shaper settings, and Pair settings. This suited me when I was worried about running out of room for buttons, and so to save space I thought that having lower-level buttons operate on progressively higher-level settings made sense. That left things a bit of a confusing mess.

Now there are seat rotate buttons at five levels, each operating in a more consistent way. They are:

High atop the Recipe panel at the extreme right, this button rotates Pair, Shaper, and Cards seat settings. That is, everything contained within the Recipe panel.

The rotate button at the top of the Shaper panel rotates Pair and Shaper settings. That is, everything contained within the Shaper panel.

The button to the right of the Pair settings rotates only the Pair settings.

The rotate buttons in the upper right of each of the 11 Shaper tabs rotate only the Shaper settings, in all Shaper tabs.

Finally, the rotate button in the Cards panel rotates only the Cards settings.

So the three rotate buttons located inside a panel or next to a seat-related setting rotate only that panel or setting.

The two rotate buttons located in the legend or title line of a panel rotate every seat-related setting contained within that panel or its sub-panels.

The seat swap buttons had similar issues, with those lower on the web page controlling higher-up panels in perhaps unexpected ways. Now, though, the new N/S and W/E seat swap buttons at the top of the Recipe panel operate on the Shaper tabs and the Cards panel—that is, on every sub-panel with four seats.

The N/S and W/E sweat swap buttons of the Shaper tabs operate only on all Shaper tabs, as before.

The seat swap buttons of the Cards panel operate only on the Cards panel, instead of also operating on the Shaper tabs.

I also added more seat swap buttons to Cards:

I added N/E, N/W, S/E, and S/W. With the new total of six seat swap buttons, you can swap cards between any two seats.

I added the new swap buttons not so much for recipe development, though you can of course use them for that. I added them because I was researching potentially fouled boards at my club. I had deals from a PBN file loaded into the Deal panel. I used the To Cards button of that panel to copy a deal into the Cards panel. I then wanted to swap North and East (for one example), generate a deal from the modified Cards, then use BridgeSolver to see how the bidding would change.

Problem: I only had N/S and W/E seat swap buttons.

So I added the rest of the seat swap buttons to support research into an already-completed deal. I don’t envision the four new seat swaps being essential to recipe development, so I did not add them to the Shaper tabs or the Recipe legend/title line.

I was right about the exponentiation, except that it’s a really small power of ten—approximately ten to the 1.591, or, to be exact, 39 shapes. That’s way less than the number of atoms in the rings of Saturn, and less even than that planet’s 274 moons!

Who knew?

I could have known that if I had only jotted down the exact shapes in suit order, then noticed that they reduced quickly (by turning exact shapes in suit order into general shapes) and that after mere minutes of noodling it out, you are left with a mere 39 shapes.

As with many other things I could have learned with a bit of online research, the number of hand shapes is well documented. But I have found that the most authoritative online sources will tell you that there are 39 shapes, but they commit the Air Bridge offense of not showing you all of them.

Why? WHY? Why go to the effort of writing an article about 39 shapes, only to show half or fewer of them and then do hand-waving references to “the others”?

Here, for instance, is the hand shape explainer on the ACBL website. It starts off telling you there are 39 shapes, but then it only shows you the 14 most common. It lumps the remaining 25 (64.1025641025641% of all possible shapes!) into three categories: those with 8-10 card suits; those with 7-card suits not listed among the 14 most common; and those with 6-card suits not already listed.

Well, thank you very much! I’ll get right down to compiling my own list to supply the ones they left out, then.

Perhaps a website called Bridgehands.com will deliver the goods, in detail?

Perhaps not.

It, too, tells you that there are 39 shapes. It does a bit better than ACBL by showing you the 21 most common. But then it lumps the remaining 18 (46.1538461538462% of all possible shapes) in the “other” category.

Coolio! I only need to make my own list of the missing ones. Thanky kindly!!

From this and my frequent past complaints about Air Bridge, you know that I like to have things spelled out—served up, as it were, on a silver platter.

To the ACBL’s credit, while their website offers the abridged list of shapes, their very fine 7th edition of the ACBL Encyclopedia of Bridge delivers, on page 576, a complete list of the 39 shapes, along with their percentage frequency of distribution.

Thank goodness! A place where I can verify my own list!

And so, armed with knowledge that a) there are 39 hand shapes; and b) what they are, I of course offer all 39 shapes in the Shaper dropdown boxes of the deal generator.

Yep, 39 shapes. That covers all possibilities.

39.

That’s all we need.

Except, of course, you can see that I actually offer well over 100 shapes. Now, why might that be?

I offer 100+ named shapes of various types: shape groupings, fully-specified and partially-specified shapes, convenience shapes, and legacy shapes.

Shape Groupings

Since all 39 actual shapes are provided, you could construct your own shape groupings by using a multiple-tab recipe. For instance, on shaper tab 1 you could specify 4-3-3-3 shape; on tab 2, 4-4-3-2 shape; on tab 3, 5-3-3-2 shape. Voila! The standard balanced shapes.

However, if you then want to define point ranges and some other shapes to go with the balanced shapes, you will need to repeat those on each of the three shaper tabs.

Therefore, it makes sense to offer shape groupings for the most common shapes. So we have Balanced, Unbal, and Semi-Bal near the top of the list because they are so frequently used.

Near the bottom of the list I provide several other flavors of balanced, unbalanced, and semi-balanced, based on published sources. I added these because, early on, I had not yet figured out whether/how to limit the number of shape groupings I should define, so I added the other balance groupings as I became aware of them.

Here’s the balanced shape groupings we wound up with:

Most Common Understanding of Balanced

Balanced: 4333, 4432, and 5332. Excludes Semi-Balanced.

Semi-Balanced: 5422 and 6322.

Unbalanced: Anything not covered by Balanced.

I treated Semi-Balanced as I did because basic beginner instruction tends to focus on the three main balanced shapes and doesn’t even mention semi-balanced.

“Strict” Balanced

This grouping came about because of this article on hand shapes. I’m not sure where I got the word “strict”, but I ended up adding these shapes to the shaper dropdowns:

Unbal (Strict): Excludes Balanced and Semi-Bal (Strict).

Semi-Bal (Strict): Includes Semi-Balanced, plus 7222.

“Thin” Balanced

This grouping was loosely influenced by Terry Bossomaier’s book, Getting to Thin Games. I write “loosely” because I have not read the book (it’s on my shelf, waiting). A subscriber and expert user of my bridge dealer made me aware of some concepts, and so I wound up adding these groupings:

Bal (Thin): 4333, 4432, 5332, and 5422 (note that one of the common semi-balanced shapes joins this version of balanced).

Unbal (Thin): 6322 and 7222 (lost 5422, gained 7222).

If these groupings don’t accurately represent Bossomaier’s methods, the fault is mine.

No more Variations on a Theme of Balanced

Good luck understanding all of those in relation to each other. I supposed if you specialize in one variation or another, it’s easy enough to get used to using the shapes you need. Me, I stick mainly with Balanced and Unbal (the common variety).

At that point, without having proven the utility of those varieties of balanced, I decided I couldn’t cater to every arcane (which is not to say unreasonable) definition.

Note that the main difference between the various definitions of “balanced” has to do with the number of doubletons. If you find yourself wanting the most liberal definition of balanced, and you don’t care about what name is applied to it, you can always use the No Singleton and No Void shape selections to get no, one, two, or three doubletons:

Fully-specified and Partially-Specified Shapes

A fully-specified shape has only 4 digits separated by three dashes, i.e. 9-2-1-1. This covers the 39 possible shapes.

When you use a fully-specified shape, the deal generator will only search for a deal where the hand has that exact shape (by number of cards—not in suit order).

A partially-specified shape has digits and one or more unspecified numbers of cards, i.e. 9-2-x-x.

When you use a partially-specified shape, the deal generator will search for a deal where the hand has the exact number of cards for the digits in the shape, and any number of cards for the exes. S, for 9-2-x-x, it will find deals with one of shape 9-2-1-1 or 9-2-2-0.

I chose a rather extreme example there. You might more often use a shape like 5-5-x-x or 5-4-x-x or 6-4-x-x to partially specify two-suited hands.

I find it useful to be only as specific as necessary when creating a deal recipe. Doing so makes for more varied and realistic deals from one recipe. Being less specific also helps the generator find a matching deal more quickly.

Exact Shapes

An exact shape has an equal sign (“=”) in one or more positions, indicating that the preceding digit is an exact suit length. For instance, 1=x-x-x means exactly 1 spade, with any number of cards in the other suits; x-1=x-x means exactly 1 heart; x-x-1=x means exactly one diamond; x-x-x-1 means exactly 1 club. Note that there is no equal sign for an exact number of clubs. That’s because it is the last suit, and any digit (therefore anything other than the variable “x”) is presumed to be exact for that position.

A digit followed by a dash in suit positions 1, 2, and 3 is not exact—that length suit could be in any position, but not in another position that has a digit followed by an equal sign, and not in the last position if a digit is present there.

Hey, I don’t write the rules, I just implement them.

Rather than provide exact shapes for some arbitrary number of suit combinations, I provide exact shapes for each possible number of cards, from 0 to 13, in each suit. The exact shapes follow the “one of” shape. So for a void suit we have:

0-x-x-x means “at least one void, in any position” (no equal sign, so the 0 is not exact/positional.

0=x-x-x means “void in spades”.

x-0=x-x means “void in hearts”.

x-x-0=x means “void in diamonds”.

x-x-x-0 means “void in clubs”.

Since we have the above 5-shape pattern for all lengths from 0 to 13, I got rid of the legacy exact shapes such as 4=4=4=1 and 5=4=x-x. You can now implement them by selecting multiple shapes in one shaper tab.

4=4=4=1 becomes:

4=x-x-x and x-4=x-x and x-x-4=x and x-x-x-1. You could leave out x-x-x-1 because when you specify three exact-length suits, the fourth gets whatever is left. However, there’s no harm in including extraneous shapes if it helps convey your intent.

5=4=x-x becomes:

5=x-x-x and x-4=x-x.

Convenience Shapes

“Convenience” means making things easier. In some cases, “easier” is a huge understatement—without some shapers, you might have to make dozens of recipes with complex Card setups to achieve the same result as a single shaper selection.

Early in development of the deal generator, I had only Any, Balanced, and Unbal shapes. I theorized that anything else could be defined using one of those shapes in combination with placement of placeholders in the Cards area of the web page. You want 5332? Fine. Make a recipe with XXXXX in spades, XXX in hearts, XXX in diamonds, and XX in clubs. And another with XXXXX in spades, XX in hearts, XXX in diamonds, and XXX in clubs. And another with…

No. The number of recipes just to define basic shapes grows exponentially. Using those recipes as “starters” for more specific recipes would be a nightmare.

I reluctantly abandoned my notion of the sparse purity of the Shaper, and went all in on not only defining many more shape types, but also making it possible for the user to select multiple shapes for one hand. So, for instance, you can select Balanced, Spades Longest, and 5332 and, with nary a placeholder in sight in the Cards section, get yourself a balanced hand with 5 spades.

In those early days, I did keep trying to make the Cards area work as the preferred way to define more detailed distributions—not only shapes, but also presence or absence of specific cards. But each time I tried to do that, the Cards section setups would take on the nature of algebraic word problems. Cards solutions emerged, eventually, but they were terribly difficult to build and their meaning to another user would not be apparent at all. In most cases, I found that defining a new shaper selection made for an easy solution—easy both for the recipe writer and for other users of the recipe. It simply said what it meant.

From that experience emerged a previously-unforeseen aspect of the deal generator: providing a way, short of writing code (as is required for some other dealing programs), for everyday users to translate the language of bridge directly into a readable specification for a deal.

The language of bridge includes many phrases, and providing shapers for even just the most common ones vastly increased the size of the shaper selection list. That’s OK. Each selection (the well-thought-out ones, anyway) represents an increase in utility and a decrease in user effort.

So that’s an example of making things easier.

As for making some things even possible, see the shapes such as “No 4 Major”. That and other shapes are derived directly from the language in which bridge hands and conventions are expressed. I added them as I encountered difficulty in otherwise expressing the concepts I found when I tried to make recipes. So, while they are by no means exhaustive, they represent what I have needed in my own work.

You will see many “No” shapes, such as “No Single Face,” “No 6 Plus,” “No A,” “No K.” That’s because it turns out that negation (the absence of something) is hard to express by way of most shapers, which tend to be inclusive rather than exclusive, and placeholders in the Cards section which are, by definition, inclusive. Sure, you can overload a hand with zero-point spot cards, thus achieving “No A” (no ace), but it’s not guaranteed to work (every card has to land somewhere, and your recipe might not be airtight); “No A,” though, will absolutely work unless you foolishly assign it to every hand in every seat.

Legacy Shapes

Update: I removed the legacy shapes, in favor of Exact Shapes (see earlier section on Exact Shapes).

Early in, before I had realized there are only 39 unique shapes and before I had hit on using Shapers more extensively than using Cards, I thought I would add not only specific shapes, but that I would have exact shapes—the kind where you specify the length of each suit. So I have a few like this, with equals signs instead of dashes between the numbers:

I soon realized that I should instead provide just the 39 shapes, some groupings, some convenience shapes, and otherwise refer users to the Cards section if they wanted a very specific shape by suit. But, since I had made it possible to reload old recipes from files and links, I kept these “=” shapes around for the sake of users who might have used them in their work.

In conclusion

Shapers started out as Any, Balanced, or Unbal—true shapes, all. Now, though, the varieties of Shaper include many things that are not shapes at all. Had I known how it would go, I might have chosen a different word—something computery or scientificky-classificationy—but I have learned to go with the flow and embrace a bit of ambiguity. Thus, those things in a Recipe that are not in the Cards area shall be called Shapes simply because that’s all they were, originally.

If the purpose of a shaper is not immediately apparent, just try it. Generate some deals using only that shaper. If that doesn’t clue you in, just ask me.

This feature is provided because, quite often when developing recipes, you will want to propagate settings from one shaper tab to one or more other shaper tabs. Without the Copy and Merge features, you would have to manually repeat such settings.

There are 5 pairs of Copy/Merge buttons on each shaper tab. The pair of buttons in the upper left corner of the shaper tab operate on every seat of that tab at once. The pairs of buttons at the top of each seat on the shaper tab operate only on that seat.

All seats at once—the Copy/Merge buttons on the upper left

To use the feature, first select a “from” shaper tab from the dropdown. Here, I have selected to copy or merge settings from Shaper Tab 6:

Then click either the Copy button or the Merge button.

Copy will overlay your current shaper tab with the settings of the selected “from” shaper tab.

Merge will only apply non-default settings of the selected “from” shaper tab. For instance, if no shapes are selected on the “from” shaper tab, then no shapes will be merged into the current shaper tab. If HCP range of the “from” tab is 0 to 37, then HCP will not be merged. Default Cntl and LTC ranges of 0 to 12 will not be merged.

Let’s try an example.

Suppose I want to make a recipe for a 1-level spade opener in North. One way to specify this is with multiple shape selections: Spades Longest, 5-x-x-x, and No 6 Plus. There are, of course, many other ways to specify a 1-spade opener—this is just one possibility that might be used in a simple instructional recipe.

Suppose also that I will eventually want to specify different HCP ranges for that same set of shapes, all within one recipe. You do that by defining multiple shaper tabs in one recipe. Each shaper tab may start with the same settings (if you so choose), but then you can vary things like HCP range, make additional shape selections in one tab but not the others, etc.

So, we’re going to make a multiple-shaper-tab recipe in which we will want to copy or merge settings from one shaper tab to one or more others.

Here’s Shaper Tab 1 with the desired shapes in North. You can’t see them all at once in the shape drop-down, but you can see them listed in the Shaper Selections text area:

Notice that the number “1” for Shaper Tab 1 is bold print and italic. That means that the shaper tab is in effect for generating a recipe. Actually, Shaper Tab 1 is always in effect, even if it has all default values. But tabs 2-11 are only in effect if they have non-default values. Notice that none of the other shaper tab numbers are bold and italic.

Now click the tab number for Shaper Tab 2. You will know you are on Shaper Tab 2 because you should see it’s name in the upper left of the tab, and the tab number above it is highlighted (or low-lighted, depending on your browser):

We want to copy the settings from Shaper Tab 1 to 2. The Shaper dropdown already has “1” selected, so all we have to do is click the Copy button, to get this:

The North hand doesn’t look different in the shaper tab because all the selected shapes are somewhere down the list, out of sight. However, the Shaper Selections text area has conveniently scrolled down to show you the settings of the current tab, and there you see the three shapes that were copied from Tab 1 to Tab 2. Also, the tab number above Shaper Tab 2 is now bold and italic because that shaper tab has non-default values.

Now let’s try a merge.

Here, I have moved to Shaper Tab 3 by clicking its number above the shaper tabs. Then I selected “Balanced” shape in North:

For this shaper tab, we want to merge in the settings from Shaper Tab 1, but we don’t want to lose our Balanced setting. With Tab 1 selected from the dropdown list, click the Merge button to get this:

In the Shaper Selections area, you can see that North in Shaper Tab 3 still has the Balanced shape selected, plus now it has the other shape selections from Shaper Tab 1.

One seat at a time—the Copy/Merge buttons for each individual seat

Suppose you have set up a 4-shaper-tab recipe with different shapes and point ranges defined for North in each tab. An example would be a single recipe defining the four sub-ranges of points for a 1-major opening hand. You would carefully define the different settings in each of the 4 shaper tabs.

Now you want to use that recipe as the basis for all kinds of other recipes, such as different response bidding scenarios and conventions. You start by loading in the 4-tab opener recipe, then you manually configure the response seat in Shaper Tab 1 based on your scenario. Now you want those same response seat settings in Shaper Tabs 2, 3, and 4.

Use the shaper tab-level Merge button on Shaper Tab 2, merging in the settings from Shaper Tab 1, right?

No, sorry.

The tab-level Merge button will indeed merge in your response seat settings, but it will also merge in the settings for the opening bidder’s seat. You won’t lose any settings already in the opener’s seat in Shaper Tab 2, but that seat will also receive the unwanted opener’s seat settings from Shaper Tab 1. Not what you want.

You want the seat-level Copy button. Each seat now has its own Copy and Merge buttons, right next to the seat direction label; here’s East’s:

Assuming you have not touched the responder seat’s setting in Shaper Tab 2, select tab 1 from the Shaper selection dropdown on Shaper Tab 2, then click the Copy button for the responder’s seat. The settings for just that seat will be copied in.

If you had already started populating the responder seat settings on Shaper Tab 2, and you want to keep those settings, but you realize that you also want the settings for that seat from Shaper Tab 1, then use the seat-level Merge button.

In both cases, seat-level Copy and Merge, only the one seat will receive new values; all other seats will remain unchanged.

A Final Thought: Relax!

Don’t torture yourself over which Copy/Merge buttons to use. They are labor-saving devices—you could define your recipes without them. You may choose to spend time learning the ins and outs of each Copy/Merge button, but your best bet may be to just work on some recipes until you find yourself doing something overly repetitive across multiple shaper tabs. At that point, grab the Copy/Merge button that will speed up the specific steps you have found yourself repeating.

As you create more recipes, you will find yourself using some settings repeatedly. Recipes for 1-level suit openers are a good example—you will have recipes for 1 spade, 1 heart, 1 diamond, 1 club, or perhaps more generically 1 major, 1 minor. These recipes may look very similar to each other, with only the suit changing. So, when designing recipes, try to think about which parts of the recipe are specific to a certain scenario, and which might be common settings that you could save off separately as ingredients for other recipes.

You can always create recipes entirely from scratch. However, to save time and effort you can also build recipes from existing fragments, or ingredients. We will do that here. Let’s build a recipe for a 1-spade opening hand in North, starting from scratch but also merging in ingredients from another recipe.

I start by selecting multiple shapes for North in Shaper Tab 1: Spades Longest, 5-x-x-x, and No 6 Plus. I then used the Copy buttons in Shaper Tabs 2, 3, and 4 to copy Shaper Tab 1 to three other shapers. You can see my settings in this recipe report:

Notice that all HCP ranges are the default value of 0-37. That’s because I purposely didn’t set any meaningful point ranges.

We have four shaper tabs because we will need four HCP ranges: 12-14, 15-17, 18-19, and 20-21. Because these ranges are needed often, I have them defined in a separate recipe. Here’s the report for that ingredient recipe, with the desired HCP ranges (and no shapes) defined in North:

We want to merge the two recipes shown above. Here’s my Shaper screen with just the “1-Spade Opener” recipe loaded; note that the shape selections are present, but only default point ranges:

Click the “Merge Recipe” button and choose the “4 Common Point Ranges” recipe for merging:

And now you can see the HCP range 12-14 on Shaper Tab 1:

And the recipe report shows that each Shaper Tab in North now has a different HCP range:

We’re not quite finished. We have four shaper tabs, and four different point ranges, because we don’t want to generate 1NT and 2NT opening hands. To exclude NT openers, we need to make the hand shape unbalanced for point ranges 15-17 and 20-21. You can select “Unbal” manually in Shaper Tabs 2 and 4 or, if you have the right ingredients at hand, you can merge in another existing recipe. I happen to have just such a recipe right here:

Notice that Shaper Tab 1 has only Any shape, while Tabs 2 and 4 have Unbalanced shape. Perfecto!

You might wonder why Shaper Tab 3 is not shown. That’s because we left it with a shape of “Any”, which is a default value. Except for Shaper Tab 1, the recipe report does not show shaper tabs that have only default values.

Now, we had a recipe consisting of 4 tabs worth of 1-spade openers, plus the 4 different point ranges that we merged in. Now let’s merge in the recipe with alternating Any/Unbal shape in North. After clicking the “Merge Recipe” button I select the final ingredient:

And here’s the recipe report for our three recipes merged into one:

Finally, to demonstrate the power and convenience of using pre-built ingredients and the Merge Recipe feature, I repeated the process, this time using a 1-heart opener recipe as my starting point. That recipe had only the shaper settings Hearts Longest, 5-x-x-x, and No 6 Plus. I then merged in the 4 point ranges recipe and the alternating any/unbal shape recipe, and within seconds I had the hearts version of our recipe:

Loading and Merging Recipes: It’s not just for files anymore

The example above shows how to load and merge recipes from files. You can also do the same things using recipe links saved to your clipboard. This is handy for the majority of users who, I suspect, would rather work directly from the recipe cookbook web page and not have to download all the recipe files.

In a typical session, you would have multiple tabs open in your web browser. In one, you would be on the deal recipe cookbook web page; in the other, you would be on the deal generator web page. You could load an existing recipe, either from a file or from a link obtained from the cookbook page. Then, if you wanted to merge in another recipe, you would copy the link for that recipe to your clipboard, then click the Merge Link button.

I won’t rework and illustrate the full example that I demonstrated with files; instead, I’ll just show you the Load Link and Merge Link buttons of the Recipe panel. The procedure for using recipes is the same, whether you get them from files or from links.

And I will remind you to only click one of those buttons after first copying a recipe link to your clipboard, say from a recipe report or directly from a recipe cookbook.

If the file is in PBN or LIN format, then you can load it into the deal generator for further study and practice.

Sometimes, no deal file is provided. However, you can usually find a web page that displays all the deals from your session. If that is the case, you can sometimes create a file by using the BridgeSolver browser extension, described here. That’s the best way to capture every board from a session at once.

There are two situations where you can’t use the Bridgesolver extension: 1) the BridgeSolver extension only works in Chrome-based browsers, or those that use the Chrome API for extensions, so if you only have FireFox or Safari or another non-Chrome browser, it won’t work; and 2) while the extension can recognize and process deal displays on many websites, there is no universal standard for deal display and so the extension can’t handle all sites.

If you can’t use the BridgeSolver extension, or if it does not recognize deals on the site that displays them, the deal generator offers one more way to load deals: the Handviewer button of the Deal display. This method only works if you have a deal available on a Bridgebase Handviewer web page, with a URL in this general form:

https://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?n=ckjdkj4s83ha98764&s=cq654d10852skj105h3&e=ca972d96sa9762hj2&w=c1083daq73sq4hkq105&d=n&v=-&b=1  

The above URL has the minimum requirements: the text “handviewer”, a North hand, a South hand, an East hand, a West hand, dealer, vulnerability, and board number.

Let’s look at how I obtained that URL from a results web page.

In my browser, I went to the live.acbl.org website and selected a tournament at random. I then selected a completed session from that tournament’s session list. I scrolled down to the first board:

Notice the blue box with white dots to the left of each set of results. Left-click any blue box to see this menu:

On an ACBL results page, the “Play” menu option will take you to a Handviewer web page with the deal loaded. There, you can copy the URL from the address bar to your browser’s clipboard. However, on some browsers you can get also the URL without visiting Handviewer, by right-clicking the “Play” menu option to get this action menu:

Click on “Copy Link Address” to copy the Handviewer URL to your clipboard.

Then, in the deal generator, make sure there is no deal in the Deal display panel.

Click the Handviewer button above the display area. A pop-up dialog will prompt you to paste in the Handviewer URL:

Paste in the URL:

Then click the “Load Deal From URL” button. The pop-up dialog will disappear and you should see the deal loaded both in the Cards panel and in the Deal display panel:

The deal and vulnerability settings at the far left of the page, and the board number in the deal display, will be set from the deal you just loaded.

If you click the Handviewer button while a deal is present in the Deal display panel, the generator will not prompt you to paste an URL from the clipboard—it will open a new browser window with a Handviewer display containing the current deal. This was, in fact, the original purpose of the button.

If you can’t use the BridgeSolver extension, and if the Handviewer URL solution isn’t suitable for the source of your deals, please let me know through this blog or via the Contact link on the deal generator page. I will see if I can provide a solution for other situations.

Of course, if automated solutions don’t work, you can always key the deal in on the generator page.

Loading or Varying a Deal from a Bridge, Out Ahead Deal Link

Since this guide was first published, I have added a new capability: you can now load or vary a deal from a link stored in your clipboard. That link must be in the Bridge, Out Ahead link format of the kind you get when you click the “Link” button directly above the deal display, or that you can find in deal report PDFs created with this program.

Wherever you get your deal link, be sure to copy it to your clipboard before clicking the Load Link or Vary Link button—those buttons expect to be able to read the link from your clipboard.

The deal generator itself does not calculate Double Dummy results. However, it can display par scores and makeable tricks if that information is included in a deal file in PBN format. For instance, here I have loaded in the hand record PBN file from a recent session, obtained from the ACBL Live for Clubs website:

If you want to see Double Dummy results for your own generated deals, here’s how:

1. Generate a set of deals and save them to a PBN file. At this point they will not have Double Dummy results.

2. Click the “BridgeSolver” link at the far left side of the deal generator web page. This will open a new Bridge Solver Online page that prompts you to open a file. Note: this is not the BridgeSolver button at the top of the deal display; that button only passes the current deal to BridgeSolver, while the link at the far left will let you load an entire deal file into BridgeSolver.

3. In BridgeSolver Online, Click the “Open File” button and select the PBN file that you just created.

4. The BridgeSolver analysis page will process your PBN file. A green progress bar will show you that the program is working on your file. When it finishes, click the “Save” button at the bottom of the page. A file save dialog will appear. Update the new file name in the dialog, and save the file; you may also simply let it overlay your original PBN file name. This file does have Double Dummy results.

5. Now, when you load the new or updated PBN file into the deal generator program, the Double Dummy results will appear in the deal display panel.

The “Report” button of the Recipe panel lets you create a printout with which you can share your recipe. When you click the “Report” button you first see this dialog:

This is not your final document. This form lets you key in a title and a brief description of your recipe. Here, I have filled in both fields:

To get suit symbols in the description area, key ! followed by the first letter of the suit in upper or lower case.

This:

Produces this:

The “Save Text” button lets you save just the title and description text to a separate text file. This is useful in case you later want to make a report with a modified version of the recipe (e.g. the hands rotated to different seats) but you don’t want to have to rekey the whole report. Just click “Report” in the recipe panel to get to this form with your modified version of the recipe, then click “Load Text”. A file chooser dialog will let you select the saved-off report text file, which will then be reloaded into this preview form. It’s a good practice to always do “Save Text” before saving the PDF of the report—you don’t want to lose that text.

After supplying the title and description and saving the text, click the “Save PDF” button under the title. You will be prompted to save the PDF document to your file system. You can change the file name rather than accept the default name of “BCOA_recipe.recipe.pdf”.

The text filename for a recipe report should end with “.recipe.txt”. Even if you change the first part of the filename (which you should do, to make it meaningful to yourself and others), keep the “.recipe.txt” at the end so that you and the cookbook process can tell that this text relates to a recipe.

The PDF filename for a recipe report should end with “.recipe.pdf”. Same advice about keeping that filename ending applies to the PDF.

Here’s the PDF resulting from the above example:

If you share your document electronically, the link at the top of the page is clickable and it will bring up the deal generator website with this recipe loaded into the recipe panel.

The QR code can be scanned by a smartphone or tablet, and will also bring up the deal generator website with this recipe displayed.

If the URL for the recipe is too long, the QR code will not work, but clicking the URL should always work. The more active shaper tabs in your recipe, the longer the URL, so with short-to-medium size recipes you should have no problem with the QR code.

The “Report” button of the Deal panel lets you create a printout with which you can share your deal.

If you want to see Double Dummy results on your report, you must load a deal file in PBN format that already contains Double Dummy results. This tutorial shows you how to obtain or create such a file.

The Deal Report will show only the deal that is currently in the deal display panel. Here, I have used the deal display scroll arrows to get to the 16th board in a 36-board set.

Notice the comma-separated values in the Auction text box. That didn’t come from the PBN file—it was all me. You must key in an auction on the main generator page if you want it to appear on your deal report. This guide tells you how to key in an auction.

Once you have your deal and, optionally, your auction, click the “Report” button just above the deal display. You should see a pop-up window that looks like this:

This is not an especially attractive layout, but don’t worry—it’s not the actual report: this window is here to let you provide some additional, optional text, as well as choose some settings, for your deal report.

Any text you key in the Title text box will appear in bold print at the top of your deal report.

Your auction text, in expanded and modified form, appears in a read-only text box below the deal. You can’t change the auction here—you can only change it on the main generator page. If you close the print preview panel to get back to the main page, any text or settings on this print preview panel will be preserved.

The large text area below the auction text box is where you can type in your analysis of the deal. You can key as many characters as your browser allows in the text area; the stated limit in the HTML standard is around 524,000 characters.

To get suit symbols in the text area, key ! followed by the first letter of the suit in upper or lower case.

This:

Produces this:

The “Hide?” checkboxes below the analysis text area let you selectively display or hide each hand, and several other elements of the deal display. This is useful when writing lessons where only certain hands matter, or where you want the reader to see only certain hands and to reason about the possible locations of the unseen cards.

If you check the “Include recipe link” checkbox, the URL of the recipe currently in the deal generator web page will be embedded in your deal report, right under the URL of the deal itself. Users viewing your report on their computers or tablets can click those links and study the deal and recipe to their heart’s content.

Let’s have a combo platter with some of everything. Here, I have keyed a title and I pasted some text into the analysis area. I asked it to hide the North and South hands. I also checked the “Include recipe link” checkbox:

The “Save Text” button lets you save just the title, auction, and description text to a separate text file. This is useful in case you later want to make a report with a modified version of the deal (e.g. the hands rotated to different seats) but you don’t want to have to rekey the whole report. Just click “Report” in the deal panel to get to this form with your modified version of the deal, then click “Load Text”. A file chooser dialog will let you select the saved-off report text file, which will then be reloaded into this preview form. It’s a good practice to always do “Save Text” before saving the PDF of the report—you don’t want to lose that text.

Now click the “Save PDF” button and follow the prompts to save your PDF file. Be sure to key a meaningful name in the “Save As…” box of the file save dialog that pops up.

The text file name for a deal report should end with “.deal.txt”. Even if you change the first part of the filename (which you should do, to make it meaningful to yourself and others), keep the “.deal.txt” at the end so that you and the cookbook process can tell that this text relates to a deal.

The PDF file name for a deal report should end with “.deal.pdf”. Same advice about keeping that filename ending applies to the PDF.

Here’s a screenshot of my PDF:

A deal recipe is made up of the settings in the Shaper panel and the settings in the Cards panel.

The Cards panel lets you specify either specific cards, or placeholders that represent categories of cards, that make up a deal.

Gen Deal = Cards, Ignore Shaper button: Generates a deal that fulfills the cards/placeholders in the Cards panel, while completely ignoring the Shaper panel. This button is useful for testing your Cards settings in isolation. When you are ready to generate deals that evaluate both the Cards and the Shaper panels, see the user guide for the Deal Recipe panel for guidance on which Generate buttons to use.

See this guide for information on how to use the Placeholders.

The Hands panel lets you specify hand rotation options when you generate sets of deals from existing deals or from recipes. For deals generated from existing deals, hand rotation will move already-dealt cards around the table as specified. For deals generated from recipes, hand rotation will rotate the Shaper and Cards settings around the table while generating deals, so that the key cards land in different seats.

With the settings as shown above, with nothing selected from either dropdown box, there is no hand rotation. Dealer and Vulnerability rotation proceed based on the settings in their respective panels, unaffected by the Hands panel.

Let’s look at settings for a typical instructional scenario: you have a recipe where dealer has a no trump opening hand, LHO has low HCP, responder has 8-9 HCP and at least one 4-card major and no 5-plus card suits. Here’s the shaper and recipe. (If you are reading this in an email and the recipe link comes up with an empty shaper and recipe, then try clicking the title of this blog post and reading the post directly on the blog. The links should work from there.)

Note that the variety of shapers, and the ability to select more than one from a listbox, helps to make recipes very concise. The recipe linked above uses two shapes in South: “Major Long” and “No 5 Plus”. With that combination, you don’t have to put placeholders in spades and hearts to force a 4-card major suit—it emerges naturally based on the two shapers for that hand.

You like this recipe, and you want 16 boards for your students. You want dealer and vulnerability to rotate as they do on the duplicate scoresheet. You want the key cards (the 1NT opener and the potential Stayman responder) to rotate one seat clockwise for each board. To do that, you set the controls on the left side of the screen like this:

Now press the Red Button of the Recipe Panel, and you should see the first of 16 deals in the Generated Deal panel. The 1/16 in between the scroll arrows tells you how meany deals were generated. Notice that the first board has North as dealer, None vulnerable, just like on the duplicate scoresheet. And the opening no trump hand is in North, with the potential Stayman hand in South. That’s just the starting seats; if you click the right single-scroll arrow, you will see board #2, with the opening no trump hand in East and the potential Stayman hand in West. Click through each board and you will see those hand configurations rotating one seat at a time as you go.

Save your deals to a PBN or LIN file, and you’re all set to do whatever you do for your students—load physical boards with a dealing machine, use other software to produce instructional documents, etc.

There are other hand rotation options in the dropdown boxes; they let you specify rotation after different intervals or numbers of deals, and you can specify rotation 2 or 3 seats clockwise instead of 1 seat. For example, if you are working with just two students and you want them to take turns having the key cards, you could set the “After” dropdown to 1, and the “rotate” dropdown to 180 degrees, or two seats. With this setting, the key cards would alternate between North and South.

Happy dealing!