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.