Bridge, Out Ahead website
How to request a set of custom deals
Update: This post says that ordinary users can generate just one deal at a time. Thanks to the new multi-deal feature, that is no longer true. You can generate 1, 16, 32, 64, or 128 variations on any deal configuration. Hopefully, that capability will suffice for your deal-generating needs. The user guide tells you how to make more than one deal when generating your own.
However, there is one situation where you might want help from me: generating a set of deals with different configurations. For instance, if you want 16 deals of one configuration you can do that yourself all in one throw. But if you wanted the first four to be one configuration, followed by four more of some other configuration, and so on, then your options are to generate one deal at a time, or generate 16 of each desired configuration and then manually mix and match deals from those files into one final product. You could do that with a text editor, but it would be laborious. The website doesn’t give the average user a way to do that, but what you CAN do is set up your deals one at a time and let the website stack up the specifications of your deals in the Script text area. Then you could click the “Script” button to save off the script and send it to me and I will gladly run it to create your combined, multi-deal, multi-configuration masterpiece. Perhaps someday I will make the web page let you do all of that mixing and matching into one file, but for now if you think you need help generating some set of deals, just ask. I’ll tell you quickly whether you can actually do it yourself (and I’ll show you how), or else I will work with you to create what you need.
Now on to the original post that was written before I developed the multi-deal capability:
In another post, I show you how to capture a generated deal and upload it into Bridgebase.com, where you can play out the deal. In another post, I show you how to load a generated deal into the Bridge by NeuralPlay app (Android only, at the moment).
That’s great fun. In those posts, I also mention that you can generate multiple deals (one file each, though) and load all of them into the other applications. But what if you want to generate a lot of deals all in one file, similar to the sets of deals that I post to this blog every day? Well, you can’t do that with my website, just yet.
But I can do it for you.
While you are generating your deals, you will see that the website busily builds something down in the Generated Script text area. See it at the bottom of this page:
That script is not something that you can run on your system, but it is something that I can run on my system, where I have the deal-generating program available to run on the command line, or from a script file. If you want to produce more than one deal in a file, just use my website to configure and generate the kinds of deals you want, and let that script build up in the text area. Once you have built the types of deals that you want, click on the “Script” button. It will bring up this dialog:
Click on “Save File” and the script file will be saved to your file system.
Contact me through this blog and send me an email with your script file attached. I will use the script file to generate a PBN file and a LIN file. Each file will contain not just one deal, but deals from all of the configurations generated from your script. I will send the PBN and LIN files to you, and you can do with them as you wish.
Please note that the deals I send you will not match the deals you generated while building the script. They will, however, match those deals’ configurations. And, by the way, you can request multiple sets of different deals from the same script. Do you have a set of 10 deals that you like, but you would like five different files, each with 10 different deals based on your configurations? Just tell me how many different sets of deals you want based on your script, and I’ll make them for you.
I am offering this service to see if anyone, but especially bridge teachers, finds it useful to be able to try out and save different sets of configurations that tie in with the lessons they are teaching. Anyone can, of course, generate such deals individually and save off their own PBN and LIN files, but if you want help in mass-producing your deals without having to manage all those one-deal files, just ask and I’ll help you out.
One warning: If you send me a script and any configuration in that script turns out to be an impossible deal (e.g. it adds up to more than 40 HCP), that will tell me that you did not first test out your configurations. I will not fulfill such requests, or any that contain other errors introduced by the user, and I might even say “tsk tsk”.