Hi, bridge pals.
When I started writing my bridge deal generator, the focus was on just that: generating deals. As you know by now, you can generate your own sets of deals, download them as files, and load them into bridge-playing software. When you do that, the bridge-playing software becomes your tool for analyzing the deals. That’s a good thing. Since my program doesn’t let you play out the hand, it is natural that you would export deals and go work with them elsewhere. I do that all the time.
But today I want to show you a way to use my program to help you as a handy tool for deal analysis.
I was inspired to do this by an article on page 15 of the August 2022 issue of The Bridge World magazine. There, Göran Ofsén presents two construction puzzles. Let’s play with the first one.
The challenge is to “Construct a deal where North-South have balanced hands, at most 19 HCP, and at most six spades, on which, at double-dummy, South can make seven spades.”
People who don’t use a bridge program would probably use pencil and paper to work out this problem. Or maybe they laboriously deal out cards. Or, for all I know, expert players can see solutions swimming in the air like the chess-playing gal in the TV series The Queen’s Gambit. I have not yet developed this “air bridge” capability, and in fact I developed my program because I foresaw that as I got deeper into bridge I would have need of an intellectual enhancement, or, as some might call it, a crutch.
I like crutches! Let’s run to the CrutchMobile! I mean, to my program!
Using my program, select Manual Deal, Rotate deal, Rotate vulnerability, and 16 deals (if you want more deals, go for it). Click “Deal” and let’s start building the deal based on the puzzle.
The basic outline of the solution is very easy. Here I have specified balanced hands in North and South, with exactly six spades. The puzzle allows fewer than six spades, which you may want to pursue on your own.
Let’s look at the first resulting deal out of the 16 that my program generated:
We nailed the shape, thanks to the WYSIWYG nature of manual deals. But North/South have 24 combined HCP, and the puzzle requires no more than 19. Back to the drawing board.
Manual Deal is bare bones by design, but even with no way to specify HCP for each hand, you can influence the outcome by beefing up your deal specification. Instead of simply specifying the desired shape, let’s get specific about a few cards. By the way, I hope you realize that this is exactly how you would approach this puzzle on paper, by reasoning in ever-greater detail about the specifics of the deal. This program is really just a step up from paper, in that it helps you by keeping track of things and quickly generating deals that suit your model. So, let’s steer some HCP around the table:
Keeping North/South’s shape the same as before, I changed some of the placeholders to face cards. The pair now has exactly 19 points. To make sure they didn’t get any more face cards assigned to them randomly, I put all the other face cards in West/East. Notice that West/East have only those face cards, no “X” placeholders, and no “B” codes to specify the exact length of each suit. This means that they will get at least the specified face cards, but they will also receive other cards at random. Let’s see how it looks:
Boom. We forced the HCP to come out right. We now have a set of 16 candidate solutions to the puzzle.
Constructing a deal with the right shape and HCP points is the easy part. Now it’s up to you, the user, to study the deals and see if South could make seven spades. Right away, of course, you can see that West would lead the Ace of clubs to the first trick and ruin your chance at grand slam. So your immediate realization is that opener cannot have a quick trick, and he also cannot have a lead that gives East a quick trick (this is double-dummy, remember, so we see all and know all).
So, to the drawing board to salvage our first trick, and with it, the fate of the Free World! Or maybe just the first trick. Anyway, how about this:
Spoiler alert: this is the solution from page 33 of the magazine. Notice how it makes sure that West not only can’t take the first trick with an ace, but he also can’t lead clubs to let east jump in and steal a trick.
Notice how I carefully put “VOID” in clubs for West. With all 13 clubs allocated to the other hands, West would have had a void anyway. But there is no harm in describing exactly what you want.
Here’s the resulting deal:
The deal file will have 16 of this exact deal, each with a different dealer/vulnerability combination. But since you’re headed to seven spades it shouldn’t matter how the bidding starts. It might still be valuable to play it out multiple ways in your bridge program, because doing so may help you recognize slam situations in future games.
So there you have it: Manual Deals as a tool for deal analysis!