Deal Generator User Guide

Generated Deal Panel

This is one of several user guides on specific topics. The directory for all user guides is here.

When you generate or load a deal by any means on the Bridge, Out Ahead bridge deal generator, it will appear on this panel. If you generate or load multiple deals, the first one will appear in the panel, and you can navigate to the other deals using the left and right arrows above the display area.

The Generate button will generate a completely random deal. It does not use information from the Shaper panel or the Cards panel. If you want to use Shapers or Cards, you must use the Generate buttons on those panels.

The Load Deal button displays a file chooser dialog. When you choose a deal file, the deal or deals from that file will be loaded, unmodified, into the deal display panel.

The Vary Deal button displays a file chooser dialog. When you choose a deal file, the deal or deals from that file will be loaded into the deal display panel. Each deal will be loaded the number of times specified in the Number of Deals setting on the web page. As deals are loaded, dealer and vulnerability will be rotated in the order in which they appear on the standard duplicate bridge scoresheet. Hands will be rotated around the table based on the settings in the Hands panel of the web page.

The Load Folder button displays a folder chooser dialog. When you choose a folder, the deal files with an extension of .LIN will be loaded, unmodified, into the deal display panel.

The Vary Smorgasbord button displays a file chooser dialog. When you choose a file with .bcoasmorgasbord extension, the program will generate deals from each recipe in the smorgasbord file. Deal generation will operate as it does when a user clicks the Red button (Gen Deal = Cards, = Shaper) of the Recipe panel.

Recipes contain their own rotation and number of deals values; however, when used in the Vary Smorgasbord process, those values will be ignored. Dealer and Vulnerability will both be set to Rotate. The user should set the Number of Deals and the Hands settings to the desired values. For instance, if you wanted to generate four deals for each input recipe, with the key cards moving clockwise around the table, you would set Number of Deals to 4 (it applies per recipe in this case), and set Hands to rotate 90 degrees after every 1 board.

The Negate Smorgasbord button is identical to the Vary Smorgasbord button in almost every way. The only difference is that when generating deals from each recipe, the generator will create deals that do not satisfy the Shaper portion of the recipe, instead of deals that do satisfy the Shaper. Deal generation here operates as it does when the user clicks the Yellow button (Gen Deal = Cards, not = Shaper) of the Recipe panel.

The BridgeSolver button will open a new browser window showing the currently-displayed deal on the BridgeSolver web page provided by these good folks. BridgeSolver is a very nice user interface showing the results of passing your deal to Bo Haglund’s double dummy analysis program. This is the same double dummy program used by the well-regarded Bridge Composer program, which provides double dummy analysis of boards in The Common Game.

The Handviewer button will open a new browser window showing the currently-displayed deal on the hand viewer web page provided by Bridgebase.com. If you also keyed in an auction in the auction panel of the bridge deal generator, the hand viewer page will also display your auction.

The Report button will open a pop-up window showing just the currently-displayed deal, suitable for printing. The pop-up window has a Print button.

The Link button creates a hyperlink containing the currently-displayed deal, and copies it to your computer’s clipboard. You can use that link in plain text like this:

https://bridgeoutahead.com/bridgedeal/?lin=qx|o1|md|3S96HT76DK973CT932,SAJ753HK4DAQ84C64,SKQTHQJ53DJCKJ875|rh||ah|Board%201|sv|0|pg||

Or, like a sane person, use it as a hyperlink in a document or web page where you are writing about your deal. As in, “Oh, yes, I remember Board 1 with KQT in spades in the North…”

The To Cards button copies the currently-displayed deal to the Cards panel. The use of that panel is described elsewhere.

The Jambalaya! button will scramble the order of the deals currently in the deal display panel. If you want to put the deals back into boad-number order, you must reload them from the deal file (you did have them in a deal file, right? RIGHT???).