When making recipes, you can specify several point ranges for each pair and each hand. You can specify many things about the shape of each hand, as well as placing specific cards or types of cards in each hand. The important thing you cannot specify in advance is the par score.
Until recently, if you wanted a particular score or range of scores, you would have to refine your recipe and keep generating deals and seeing what scores you get. If you later wanted that same scenario but for a different range of scores, you would have to revise that recipe or duplicate it and revise the duplicate, then do more generating and examining.
This was tedious and does not always give you the result you want.
To ease this pain, you can now make a large set of deals for a given scenario without worrying about the par score, then use the Deal Filter to save off just the ones with par scores that suit your needs.
Here’s how to do it.
First, make sure the Dbl Dummy Calculate box is checked. It is checked by default when the deal generator web page loads, but if you have unchecked it, click it again so it looks like this:
Now make your recipe, without regard for the par score:
After generating deals from this recipe, we have 100 deals in the deal display:
Now suppose you want 1NT openers for three different classes: 1) a class on part scores; 2) a class on game contracts below slam; and 3) a class on slams.
Care to scroll through those 100 deals and save just the deals you want to a deal collection, and from there to a file?
Well, yes, that’s kind of what we want to do, but in a less laborious way. Deal filter to the rescue:
The deal filter has been around for a long time, but it originally only filtered on board number. Now, though, you can also filter on a range of par scores. In fact, when adding deals to a collection or saving them to a file, you will filter them on board number par score range. It’s just that the filters are pre-set to the broadest possible values—any board number, and any valid par score. If you want specific filtering, then change those settings.
Here’s my setting for getting just the part score deals from the set of 100:
Why, you might ask, does it ask for the range -399 to 399? That’s because the par scores in this deal generate are always expressed relative to North/South. So a positive score is for N/S, and a negative score is actually a positive score for E/W.
Now let’s see how many part score deals we get. See the deal counter for the deal collection after clicking the Add Current Deals button:
Now if you want to see just those 44 deals in the deal display, click the “Load Coll” button at the top of the deal display to load the deals from the collection, and now you will have 44 part score deals:
You can use some or all of those deals in your part score lesson or study.
Part scores are a special case since, as shown above, you can use one continuous score range to get hands with that score in either N/S or E/W.
For the other two cases—game contracts and slam contracts—you need separate N/S and E/W score ranges. For instance, if you used -500 to 500, you would get some game contracts in both directions, but you would also get the part scores too since they fit inside that continuous range.
For N/S game contracts, you might use a par score range of 400 to 500. For E/W game contracts, use -500 to -400.
For N/S slam contracts, you could use a par score range of 900 to 7600. For E/W slam contracts, -7600 to 900.
Note that none of those game and slam par ranges are especially exact—you can make them as broad or as exact as you want.
The par score filtering does not consider factors such as doubling, redoubling, sacrifice bids, etc. Those are bridge topics beyond the scope of the generator. Par score calculations and filters only consider the raw double dummy par score.
I didn’t mention the points at which you might want to save off a set of deals to a file. That depends on your workflow, but do understand that if you generate 100 scored deals, then filter it down to a smaller set in the deal collection, then load the deal display from the collection, you have thrown away the deals that didn’t make it into the collection.
Don’t worry! The nature of this generator is that, if you have at least saved off your recipe file, it is very easy to regenerate as many deals as you need at any time. Generated deals only gain some value and permanence when you get down to a set that you actually want to keep, and you save those deals to a file for repeated use.
That said, if I generate 100 or more deals that I’m going to subject to one or more filters, I would save off that original set of 100 just so I don’t have to keep regenerating that many—the score calculation makes it take more than a couple of seconds. Then, if I wipe out the 100 in the deal display, I can always quickly reload the 100 from the saved file and apply some other filter to it.