Deal Generator User Guide
Auction Panel
This is one of several user guides on specific topics. The directory for all user guides is here.
The Auction text area is a place where you can key in a duplicate bridge auction. It is a free-form text area and no editing is done by the bridge deal generator. This is provided so that when you press one of the Handviewer buttons, the hand viewer will display the auction as well as the generated deal or the deal recipe (depending on which Handviewer button you press).
The Handviewer will make its best effort to display your auction, but if you key in garbage then it will silently give up.
The auction will also be reformatted for inclusion in the deal report when you click the “Report” button of the Deal panel.
Don’t obsess over an exact specification for all possible auctions, just use your intuition and do this: key in “P” for pass, 1N for one no trump, 1S for 1 spade, X for double, XX for redouble, and so on—just numbers and suits for the most part, with each bid or call (except the last one) followed by a comma. To make your auctions correct, always end them with “P,P,P”—three passes.
If you want to include footnoted annotations in the auction table of the deal report, simply key your annotations, enclosed in parentheses, immediately after the bid to which it applies. Do not type any commas inside your annotations—they will confuse the report builder because commas are used to note the separation between each bid or call. The report builder will assign a footnote asterisk or number to each note, so you only need to key your bid/call and the annotation text. Keep your annotations short—a few words at most. You can always give more detail in the analysis text area of the report panel.
Here’s an example of a huge auction with too many annotations so you can see how it’s done:
1c(Take that),1d(Wham!),1H(Not so fast knave),1s(Have at ye varlet),1NT(Oh no you dint),2c(Zip),2D(Boing!),2H(Transfer maybe),2s(Liar),2NT,3C,3D,3H,3S,3nt(Final offer),4C,4D,4H,4S,4NT,5C,5D,5H,5S,5NT,6C,6D,6H,6S,6NT,7C,7D,7H,7S,7NT,X,XX,P,P,PThe auction shown above produces this festive report:
With some bidding sequences, multiple bids may refer to the same note. An example is the relay bid sequence, where one partner is describing their hand while the other partner keeps asking for more information with yet another relay bid. In these sequences, having a separate yet identical footnote text for each relay bid would be wasteful and would use up too many superscript values. To handle this type of situation, we use a “refer-back” note that exists only to refer back to a previous bid or call, by its position in the bidding sequence (1 for first bid/call, 2 for second bid/call, etc.). When building the deal report PDF, each bid with a refer-back note will receive the same superscript as the original bid, and all will point to just one footnote.
Here’s an example of a very long auction with multiple refer-back notes—see the numbers enclosed in square brackets, which refer back to the third bid in the sequence. This auction is from page 4 of The Bridge World magazine, Volume 93, Number 5:
1s,p,2c(game-forcing relay),p,2h(some 5-plus card suit),p,2s([3]),p,3c(five-plus diamonds),p,3d([3]),p,3h(short hearts at least 2 clubs),p,3s([3]),p,4h(6=0=5=2 shape),p,4nt(How many 2-1 points?),p,5h(4),p,6d,p,p,pThe above auction gives the result shown below. Note that every bid with a refer-back note gets the asterisk superscript to point to the same footnote as the third bid in the sequence:
The auction text area is also useful as a bidding scratch pad when analyzing a deal.