Deal Generator User Guide
Deal Shaper Panel
This is one of several user guides on specific topics. The directory for all user guides is here.
The user guide also includes a tutorial for the Deal Shaper, which goes into great detail. For that reason, this part of the user guide just gives a basic description of the user interface.
The panel provides controls for specifying the shape and High Card Point (HCP) range for each seat. There are four sets of shape and HCP controls, with each set on a separate tab. You activate a tab by clicking its number on the shaded bar along the top of the panel. See the end of this post for more on shaper tabs.
For the shape of the hand, the dropdown box lets the user select Any, Unbalanced, Balanced, Semi-Balanced, or one of several other commonly-used shapes.
For HCP range, the number entry fields with scroll buttons let the user specify a minimum and maximum number of HCP.
The N←>S button will swap the shapes of North and South.
The W←>E button will swap the shapes of West and East.
The button with the swurvy-curvy arrow will rotate each shaper one place, clockwise, based on table position. So, North will move to East, East to South, South to West, and West to North.
The Generate Deal button will generate a deal or deals based on the Deal Shaper configuration. The resulting deal will appear on the Generated Deal panel. If more than one deal is generated at once, then all generated deals will be in memory, and only the last deal will appear in the Generated Deal panel.
The Report button doesn’t do anything yet.
The Copy Link button will create a hyperlink suitable for opening the bridge deal generator in a browser with the shaper panel loaded, like this.
Shaper Tabs
When you generate a deal from the shaper panel, the generator always looks for a deal that conforms to the shaper settings in shaper tab #1. If you put anything other than a default setting in any other tab, the generator will also consider that tab’s shaper settings when searching for a deal. This lets you specify something like “north is any shape with 12-14 HCP, or north is unbalanced with 15-17 HCP, or north is any shape with 18-19 HCP, or north is unbalanced with 20-21 HCP,” which happens to be a useful shaper as a starting point for recipes for opening 1 of a major.
Default settings (“Any” shape, 0-37 HCP in all four seats) will be ignored in tabs 2-4, because every deal matches the default settings. Default settings will be matched in tab 1, but note that a match on tab 1 prevents any attempt to match on tabs 2-4. If you have multiple shapes in mind for one shaper or recipe, it is best to put the most restrictive or rare shape in tab 1, then the next less restrictive in tab 2, and so on.
When you have non-default settings in more than one tab, when the generator matches on a shaper it will activate, or bring forward, the shaper tab on which it matched. When it finds no match (that is, reaches Max Shuffles) it will not change which shaper tab is visible.