Deal Generator User Guide

Shaper panel

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

The Shaper panel lets you configure the shaper, which is one component of a deal recipe (the other component is the Cards panel).

A shaper consists of from 1 to 11 shaper tabs. In each shaper tab, you can configure the shapes and high card point (HCP) ranges of each hand.

The shape list boxes allow you to select multiple shapes. So, for instance, you could select both “Balanced” and “Minor Longest” and as many other shapes as you want. Keep in mind, though, that when you choose multiple shapes from one listbox, they are connected by a logical “and”; that is, all shapes within one list box must be true for a deal to satisfy the hand shape. So as you make selections in list boxes and HCP ranges in one shaper tabl, imagine that you are building an expression of the form:

“(West shape(s) are true) and (West HCP range is true) and (North shape(s) are true) and (North HCP range is true)…” and so on for each of the four hands in one shaper tab.

Be careful—don’t select mutually exclusive shapes inside of one list box (e.g. don’t select both “Balanced” and “Unbal” in one list box, since both cannot be true at the same time).

If you use more than one shaper tab, then those tabs are connected by a logical “or”. So as you use more than one shaper tab, imagine that you are building an expression of the form:

“(Shaper Tab 1 is true) or (Shapter Tab 2 is true)…or (Shaper Tab 11 is true)”

The Shaper panel provides two buttons. Both buttons consider only the Shaper settings, and ignore the Cards settings.

Gen Deal = Shaper, Ignore Cards: Generates deals that conform to the shaper panel, and which ignore the settings in the Cards panel.

Gen Deal not = Shaper, Ignore Cards: Generates deals that do not conform to the shaper panel, and which ignore the settings in the Cards panel.

Since both Generate buttons of the Shaper ignore the Cards panel, if you want deals that conform to both the Shaper and the Cards panel, you must use the buttons of the higher-level enclosing Recipe panel, which take both sub-panels into account when evaluating deals.