This is one of several user guides on specific topics. The directory for all user guides is here.
The Hands panel lets you specify hand rotation options when you generate sets of deals from existing deals or from recipes. For deals generated from existing deals, hand rotation will move already-dealt cards around the table as specified. For deals generated from recipes, hand rotation will rotate the Shaper and Cards settings around the table while generating deals, so that the key cards land in different seats.
With the settings as shown above, with nothing selected from either dropdown box, there is no hand rotation. Dealer and Vulnerability rotation proceed based on the settings in their respective panels, unaffected by the Hands panel.
Let’s look at settings for a typical instructional scenario: you have a recipe where dealer has a no trump opening hand, LHO has low HCP, responder has 8-9 HCP and at least one 4-card major and no 5-plus card suits. Here’s the shaper and recipe. (If you are reading this in an email and the recipe link comes up with an empty shaper and recipe, then try clicking the title of this blog post and reading the post directly on the blog. The links should work from there.)
Note that the variety of shapers, and the ability to select more than one from a listbox, helps to make recipes very concise. The recipe linked above uses two shapes in South: “Major Long” and “No 5 Plus”. With that combination, you don’t have to put placeholders in spades and hearts to force a 4-card major suit—it emerges naturally based on the two shapers for that hand.
You like this recipe, and you want 16 boards for your students. You want dealer and vulnerability to rotate as they do on the duplicate scoresheet. You want the key cards (the 1NT opener and the potential Stayman responder) to rotate one seat clockwise for each board. To do that, you set the controls on the left side of the screen like this:
Now press the Red Button of the Recipe Panel, and you should see the first of 16 deals in the Generated Deal panel. The 1/16 in between the scroll arrows tells you how meany deals were generated. Notice that the first board has North as dealer, None vulnerable, just like on the duplicate scoresheet. And the opening no trump hand is in North, with the potential Stayman hand in South. That’s just the starting seats; if you click the right single-scroll arrow, you will see board #2, with the opening no trump hand in East and the potential Stayman hand in West. Click through each board and you will see those hand configurations rotating one seat at a time as you go.
Save your deals to a PBN or LIN file, and you’re all set to do whatever you do for your students—load physical boards with a dealing machine, use other software to produce instructional documents, etc.
There are other hand rotation options in the dropdown boxes; they let you specify rotation after different intervals or numbers of deals, and you can specify rotation 2 or 3 seats clockwise instead of 1 seat. For example, if you are working with just two students and you want them to take turns having the key cards, you could set the “After” dropdown to 1, and the “rotate” dropdown to 180 degrees, or two seats. With this setting, the key cards would alternate between North and South.
Happy dealing!