Deal Generator User Guide

Hands Rotation Panel

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

The Hands panel replaces the Rotate Hands checkbox that used to live in the Number of Deals panel. That checkbox was limited in that, when checked, it only rotated the hands 90 degrees (one seat clockwise) after every 16 deals. This intriguing maneuver was in service of the deal variegator function which, you’ll be happy to know, still works exactly as it did before.

The Hands panel lets you specify hand rotation options more suited to making sets of instructional deals.

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. 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.)

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 16th deal in the Generated Deal panel—evidence that your 16 boards were generated. Notice that the 16th board has West as dealer, E-W vulnerable, just like on the duplicate scoresheet. And the opening no trump hand is in West, with the potential Stayman hand in East. While that’s a good sign that hand rotation happened as expected for the whole set of deals, you can also save off a Navigator file if you want to quickly check out the individual deals to verify that each seat gets the key cards 4 times, in rotation, in the set of 16 deals.

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!