Deal Generator User Guide

Tutorial: merging recipes

This tutorial will show you how to use the Merge Recipe button of the Deal Recipe panel.

As you create more recipes, you will find yourself using some settings repeatedly. Recipes for 1-level suit openers are a good example—you will have recipes for 1 spade, 1 heart, 1 diamond, 1 club, or perhaps more generically 1 major, 1 minor. These recipes may look very similar to each other, with only the suit changing. So, when designing recipes, try to think about which parts of the recipe are specific to a certain scenario, and which might be common settings that you could save off separately as ingredients for other recipes.

You can always create recipes entirely from scratch. However, to save time and effort you can also build recipes from existing fragments, or ingredients. We will do that here. Let’s build a recipe for a 1-spade opening hand in North, starting from scratch but also merging in ingredients from another recipe.

I start by selecting multiple shapes for North in Shaper Tab 1: Spades Longest, 5-x-x-x, and No 6 Plus. I then used the Copy buttons in Shaper Tabs 2, 3, and 4 to copy Shaper Tab 1 to three other shapers. You can see my settings in this recipe report:

Notice that all HCP ranges are the default value of 0-37. That’s because I purposely didn’t set any meaningful point ranges.

We have four shaper tabs because we will need four HCP ranges: 12-14, 15-17, 18-19, and 20-21. Because these ranges are needed often, I have them defined in a separate recipe. Here’s the report for that ingredient recipe, with the desired HCP ranges (and no shapes) defined in North:

We want to merge the two recipes shown above. Here’s my Shaper screen with just the “1-Spade Opener” recipe loaded; note that the shape selections are present, but only default point ranges:

Click the “Merge Recipe” button and choose the “4 Common Point Ranges” recipe for merging:

And now you can see the HCP range 12-14 on Shaper Tab 1:

And the recipe report shows that each Shaper Tab in North now has a different HCP range:

We’re not quite finished. We have four shaper tabs, and four different point ranges, because we don’t want to generate 1NT and 2NT opening hands. To exclude NT openers, we need to make the hand shape unbalanced for point ranges 15-17 and 20-21. You can select “Unbal” manually in Shaper Tabs 2 and 4 or, if you have the right ingredients at hand, you can merge in another existing recipe. I happen to have just such a recipe right here:

Notice that Shaper Tab 1 has only Any shape, while Tabs 2 and 4 have Unbalanced shape. Perfecto!

You might wonder why Shaper Tab 3 is not shown. That’s because we left it with a shape of “Any”, which is a default value. Except for Shaper Tab 1, the recipe report does not show shaper tabs that have only default values.

Now, we had a recipe consisting of 4 tabs worth of 1-spade openers, plus the 4 different point ranges that we merged in. Now let’s merge in the recipe with alternating Any/Unbal shape in North. After clicking the “Merge Recipe” button I select the final ingredient:

And here’s the recipe report for our three recipes merged into one:

Finally, to demonstrate the power and convenience of using pre-built ingredients and the Merge Recipe feature, I repeated the process, this time using a 1-heart opener recipe as my starting point. That recipe had only the shaper settings Hearts Longest, 5-x-x-x, and No 6 Plus. I then merged in the 4 point ranges recipe and the alternating any/unbal shape recipe, and within seconds I had the hearts version of our recipe: