Deal Generator User Guide

Tutorial: cards panel basics

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

As stated in the Deal Recipe guide, a deal recipe is comprised of the settings in the Shaper panel and the Cards panel. The Shaper panel lets you describe the shapes and point ranges for hands, which is a very effective way to arrive at suitable deals. However, there are many times when you want to place specific cards or types of cards in a hand. The Cards panel is where you do that.

Note that, for the Shaper and Cards to work together, you must click the red or yellow button at the top of the Recipe panel. The red or yellow buttons at the top of the Shaper panel generate deals based only on the settings in the Shaper panel. The single “Gen” button of the Cards panel generates deals based only on the settings in the Cards panel. This button specialization exists so that you can test out your Shaper and Card setups in isolation from each other before invoking them both together. Shaper and Cards interactions can be quite complex and can give unexpected results, so it’s a good idea to test them independently in the early going.

You specify cards by typing specific cards, or placeholders that represent typs of cards, into the text boxes for each suit. You don’t have to type in all 52 cards, or placeholders for them, unless you really want to. Just type in the cards that matter to you, and the remaining cards will be dealt out randomly.

Before configuring the recipe, choose the dealer and vulnerability from the options on the left side of the page. Set Number of Deals to however many deals you want.

In the recipe, if you leave every hand blank and click “Gen Deal = Cards, Ignore Shaper” then you will get a random deal in the Deal panel. That’s because leaving all hands blank is actually a valid recipe that says, “give me any cards in any order.”

Let’s consider a few typical things you might want to put in the Cards panel.

Suppose you want North to have all four face cards in spades. To express that, type “AKQJB” in North’s spades. The “B” after the last card tells the generator to deal only the four cards to that suit.

Remember to click the “Gen Deal = Cards, Ignore Shaper” button to see the deal resulting from your Cards setup.

Now suppose you want North to have two face cards and two other cards of any kind in spades. You don’t care which two face cards North receives, and in fact you would like it to be different each time you generate a deal from the recipe, so that you get an interesting variety of hands. To express that, key “FFXXB” in North’s spades. The “F” placeholder gets you any face card; “X” gets you any card.

So far I have limited the length of my suits by putting a “B” after the other placeholders. I’ll do it again here to demonstrate how to request exactly 5 cards in a suit: “XXXXXB”.

Now suppose that, instead of “exactly five” you want “at least five.” Simple. Just leave off the length limiter: “XXXXX”. This will guarantee five cards (assuming your Shaper and placeholders in other hands don’t prevent it, but you could get up to 13 cards in the suit since you didn’t limit the length.

If you want to specify a range of lengths for a suit, use the length randomizer construct which I describe next, along with other useful randomizing constructs.

Parentheses, Square Brackets, and Curly Braces

Most of the placeholders are easy to understand—the key describes what card or category of cards each one represents. However, the three different types of braces or brackets that control random selection require some explanation.

Bridge authors often specify the length of a suit as a range, such as “three or four spades.” We use parentheses in the Cards panel to express that.

When you enclose two numbers separated by a hyphen within parentheses, and follow that with a placeholder code, you are telling the generator to randomly choose a number between the two numbers, inclusive, and put that many of the placeholder code into the suit. So if you type “(3-4)X” in a suit, you are saying that you want at least from 3 to 4 “X” placeholders; if you want to limit the randomly-chosen length, add the “B” length limiter: (3-4)XB.

Bridge authors often specify different card groupings for a single concept. For instance, you might encounter articles that define a “good 5-card suit” as one having either two of the top three honors or three of the top five honors. We use square brackets in the Cards panel to express that kind of thing.

When you enclose distinct sets of placeholders within square brackets in a single suit in a hand, you are telling the generator to choose just one of the sets of square brackets in that suit, and to then include the placeholders from inside just that set of brackets. For our “good suit” example you can put both versions in a suit and let the generator choose at deal-generation time: [GGSSS][HHHSS]XB.

I used “S” instead of “X” for my spot card placeholders because I didn’t want honors (by any definition, including the Ten) to replace them.

If you want to specify spot cards to include the Ten, you can use the “Z” placeholder.

Square brackets control random selection only within the suit in which they appear.

Bridge authors often specify a number of cards but they don’t care which suit it is. For example, they might write that a player has no support for partner’s spades, but has six cards in another suit. That’s fine, we can visualize that, but how can we express it? We use curly braces in the Cards panel to express that kind of thing.

When you enclose distinct sets of placeholders within curly braces in a single hand (but, very likely, in different suits in that hand), you are telling the generator to choose just one of the sets of curly braces in that hand, and to then include the placeholders from inside just that set of curly braces.

For the six-card side suit example, let’s say we want South to have six cards in either hearts, diamonds, or clubs. To express that, key {XXXXXXB} in all three suits in the South hand in the Cards panel. At deal-generation time, the deal generator will randomly choose just one of those brace-enclosed expressions.

Buttons Galore

Notice the nine buttons with arrows to the right of North’s hand in the Cards panel. While it is very easy to type cards and placeholders into the Cards panel, the buttons let you quickly swap the contents of one hand with another, or swap the contents of one suit with another. This comes in handy when you are creating recipes for one suit, and after saving it off to a file you decide you want a similar recipe for another suit. Just click the appropriate swap button and the setup that was good for spades, for instance, jumps to hearts.

Suit swap buttons only operate on the Cards panel. Seat swap buttons and the rotate button of the Cards panel, though, operate on both the Cards panel and the Shaper panel.

The seat swap buttons and the rotate button of the Shaper panel operate only on the Shaper panel.

The deal generator performs no error checking of your cards and placeholders. If you key in impossible combinations (e.g. 13 aces in every hand) the deal generator will try to obey your instructions but it will ultimately deal most cards out randomly.