This is one of several user guides on specific topics. The directory for all user guides is here.
This deal-generating tutorial is based on the “Responses to 1NT” section of the Chapter 3 summary of the book, Bidding in the 21st Century, that is part of the ACBL Bridge Series. I intend these deals for natural bidding, but of course you can use whatever system you prefer.
The chapter summary gives us 11 response scenarios. There can be many deals for each scenario. I will show you how to build one deal recipe for each; you can make others that suit you.
You may choose the dealer and vulnerability that suits you. I often start with North as dealer and nobody vulnerable since that is easy to visualize, and you play South in many bridge-playing programs. You can vary the dealer and vulnerability using features explained in other tutorials.
Scenario #1: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 0-7 points and no 5+ card suits.
Start with a Shaper. I made North balanced with 15-17 HCP. Responder (South) can have any shape and 0-7 HCP. I gave East very low HCP to discourage overcalls. I do this for deals intended for an instructional setting; when making “real” deals you would let both East and West have 0-37 HCP.
Click the “Generate Deal” button at the top of the Shaper panel. I get this deal:
This deal conforms to the Shaper, but it has a 5-card suit. The Shaper only lets you specify a general shape—balanced, unbalanced, or randomly-assigned. There are two ways to get a more specific shape: 1) click “Generate Deal” in the Shaper panel until you see a deal you like; or 2) use a Recipe. We will cover the Recipe Maker in the next scenario. For this one, though, let’s just click “Generate Deal” in the Shaper panel until we get what we want:
There we are: 4 HCP and no 5+ card suits in South. That’s a Pass call, according to the book.
Scenario #2: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 0-7 points and 5+ clubs.
Start with the same Shaper as before. It should still be on your screen, but some of our upcoming actions might reset it to defaults. Take a moment to save it to a file. Here, I have given it a meaningful file name and clicked “Save Shaper” in the file saver panel on the lower left of the page:
As an experiment, I clicked “Generate Deal” in the Shaper panel until South got a hand with a 5-card club suit (the goal of this scenario). It took 5 clicks. While this works for one-off or quick setups, it is not ideal for making a repeatable set of instructional deal setups. That’s what recipes are for. So let’s click until South gets a hand with no 5-card suits (yes, I’m making us work at it, but this is a tutorial):
Thar she blows. Now click the “To Recipe” button above the deal and see how the deal is copied to the Deal Recipe Maker panel, as a recipe.
The letter “B” at the end of each suit tells the deal generator (the one that operates based on the recipe) to keep that suit to that specific length. This comes into play when a recipe does not specify an exact location for all 52 cards.
Click the spade icon next to West’s spade suit in the Deal Recipe Maker panel. This will delete all his cards from the recipe. Don’t worry—West will receive randomly-dealt cards later.
Change South’s recipe to look like this:
I shortened South’s spades, hearts, and diamonds by one spot card each. I did this by simply backspacing over the last spot card before the “B” in those suits. I then added three zero-point cards to South’s club suit by keying “ZZZ” before the B. By removing and adding only zero-point cards, I got the exact shape I wanted without affecting the HCP for South, or for any other hand.
Now click the “Generate Deal” button of the Deal Recipe Maker panel and you will see a deal like this in the Generated Deal panel:
It’s the right shape, but now South has 8 HCP—not what we wanted. What happened?
What happened was logic or math or both. The recipe has exact clubs assigned to North and East. South specifies K and 8 and three zero-point cards. But here we see that deal recipes are aspirational. The generator takes recipes as a suggestion, but it will always deal every card. In this case, specifying 4 clubs each in North and East and 5 clubs in South allocates all 13 clubs (note the club void in West). The deal generator in fact tried to honor our request for zero-point clubs, but after fulfilling North and East it only had the J, 9, and 7 left, so South got them.
You counteract this effect by being less specific in other hands. This is actually a good thing. If you were making the deal entirely by hand, you would have to get more and more specific. Here, you only get specific where you need to, and let the other cards fall randomly.
Blank out East’s club suit in the Recipe Maker and click "Generate Deal” in the Recipe Maker panel:
Since the generator was not required to give East 4 clubs (though it did so this time), it was free to give South only zero-point spot cards, as requested. If you generate deals from this recipe repeatedly, sometimes West will get clubs, sometimes it won’t. East could also wind up with a void in clubs. It is random when you don’t specify anything.
Scenario #3: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 0-7 points and 5+ diamonds.
Now that you have a recipe to work with, you don’t have to keep starting over again from the Shaper. You can, of course, start over with the shaper if you want to get a variety of opening 1NT hands in North. For demonstration purposes, I’m going to just work with the same recipe for the next few scenarios.
Here I swapped the diamond and club suits in South, since I now wanted 5+ diamonds and the same HCP. But East also had a king of diamonds. Requesting the same card in two places gives unpredictable (but bad) results. We see that the AQ of diamonds is in North, and we want the King in South. I changed East’s king to an “F” for Face Card. Yes, it’s always going to be the Jack in this scenario because that’s the only face card remaining, so I could have put “J”, but remember: only be as specific as you need to be.
A quick check of the other suits showed that my change to South didn’t create any other conflicts, so I pressed “Generate Deal” in the Recipe Maker panel and got my 5-card diamond suit in South.
Scenario #4: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 0-7 points and 5+ hearts.
I swapped diamonds and hearts in South. South’s diamond jack now conflicts with East’s need for a diamond face card. I want East to still get some HCP, so I changed South’s diamond jack to a zero-point spot card, but added a hard-coded jack to South’s clubs to keep South’s HCP exact.
Scenario #5: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 0-7 points and 5+ spades suit.
I swapped South’s spades and hearts to get the 5-card spade suit. Moving the 4 of hearts to South’s heart suit conflicted with North’s heart suit, yielding odd results. It’s easy to spot—in this case, South kept getting unexpected high honor cards. I then replaced North’s 4 of hearts with a zero-point spot card (“Z”) and sanity reigned.
Notice that when adapting a recipe to get what you want, the general trend is, as noted before, to make the hands that matter more and more specific, while making other hands less specific. We hit (and overcame) obstacles here because we wanted something in three hands (low points in East, remember). In fact, when you get to making recipes where you don’t mind opponents making overcalls, it is handy to leave both opponents’ suits blank in the recipe so you can focus entirely on the other pair.
Scenario #6: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 8-9 points.
The first five scenarios all used a deal derived from the first Shaper. Now we need a different point range. New Shaper, with South having 8-9 HCP:
This scenario only needs the right point range, no particular distribution, so we don’t need to work up a recipe. Just generate from the Shaper:
Scenario #7: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 10-15 points and 6+ hearts.
Here’s the Shaper for the remaining scenarios, with 10-15 points in South. I let East revert to 0-37 HCP just like West to demonstrate that you can let opponents have whatever points are left. Yes, East may wind up with enough points to overcall, but that’s life in the big city. North and South’s guarantee of 25-32 HCP puts them in a pretty good situation, even if it’s beginners bidding. Let them go forth and take their chances with their game-going points.
I got a deal that fit that Shaper. In fact, to reduce the work of making a recipe, I clicked “Generate Deal” in the Shaper until I happened upon a deal with six hearts. Took a dozen or so clicks but zero thought.
I could have just called it quits, but since I want recipes, then I made this recipe from the generated deal by first clicking “To Recipe” in the Generated Deal panel, then blanking out East and West in the recipe panel (click their spade icon to quickly delete them, or overtype the contents of one suit at a time):
I could have left South’s hearts as specific cards, but I changed four of them to “X” just to show you another placeholder. Before, I used “Z” to guarantee a zero-point spot card. Now, though, AKQJ are all allocated so I can just specify “X” to say any card will do.
Scenario #8: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 10-15 points and 6+ spades.
Same shaper as the previous deal. Same technique of shamelessly clicking “Generate Deal” in the Shaper panel until I got a deal with 6 spades, copied it to the Recipe Maker, and this time simply blanked out East and West and kept the exact hands for North and South. Thank you, Shaper and generator, for this quick and easy recipe!
Look at that—a VOID suit showed up. In the Generated Deal panel, a void suit just shows up as blanks. In the Recipe Maker, if you leave a suit blank then the generator will happily deal cards into it, so you mark it void either with the word VOID or with a single letter B as the first thing in the suit, effectively forcing it to a length of zero.
Scenario #9: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 10-15 points and 5 hearts.
Shaper, clicky-clicky on Generate Deal until I spot a 5-card heart suit in South, copy to recipe maker, clear out East and West, boom:
Scenario #10: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 10-15 points and 5 spades.
Same technique used for Scenario #9, but this time looking for spades. Boom:
Scenario #11: Opener has a balanced hand and 15-17 HCP. Responder has 10-15 points and no 5+ card major suits.
Clicking “Generate Deal” in the Shaper panel felt less shameful and more purposeful because I only had to do it once, 5-card majors being less likely than this shape in South:
Quite a journey, eh?
While I often describe the use of my program in terms of constructing lessons for students, using the program is itself a lesson in card distribution. Notice how you can study a scenario in a book or article, work up a shaper, generate a sample deal, then make a generalized recipe. Along the way, you discover that the generalized recipe for the hands you care about is very dependent on the other hands, and vice versa. This interdependence is really the underlying theme of all bridge instruction, and it is emphasized over and over again. I posit that this point is “just words” for a certain percentage of students—the ones who either don’t reach the point of playing duplicate at the club, or who never quite understand the basics of natural bidding, much less the conventions. For them, I recommend repeated review of the basics, including pointing out the vagaries of point and card distribution. It is not an automatic “get” for every student or player.
As I state often (sometimes to strangers on the street, or even in my sleep), it takes longer to explain the use of my program than it does to actually use it. I estimate that, with practice, a user of my site could generate all of these 1NT recipes from scratch in 5 minutes or less, including some additional steps to construct more varied sets of deals from the same basic recipes. More on variety in a future tutorial with fewer scenarios.
Until then, happy dealing!