Deal Generator User Guide

Tutorial: shaper panel basics

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

The Shaper panel is one component of a deal Recipe. The other component is the Cards panel. Note how both panels are contained in the Recipe panel. The two panels may be used separately or together, depending on which “Generate” button is pressed; however, regardless of how they are evaluated during deal generation, the two panels are considered equal parts of a deal Recipe. When you save a Recipe to a file, the contents of both the Shaper panel and the Cards panel are included.

The Shaper is used to specify the point ranges for the North/South pair and the East/West pair, and the shape and point ranges for each hand in a generated deal. There are eleven tabs of shaper controls, numbered 1 through 11. Many recipes can be defined using only one shaper tab; 11 are provided for the cases that require more complex definitions.

During deal generation, a deal is considered to match the Shaper if it conforms to every setting in at least one shaper tab out of the eleven provided, as well as conforming to the North/South and East/West point ranges.

The default settings for one hand in a shaper are a shape of “Any,” an HCP range of 0-37, a Ctrl range of 0-12, and a Losing Trick Count range of 0-12. Any shaper tab numbered 2-11 with all default settings will not be considered when evaluating deals. Shaper tab 1 is always evaluated, so if you leave it set to default values, it will always match any deal.

Before configuring the shaper, 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. Those settings will be in effect whenever you generate deals that use the shaper panel.

In the shaper, choose the shape for each hand from the list boxes. There are 39 possible shapes for a bridge hand. The list boxes provide over 100 selections, consisting of the 39 explicit shapes, plus many selections that describe just one aspect of a shape (e.g. “Spades Longest” guarantees just that), or in some cases a group of shapes (e.g. “Balanced” refers to 4333, 4432, and 5332, and “5-x-x-x” refers to any shape that includes at least one 5-card suit).

While all possible shapes are provided, some are statistically very rare. So, for instance, if you select a shape with 10 or more cards in one suit, or any other very unusual shapes or combinations of shapes across all four hands, the deal generator could run for a long time (depending on your Maximum Number of Shuffles setting) and never find a conforming deal. If you want a deal with very unusual shapes, you can tilt the board in your favor by using cards and placeholders in the Cards panel to define your rare distributions. This helps because when you define things in Cards the generator doesn’t search for deals that match your placeholders—it actually pre-deals the types of cards over your placeholders, then deals any remaining cards randomly, and only then does it check to see if the deal conforms to the shaper. So if you need a 13-card suit, key it into the Cards panel and don’t use the 13-0-0-0 shape in the shaper panel.

You can select as many shapes as you want in each list box; however, be aware that if you select two mutually exclusive shapes in one list box (e.g. “Unbal” and “Balanced”), the deal generator will never find a deal that conforms to that combination of shapes.

The ability to select multiple shapes for one hand in one list box lets you easily define more expressive recipes, and minimize your use of the Cards panel. For instance, if you want a 1NT opener but you don’t like to open 1NT with a 5-card major, you could select a shape of “Balanced” and also a shape of “No 5 Major” in the same list box.

The HCP ranges for North/South and East/West default to from 0 to 40. You can set them to other values as needed. For instance, suppose you have defined a point range for North of 15 to 17 HCP, and you want North/South to have a combined total of from 23 to 26 points—some deals will be game-going, others will be just short. One way to do this is to specify a point range for South of 8 to 9. However, while this keeps the North/South total between 23 and 26, it prevents several point combinations: North 15, South 11; North 16, South 10; etc. So, leave South’s point range defined as 0 to 37 points, and set North/South to 23 to 26. Combined with the North setting of 15 to 17, this can generate all possible combinations that add up to the desired point range for the pair.

Choose the HCP point range for each hand. The low end of the range specifies the minimum HCP for that hand; the high end of the range specifies the maximum. “Allocated HCP” shows the total of all hands’ low ranges (Minimum) and of all hands’ high ranges (Maximum) on the current shaper tab. The program will only generate a deal if Minimum is 40 or less and Maximum is 40 or more. You don’t need to think too hard about the Minimum and Maximum since the program will keep track and will warn you if you allocate points incorrectly.

While the program prevents you from specifying impossible HCP combinations, it does not stop you from specifying highly unlikely ones. If you ask for 37 HCP in one hand and zero HCP in all the others, the deal generator will probably never find such a deal. If you want a deal with some extreme HCP conditions, consider tilting the board in your favor by using cards and/or placeholders in the Cards panel to force specific conditions to be dealt. Want one hand to have maximum the points? Don’t make the shaper search millions of deals for it—just key 37 points worth of honors into one hand in the Cards panel.

The shaper panel only calculates HCP, not length, distribution, or dummy points.

Ctrl (number of controls) and LTC (Losing Trick Count) at both the pair level and the hand level are handled similarly to HCP, though of course they have different maximum values and they are counting different things.

The seat swap buttons and the seat rotate button of the Shaper panel operate only on the Shaper tabs; they do not affect settings in the Cards panel. However, the same buttons in the Cards panel operate on both Cards and Shapers.

The seat rotate buttons in the Cards and Shaper panels also operate on the North/South and East/West HCP range settings.

Generating Deals

There are four buttons for generating deals using the Shaper panel.

The red button at the top of the Recipe panel tells the generator to generate deals that conform to the Cards panel and to the Shaper panel.

The yellow button at the top of the Recipe panel tells the generator to generate deals that conform to the Cards panel but that do not conform to the Shaper panel.

The red and yellow buttons at the top of the Shaper panel are similar to those on the Recipe panel, except that in both cases they ignore the settings in the Cards panel. These buttons are useful for testing Shapers in isolation when you are developing a new recipe or debugging an existing recipe.

The Shaper panel is also used when you generate deals using the red and yellow “Vary” buttons in other panels; however, in those cases the Shaper panel is used rapidly by an automated process that repeatedly loads and unloads it from data in a recipe file or other storage area, and you probably won’t see the Shaper settings flashing by unless you vary a long-running recipe. It is good to be aware, though, that your Vary operations are subject to the same Shaper behavior that a user experiences when clicking a Generate button—that is, if the recipe describes a rare deal, the vary operation could run for a long time and may not find a deal.

Since deal generation using the Shaper panel can involve shuffling and evaluating many deals, and it may not ever find a conforming deal, during recipe development you should se the Maximum Number of Shuffles on the far left side of the web page to the lowest setting; otherwise, you could spend a lot of time watching the generator evaluate a million or more deals before giving up on a recipe. Once you know that your recipe is not impossible to fulfill, you can set the Max Shuffles as high as you want, confident that the generator will eventually find your deal.