Dealer selection

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

Use the “Dealer” selector on the upper left of the web page to specify which seat is the dealer for your bridge deals.

This would seem obvious and would need no further explanation were it not for the “Rotate” option. Bridge, as you probably play it, is a non-contact sport. Here in Anniston, Alabama, though, we have some local ground rules to keep our blood pumping and our spirits high. Our director puts everyone’s name into a hat (it’s a fedora—we still wear those hereabouts) and at a designated time (typically 11:47 since other things are not often scheduled at that exact time) he draws a name and shouts, “Rotate <name>!” (but, you see, he inserts the name of he/she who shall be rotated). Then everyone else converges on that person, hoists them, chair and all as though at a Jewish wedding, and we run en masse around the room, shouting “Rotate! Rotate!”

We circle the room three times, then it’s back to the game. This may seem like a quaint small-town custom, but I can honestly say that we have had not one single case of DVT diagnosed on the premises during years and years of bridge sessions; I attribute this to our little Rotate breaks keeping the blood clots at bay. Some have observed that all the chair-hoisting and the occasional fall from a high-hoisted chair takes out more members than DVT ever would, but to them I say, “Don’t be a Negative Nelly.”

Oh how I wish all of that were true. But it’s not.

The “Rotate” option tells the program to assign a dealer in the order shown on a standard duplicate bridge scoresheet. If you are generating just one deal, dealer will therefore be North. I made “Rotate” the default when you start up my program rather than making North the default because, you see, I don’t wish to show favoritism. But the standard duplicate bridge scoresheet chooses to make North the “first” dealer, so if you have complaints about equity and first-seat privilege, take it up with the scoresheet.

Where was I?

Oh yes, Rotate! Rotate is much more meaningful when you generate more than one deal at a time. Then, you will get a nice set of deals in which the dealer shifts from seat to seat just like on the scoresheet.

You can rotate vulnerability in similar fashion, but that’s in a separate mini-user guide. I’m trying to keep these things short and laser-focused.