Effective use of the bridge deal cookbook

From minimalist ingredients to complete recipes

Hi, bridge pals.

I have been quiet for a while because I have been learning 2/1 Game Forcing. I had so much new information to cram into my head that I didn’t take the time to develop recipes to create my own 2/1 deals. Sure, I could have made some one-off deals to illustrate and practice this or that concept, but what I really want to do is approach the whole task of cookbook creation in an organized manner. Since I didn’t yet have a good set of basic ingredient recipes, I had nothing from which to conjure up some decent convention-illustrating recipes.

Well, while I have only played 2/1 in one live session so far, I am past the initial cram-studying phase, and it’s now time to make the cookbook happen. I want to show you the basic ingredients I created today, and the deal recipes I built from them. This work took a couple of hours, much of which was devoted to thinking about design and organization; with those issues settled, future recipe development should go much more quickly.

In this post, and in future posts that are not introducing a new or difficult-to-use feature of the deal generator, I’m going to try to just show you what I have created, and explain why I do certain things, but let you look up the “how” in the user guide. Of course, if you ever feel completely lost, feel free to ask questions. I’ll be glad to answer you directly, or to provide an explainer if lots of people ask the same question.

So: to the cookbook!

The above Cookbook page is available via a link on my main web page. The cookbook itself is a series of linked web pages with deal recipes. You can actually click on a recipe to see it loaded into the deal generator. However, to experience the full power of the cookbook, such as by using the Load Recipe and Merge Recipe features of the deal generator, you will want the actual recipe files copied to your own computer. You can get that via the link that says “Here’s the whole cookbook folder for you.” That link will always take you to a Google Drive folder where I will always keep a current copy of my cookbook files.

Click on the “Ingredients” link on the Cookbook page, and then on “North Ingredients" to reach this page:

This is not, of course, all the ingredients I will ever want. But it’s enough to make some decent recipes, and to illustrate how I intend to make things at the lowest level of recipe creation (lowest in the sense that these ingredients, taken individually, don’t create anything particularly meaningful or useful).

Notice that each of my ingredients may define only one aspect of a full recipe: a shape but no points, or points but no shape, a suit restriction but no shape and no points, etc. That minimalist approach to ingredients is purely a design choice. While I do have eventual full recipes in mind, when I create ingredients I try to focus on one aspect of the deal at a time, keeping in mind that I will very likely want to mix and match various settings.

Also notice that you don’t, in fact, ever really have to make ingredient-only recipes. Everything I have done via minimalist ingredient recipes can actually be done directly in a full-blown recipe developed from scratch. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that if you prefer it. My ingredients approach is inspired by my computer programming habit of developing things in small pieces that can be combined into larger works later on. Even though selecting a shape and a point range is extremely easy in the deal generator, it does equal work; loading or merging pre-built ingredients is also work, but of a different kind: less thinking and mousing about.

So, to what use did I put those ingredients? Go back to the main Cookbook page, click on Opener Recipes, then on 1 Major Openers, to get to this page:

One recipe. Hey, it’s a start! I cobbled it together from several ingredient recipes, then saved it to its own file, and now we all have it, forever. Gah-roovy! Many more opener recipes will follow, of course. We’re just in Proof-of-concept Land today.

Did someone mention 2/1 game forcing? I believe it was me. From the main cookbook page, click on “Convention Recipes” and see this impressive list:

I used my one spade opener recipe as the basis for a few convention recipes. You can explore those recipes by clicking on 1NT Forcing, 2 over 1, Bergen, and Jacoby 2NT—the Four Horseman of my recent apocalyptic studies. In those recipes you will see that I left North as it was defined in the opener recipe, and I only varied South’s settings to suit the convention I was illustrating. Oh, and I gave East, as dealer’s LHO, low points to discourage interference; in real life, and in your own studies, you may of course choose to allow interference.

Happy dealing!