Hi, bridge pals. The other day in bridge class we learned about DONT. When we played the instructional boards, we discovered a few dealing mishaps that left us with hands not quite suited for playing DONT. We knew the intended lesson, though, so we swapped cards around until someone could open 1NT, responder had puny points and no long suits, and one opponent had 8+ points and the requisite 6-card suit or a 5-card and 4-card suit. We were in business.
During our correction of the boards, my eyes glinted and I thought to myself, I thought, “Self, this could have been avoided had my bridge deal program been used to create these boards.”
Later, at home, I took a look and realized, “Nuh-uh.”
The most glaring deficiency is that my deal customization page doesn’t have DONT as an option. In fact, while it supports several very common conventions, it lacks the vast majority of conventions, and for those it does support it doesn’t offer an obvious way to further configure the generated deal to your liking.
I decided to develop a way to either customize deals resulting from the few supported conventions, or to configure a deal for an unsupported convention, such as DONT, from scratch.
As proof of the wisdom of writing things down, I then discovered that (“Yes-huh”) my program does in fact already let you do all of that. It takes a bit of file-wrangling, though, which I understand may not be the easiest thing in the world for all users. But, short of building out an all-inclusive menu of all permutations of all conventions, right now the way I’m going is to document the construction of one convention at a time in this cookbook series of blog posts.
And so without further ado, let’s do DONT.
On the main page, select Customized Deal and nobody vulnerable as shown above. I am making East the dealer since I want to give dealer a 1NT opener, setting up South or North for the DONT bidding. I like to give N/S the “action” because I play my deals solo against BBO robots, and I usually sit South; you can of course vary this setup to suit your own intended use of these deals. Once you make those selections, click “Deal.”
On the Customized Deal page, set Partner (of the opening bidder) points to 0-2, LHO points to 8+, and leave RHO points random since they should just get whatever’s left anyway. Remember: you can be specific about points for several hands, but if you are too specific about all 4 hands and you specify more than or less than 40 HCP for all hands combined, you might create an impossible total point count and the program will run for a long time without finding a suitable deal. So it is wise to use point ranges and leave at least one seat with random points.
We want dealer to have a hand suitable for opening 1NT, and we hope responder will pass. We gave responder only 0-2 points, but if he gets a long suit he might get frisky and bid anyway. Let’s make it where he at least won’t have a long major suit by choosing “1NT, Partner < 4M” for the deal type. Press “Click here to continue with deal.”
The resulting deal is shown above. Experienced players will note immediately South already has a DONT-worthy hand if you play DONT with a 5-card and a 4-card suit. And West’s hand is so puny that even without DONT, N/S would very likely discover their hands’ combined strength just by stumbling around with natural bids. But remember: blog posts like this are about how to arrive at desired configurations on purpose, so you don’t have to keep hitting “Deal” over and over to luck into a deal that suits your teaching or practicing goals.
So let’s say that while that South hand is DONT-worthy, what we really want is a hand suitable for bidding Double to initiate DONT. That bid requires a 6-card suit. Enter the newly-rediscovered capability: editing an existing deal.
We want to get this deal over into our Manual Deal page. But you can’t do that directly from this page (yet) because deals from this page are not copied over to the Manual Deal page.
What you do is click the “PBN” button, which will store the current deal in a file. Each type of browser shows the resulting file differently. My Mozilla Firefox browser on a Mac computer shows the resulting file name in a list of recently-downloaded files, as shown above.
As described in this blog post, if you load a bridge deal from a file it will appear both on the main page and on the Manual Deal page—it’s just a happy side effect of the method I used to get data from the file into my web page. So let’s do that.
Click the “Browse” button that follows the phrase “click Browse to load from file:” as shown above.
Hey-o! You should see a file chooser dialog. Use it to select the PBN file you just created back when you pressed the “PBN” button.
Ta-da! But wait—isn’t that the deal we already saw before? Yes. Stick with me now. It’s the same deal, but I assure you it is now also on the Manual Deal page. And notice, under Deal Type the program has magically chosen “Manual Deal” because that’s just another happy side effect of loading from a file. This is all so convenient to building convention-ready hands that I’m getting chills up and down my spine.
We want a 6-card hand in South, dammit! Press the “Deal” button.
Mommy! Daddy! Uncle! Somebody! Hold me! There’s the generated deal, ready for us to change it in any (valid) way we like! Let’s swap two cards between North and South.
I accomplished the swap by deleting a diamond from North and changing South’s diamond holding to six placeholder (“X”) characters. I deleted a spade from South and added an “X” to North’s spade suit. Instead of using those “X” placeholders I could have keyed specific cards, and in fact you may wish to do so in many cases. Here, I wanted to demonstrate that you can change suit length but then let the program randomly assign remaining cards where you have used placeholders. Placeholders are handy when length matters more than points, but if the original points as dealt matter greatly, just be specific instead of using placeholders.
Note that each suit ends with the “B” character that indicates that suit is complete for that hand. Keep the “B” in place to ensure that the deal program doesn’t assign more cards to a fully-specified hand.
Now press “Click here to continue with deal.”
And there you have it, a DONT-ready deal, with opener’s LHO owning 8 HCP and a 6-card suit.
Once you get a configuration you like, you can also change “Number of Deals” to 16 or 32 or 64 or 128, and generate a lot of variations with the same shape but with different cards where you have placeholders on the Manual Deal page.
As usual with things I explain in this blog, the explanation takes an hour to write up and illustrate, but in actual practice you can do this sequence in under one minute per deal if you have already worked out the desired points and card distributions.
Of course, this is just one DONT scenario, to squeeze out a Double from South. You can apply the same technique to construct DONT hands that will prompt the other bids (2C, 2D, 2H, 2S) from South.
Happy dealing!