Let's do the rest of DONT

The two-suited DONT bids

Hi, bridge pals. In the post where I introduced building convention-appropriate deals from scratch, I covered building a hand with a 6-card suit with 8+ HCP in second seat, suitable for bidding Double against a 1NT opening bid. In this post, I will cover building hands suitable for the other DONT bids—2C, 2D, 2H, and 2S. I will show how to build one of each, using basic guidelines such as requiring a 5-card suit and a 4-card suit in the hand making the DONT bid. You may prefer two 5-card suits or some other requirements; if so, have at it with the deal generator and build exactly what you want.

Now that I have provided a comprehensive user guide and several detailed, step-by-step blog posts showing how to do custom deals, manual deals, save deals to a file, and reload deals from a file, from now on in cookbook posts I will focus on recipes more than on the mechanics of using the website. If my more bare-bones recipes confuse you, go back and look through the how-to posts in the Computation Corner section of this blog. If anything is still not clear or you can’t make it work, just contact me and I’ll be glad to help you out.

All of my examples will start with a custom deal with East as dealer, none vulnerable, 0-2 points in responder’s hand, 8+ points in LHO, LHO with a DONT-suitable card distribution, and random (leftover) points in RHO. It is with a mighty exertion of will that I don’t give you a screen print showing all of that, but I trust you can figure it out on the site with the help of past blog posts, especially the first one on DONT.

Here’s the raw generated deal with our basic setup, but without the desired card distribution in the 1NT opener’s LHO (South, in this case). We will merrily beat up on this deal for each DONT bid we construct:

And now for the recipes for each of the 2-level DONT overcalls.

DONT - 2 clubs overcall of 1NT opener.

For this deal, we want the 1NT opener’s LHO to have 5 clubs and 4 of a higher suit.

I added 3 clubs to South using placeholder “X” characters. That gave South 16 cards. I backspaced over 1 diamond and 2 hearts in South, taking the hand back down to 13 cards. Now it has 8+ points, 5 clubs, and 4 spades—suitable for DONT 2C overcall.

Because I changed South’s holding, I have to account for those cards in other hands. I choose to tweak West because it’s the low-point hand in this deal, and the placeholders will resolve to spot cards since all the face cards are already specified elsewhere in the deal. I backspaced over 3 clubs in West, and added 1 diamond and 2 heart placeholder “X” characters to West to keep the hand at 13 cards.

Now I click to continue, and on the main page here’s the generated deal with the desired distribution, and with placeholders filled in randomly by whatever cards were not already otherwise assigned:

DONT - 2 diamonds overcall of 1NT opener.

For this deal, we want the 1NT opener’s LHO to have 5 diamonds and 4 of a major suit.

From the main page, click “Deal” again to go back to the Manual Deal page and change the deal again by redistributing cards and placeholders:

See how I gave South 3 more diamonds and took away the 3 club placeholders? That hand is DONT-ready. I took 3 diamonds away from West, and gave West the 3 club placeholders from South. Everybody has 13 cards again. Click to continue and here’s the generated deal:

DONT - 2 hearts overcall of 1NT opener.

For this deal, we want the 1NT opener’s LHO to have 5 hearts and 4 spades.

Shift the placeholders to make it so:

Are you starting to get the hang of it? For this particular convention we can just easily shift spot cards around without unduly affecting the total points in the hand. I am taking care to keep every hand at exactly 13 cards, but it is also possible to specify some suits exactly (just put the “B” at the end of the suit to say you want an exact number of cards as shown) while leaving others up to the random generator by leaving the “B” off. You can even specify too many cards—the program will stop dealing when it runs out of cards, so it will not try to honor your broken-down misdeals that you might specify—but it’s good form to not do things on the Manual Deal page that will confuse you and/or the program. Keep it clean and tidy until you become a power user and are not confounded by randomness.

Here’s the deal:

DONT - 2 spades overcall of 1NT opener.

For this deal, we want the 1NT opener’s LHO to have 5 spades and no longer suit (with a 6-card suit they would bid Double).

Remember when I said keep it clean and tidy and be exact? Yeah—April Fool! Here’s my 5-spade LHO hand in South, with some placeholders in hearts and diamonds and with every suit’s length exactly specified (by the “B” terminator). It’s good for a DONT 2-spade overcall.

But look at West. Where did his cards go? Rather than slavishly redistribute cards in West to account for the changes in South, I simply double-clicked each suit text box in West, clearing them of all cards. Since all the other hands are specified in detail with specific cards and placeholders and with exact-length suits, all remaining cards should simply wind up in West. Oh God, I hope it does happen after all this build up.

Click to continue.

Boom! West is fully populated with all remaining cards, South ready for a 2-spade DONT overcall.

DONT (*snicker*) you love it when a plan works out?

That last deal illustrates that if you are aware of what you are doing, you don’t have to tediously deal with each card yourself—just make your setups make sense in the hands that matter, and leave the other hands blank and let the computer fill them up with whatever cards are left unspecified. I could have done all four examples that way, but I wanted you to appreciate the difference between very specific and somewhat general setups. As it is with point counts on the Custom Deal page, so it is with card distributions on the Manual Deal page: be only as specific as you need to be to get the desired result, then let the program do the rest.

Happy dealing!