When in the course of human events—especially duplicate bridge sessions—it becomes desirable to study or replay the deals on your computer, your choices may be limited.
For instance, when I look at the “ACBL Live for Clubs” page for a session from my club, I see something like this:
See the “Hand Records” file at the upper right? That is a file in PBN format, which is great if your bridge-playing software can handle it. I use BBO on Bridgebase.com, which requires files in their proprietary LIN format.
I know of at least one free bridge deal converter, and I’m pretty sure the commercial bridge software packages let you convert between formats.
Well, now you can also convert files from PBN to LIN, and vice versa, using my program. Let’s play with the file shown above. First click on the “Handrecord File (PBN)” link. You should see something like this:
Click the “Save” button at the bottom of that dialog and the file will be saved on your computer.
Now go to my program website and click the “Browse…” button on the same line as the “Deal” button. You don’t need to select a Deal Type, Dealer, or Vulnerable option because when you load from a file, the Deal Type will default to Manual, and Dealer and Vulnerability will be specified for each deal inside the deal file that you are loading. Here’s the page right before you click the “Browse…” button:
When you click “Browse…” you will get a file chooser dialog. In it, navigate to the folder where you just saved the PBN file from ACBL Live for Clubs:
I have selected the Friday A.M. “PBN” file that I previously downloaded from ACBL. Now click the “Open” button to see this:
My program loaded the PBN file. It shows the first deal, including dealer and vulnerability obtained from the file, but rest assured all of the deals from the input file have been read in by my program and are available for you to download in another format. Now if you want the equivalent LIN file, click the LIN button to see something like this:
Click on the LIN file and it will be saved to your computer:
Now you’re in business. You can load the LIN file into Bridgebase.com by following these instructions. You can replay the deals in Bridgebase to your heart’s content. Note that the instructions begin with generating a deal, but since you have just created a LIN file from a PBN input file, you can start after the part about generating a deal.
My program automatically creates both PBN and LIN versions of all generated deals and of any deals loaded from a file, so you can convert to/from both formats just by using the “load from file” feature on either file type.
Please note that when deals are loaded from a file, the resulting PBN and LIN output files are minimal in nature, containing just enough information for another program to load up your cards, dealer, and vulnerability. When loading in an input file, my program drops information such as session information, dates, the auction, actual play of the cards, double dummy results, etc.
That said, there is a nice bonus feature: after you have read in a deal file containing one or more deals, the last deal in the file is also available on the Manual Deal form. After reading in a file as shown above with the input PBN file, Deal Type should be set to “Manual Deal” by the program. Click the “Deal” button and you will see this:
Hey, look! It’s the last deal, laid out as though you keyed in a manual deal specification!
Why is that so great? Because you might be interested in doing something special with just the last deal from a file, or you might be working from an input file that contains only one deal, but you want to modify it and/or generate multiple versions of it. Sure, you could have keyed this in yourself, but if you have a PBN or LIN input file lying around, why not just load it up and save yourself some keying? Once you load a deal into my program, you can use the Manual Deal feature to modify it and generate as many versions as you like, specifying “Rotate” for Dealer and Vulnerability to get interesting variations.