Notes from Bridge, Out Ahead
Volume 2, Number 18
Hi, bridge pals!
This week’s update is heavy on the tech and process content since I’ve been working on mass-production of recipes and deals. The Incident Report at the end, however, is pleasingly non-technical.
Bridge Deal Generator Notes
Some local bridge pals asked me for a set of deals to practice the DONT convention. Looking back, I discovered that I had published no fewer than three blog posts about DONT, none of which resulted in a complete set of deals. Time to make it happen.
First up was Let’s Do the DONT from December of 2023. This one is noteworthy because it shows my old user interface, and because the writing style is that of a wild man (before I settled down and became wise and reserved).
I then continued that discussion the very next day in Let’s Do the Rest of DONT.
The deal generator was very hard to use back then. The thing that later became the Shaper panel, and the other thing that became the Cards panel, were on separate pages and they did not interact in any way during deal generation.
Last summer, I tackled DONT again, this time with the new, improved user interface, in the utterly non-cleverly-titled The DONT Convention.
At that point, I had 8 recipes covering the various DONT suit length combinations. But I had them for only one HCP range in the DONT bidder’s hand. I wanted the same recipes but with other HCP ranges. One can do that by hand, but it is tedious and error-prone.
A few weeks ago, I introduced the Permutations feature to make it easy to generate variations of a recipe. At that time, it only allowed you to generate combinations of North and South HCP ranges. That won’t do for DONT, where I wanted to vary the dealer’s LHO’s HCP ranges. So now, with the even newer eastHCPRanges feature described in the tutorial, you can vary North and East HCP ranges.
With that, I was able to quickly generate four variations of each of my DONT recipes, as you can see in this section of the cookbook. And now we have the tools necessary to mass-produce recipes in which 2nd seat varies.
Once I had my complete set of DONT recipes, I used the Recipe Collections panel to generate four fully-rotated deals from each recipe. I clicked the “Jambalaya!” button of the Deal panel to mix up the deals before saving them to a file for my friends to use.
Recipe in Focus
I was going to share a simple DONT recipe, but that’s really too simple and you can see all of them in the cookbook. Instead, since we have some new subscribers out there, let’s review some organizing principles. If you just make a big pile of recipes with no regard for grouping and naming, then mark ye well my words: you’ll be sorry.
So. From my earlier DONT efforts, I had these 8 recipes:
My goal was to make four of each, with four different HCP ranges in East. I used this permutation specification file (which you can see in the cookbook):
Note the “fileNameFirstNumber” setting. That’s how you tell the generator what number to stick on the front of your output recipe file names. With a setting of “1” I produced these four permutations of my first DONT recipe:
See how they each start with “0001” followed by a sequence number, then a bit of info on the HCP ranges contained in the recipe? This is how we get a) unique; and b) somewhat meaningful file names.
The filenames do not tell you that the deal is (hopefully) for DONT practice. Never fear! As the boss of your own computer, it is your job to group and name things appropriately. So, while I have been working at the individual file level, once I get a set of related recipes I put them into folders that supply the missing information.
Here you can see part of my cookbook file structure. Within the DONT folder, I chose to group recipes in sub-folders by suit lengths.
Higher level folder names tell you what you’re getting into. Everything inside the DONT folder relates to DONT, so I do not (don’t, that is) need to repeat that word in every lower-level folder and file name. To do so would be to court madness and also might exceed some filename length limitation.
Newbies note: You can see the entire cookbook, in both shared folder form and as a web page, at links provided in this user guide post. There you will see the above folder structure in action.
Incident Report
Here’s a hand from a recent club session. It presents challenges both in the auction and in the play of the hand.
Happy dealing!