This is one of several user guides on specific topics. The directory for all user guides is here.
The general workings of the Deal Recipe Maker are explained in other posts. This post is a tutorial showing how to write recipes for good suits.
In bridge literature, you see a “good” suit defined in one of two ways:
A suit with at least two of the top three honors.
A suit with at least three of the top five honors.
Let’s do two-of-the-top-three honors first. Conveniently and not at all coincidentally, there is a placeholder, “G”, that is used to specify one of either Ace, King or Queen (aka the top three honors). A recipe to request at least two of them could include:
(2-3)G
In fact, the “G” placeholder only exists to support the 2-of-3 version of good suits.
A recipe to request at least three of the top five honors could include:
(3-5)H
But if you were making deals to explore weak two-level opening bids and you didn’t want too many honors, you might do this to ensure you get exactly two of the top three:
(2-2)G(4-6)ZB
That’s a 6-8 card suit with exactly two of the top three honors and from four to six zero-point cards. Each time you generate from that recipe you will get the same number of the top three honors, but possibly two different cards each time; you will get from four to six randomly-assigned zero-point cards.
If you want to use the other definition of good, use H instead of G, putting jacks and tens into the mix:
(3-3)H(3-5)SB
Note that since 3-of-five-honors takes up three spots in the suit, I dropped the zero-point cards from (4-6) down to (3-5) so we would still get a 6-8 card suit. I also changed my spot card placeholder to “S” to rule out the 10. If I’m using the 3-of-5-honors then I must consider 10 to be an honor card, so I may not want to accidentally get it in my 3-5 spot cards.