Seasonal Pain Relief

Toward more expressive bridge deal recipes

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Season’s greetings, bridge pals.

I know what many of you want for Christmas or your other gifting occasion of choice: a completely updated user guide that reflects all the latest changes to the bridge deal generator.

Wish granted. Every guide in this section is up to date.

The most noteworthy changes in recent months have been the addition of many new shapes to choose from in the dropdown lists in the deal shaper panel. Oh, so many shapes.

I’m going to discuss a few of the shape options here, but if you would like to see how a few of them have made it possible to make more expressive deal recipes, with fewer recipe placeholder gymnastics, take a look at the guide to developing recipes for 1NT natural bidding. If you tried to follow it before the latest update, you surely found it overly complicated; I know I did, and I created the darned thing.

It’s a whole lot easier now.

I used to want to minimize the number of shape options in the shaper panel, because I knew that it was theoretically possible to define any shape through the use of placeholders in the recipe panel. This was tied in with my goal of building as little bridge knowledge as possible into the generator, for I know that one person’s bridge knowledge is another person’s idea of bridge heresy. This problem arises when you assign names to concepts that are not and never will be clearly defined or universally understood. I thought that by not naming things in my program, but giving the user the tools to build up those things from elementary particles (lots and lots of recipes with lots and lots of placeholders), a sort of bridge nirvana would evolve. Don’t like someone’s concept of bridge? Fine, don’t use their set of recipes! Roll your own.

However, while I still don’t want to put named concepts into my program, I now appreciate the convenience of building in some very specific named things (not nebulous concepts) on which everyone can agree, and those things are card distributions, as expressed mainly by suit lengths, but sometimes with a few clearly defined phrases.

And so now, among the over 100 shapes in the dropdown lists, you will find all 39 possible shapes explicitly defined. Those 39 are the ones that specify exact lengths for all four suits, so no placeholders are involved. See, for example, 4-4-3-2, 7-4-2-0, 13-0-0-0.

I will admit that I broke my own “no named concepts” rule, for the sake of a user who asked politely. The “Pancake” name is used for a 4-3-3-3 shape, but only because I polled all bridge players worldwide, and all agreed that pancakes are flat and featureless. It’s not like pizza, which ranges in flatness from very (New York) to not at all (Chicago).

The shaper now also provides many shapes where some suit lengths are explicitly defined, while others are left to chance. See any shape that has an “x” in it. Examples include 0-x-x-x, 5-4-x-x, 11-x-x-0. You can define those same shapes by using placeholders and randomizers in the recipe panel, but if you are happy with a bit more random assignment, use the shaper instead. And remember, you can always use the shaper and some judicious recipe placeholders—let the shaper do the shaping, and you can make a card or card type placement choice down in the recipe panel.

There’s a six-member set with the word “Long”: Major Long, Spades Long, Hearts Long, Minor Long, Diamonds Long, and Clubs Long. Using one of these shapes will make it so that your chosen suit (or one in your class of suit if Major Long or Minor Long) with be as long or longer than any other suit in the hand. The “as long” possibility is important: don’t expect your chosen suit to always be longest—it might be 4 cards, and some other suit might also have 4 cards.

Never fear! If you want to specify a longest suit or class of suit, use one of Major Longest, Spades Longest, Hearts Longest, Minor Longest, Diamonds Longest, or Clubs Longest.

If you use the “Long” or “Longest” shape and put nothing in the corresponding hand in the recipe panel, the deal generator will just find a random deal that meets the “as long” or “longest” requirement in that suit. Long or longest could be anywhere from 4 to 13 cards. But if you have some specific length—or a minimum length—in mind, then also use placeholders in the recipe panel. You can see this combination of shaper and recipe in action in the 1NT natural bidding guide mentioned earlier.

There are several shape options with the word “No” in them: No 3 Spades, No 3 Hearts, No 3 Diamonds, No 3 Clubs, No 4 Major, No 5 Major, No 5 Spades, No 5 Hearts, No 5 Minor, No 5 Diamonds, No 5 Clubs, No 5 Plus, and No 6 Plus. Why those exclusions, in particular? Because in my experience building deal recipes, they come up an awful lot. I’m sure that experienced bridge teachers or players see them all the time. Three-, four-, five-, and six-card suits are our stock in trade, and many scenarios and conventions are described in terms of those lengths either being present or absent. You can easily include those lengths by choosing a shape and/or by keying the desired number of placeholders in the recipe panel; however, excluding those lengths is not so easy—or it wasn’t, before I provided the “No” set of shapes.

I have written before about the three families of balanced vs unbalanced shapes. I will eventually provide a user guide with a chart that defines those categories in detail. Most users will be happy with the set (Unbal, Balanced, and Semi-Bal) at the top of the dropdown lists, which adhere to the meanings as defined in Bidding in the 21st Century.

Note also that the recently-added yellow buttons of the shaper and recipe panels cause the generator to look for deals that do not conform to the shapes and point ranges chosen in the shaper panel. This greatly increases your ability to express “not” something. For a quick and easily-understood example, set North’s shape to “Spades Longest” and their HCP range to 10-10 (that is, exactly 10 HCP). Now click the red Generate Deal = Shaper button and see what you get; then click the yellow Not = Shaper button and see how you get the opposite of what you defined. Very useful for coming up with counter-examples for your bridge deal scenarios.

This has been a great year for me and my work on the bridge deal generator. I appreciate all of you who have followed along, and those who have given me valuable feedback and encouragement. I have learned to never say “never” regarding more program enhancements, but my plan for 2025 is to finally focus on developing a full set of deal recipe cookbooks. That was actually the plan at several points this year, but the deal configuration drudgery and too-frequent pain points caused me to keep adding features to aid expressiveness and reduce the number and complexity of recipes. It’s starting to feel downright fluent; we’ll see how it goes as I tackle a mountain of scenarios.

Let me know how it works for you, too.

Happy dealing!