Support for Suit Combinations
Document them, then play them.
Hi, bridge pals.
I just gave my first Technology Train 2025 demo this morning, courtesy of realbridge.online. Many thanks to that company and to all the attendees. There are more live demos coming up this week—give it a look if you haven’t already signed up.
After my demo, someone asked if my deal generator supported partial deals. I think they were asking about the ability to display partial deals, not the ability to generate partial deals. And when I think of partial deals, I think of that tried and true teaching tool, suit combinations.
I said “no” to that question, though in fact I knew that you could use the Cards panel to set up a suit combination problem, save it as a recipe, and also print it to a PDF via the recipe report. I didn’t immediately recommend that because the recipe report was designed to include everything about a recipe—point ranges, shapes, and cards. That’s a lot, if you really just want to see the cards.
Well, now the answer is “yes” because I just added a new feature: the ability to show just the cards in a recipe report. Here’s how it works:
In the Cards panel, key in a suit combination. Here, I have keyed in problem #17 from Gitelman and Ruben’s book, Playing Suit Combinations.
Note the “B” length limiters on the two spade suits. I included them because we will eventually want to generate deals from this suit combination, and we don’t want extra spades in North and South.
Use the Save Recipe File panel to save this to a recipe file. It is a full-blown recipe, with point ranges and shapers from the Shaper panel, but we left those at default settings and we don’t mind if they ride along in the recipe file.
Now, using top-secret knowledge, click the Clubs icon for the North and South suits in the Cards panel. The “B” length limiters will disappear. You may correctly observe that you could have also just backspaced over those Bs to get rid of them. If you do make that observation, you may have problems with the new Mission Impossible movie, including wondering exactly why (spoiler alert) the bi-plane chase—as exciting as it was—was strictly necessary to the plot. Top-secret spy stuff is its own reward, don’t you know.
But I digress. Clicking clubs icon chops off a trailing “B” for every suit in a hand in Cards.
Now click the Report button of the Recipe panel to get this:
That’s the recipe report preview panel. Click the new Cards Only checkbox, key in a title and description, and click Save PDF. Here’s what my PDF looks like, with notes from the book summarized:
If you were making this report for a lesson, then you are finished. However, if you are a student or player who wants to do more than just think about this suit combination, there’s more for you to do: close the report preview panel, put the Bs back on the end of the spade suits (or else reload the recipe from the saved file, restoring the Bs), and generate deals from the recipe. Take the knowledge you gained from studying the suit combination, and see how your chosen line of play will hold up against many hands generated from it. Do that in your head while studying the generated deals, or by clicking the Bridge Solver button of the deal display for some Double Dummy assistance, or save your generated deals to a PBN file and go play them in Bridge-Training.com.
Some suit combinations use X for spot cards. The deal generator uses “X” to mean any card, which could give you unwanted honors. If you intend to generate deals from your suit combinations, and if you need zero-HCP spot cards, just use the S or Z placeholders instead of X. Here’s #70 from Alan Truscott’s first set of Bridge Flash Cards, changed to use Z for spot cards:
Happy dealing!