The April, 2025 Deal Generator Update is Now Online
Deal display, deal report, and recipe report enhancements. Also, support for upcoming ACBL initiatives.
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Hi, bridge pals.
The deal generator at this link has been updated with new and improved features. Most of this round of changes focuses on making the deal display and the deal and recipe reports more useful. The deal report and recipe report user guides describe how to use every feature, so I’ll just list the newness here.
The Number of Deals setting previously let you generate up to 64 deals at a time. The new maximum is 2048 deals.
High Card Points for each hand are now shown in the deal display panel, and on the deal report.
The recipe report shows hand rotation settings.
The recipe report shows the “number of deals” setting.
The deal report allows essentially unlimited deal analysis text, and each page is numbered.
The deal report optionally displays the URL of the recipe that created the deal in the report.
The user may selectively exclude hands from the deal report, as one does when attempting to confound and/or challenge students.
That’s it for this month. Next month, I plan to make changes in support of the ACBL’s efforts to attract new players to our favorite game. To that end, I will be implementing the following:
Double Disambiguation. Bridge, Out Ahead auctions will use icons that correspond to the new standard bidding cards that take the guesswork out of the calls formerly known as doubles.
Penalty, without a doubt. The skull-and-crossbones call will denote a penalty in all cases. Players are asked to kindly refrain from devising new conventions that alter the meaning of this plain and simple call; such efforts will be tolerated zero-ly (that is, not at all).
The Chinese food carton call will mean takeout. That is all it will mean…forever. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
For face-to-face play, Baron Barclay’s and other suppliers will offer attractive sets of plastic, waterproof card packs for the new calls—just specify how many you need to upgrade all your bidding boxes, and be sure to request the bulk discount. But do keep the old, confusing double cards around for the occasional ACBL-wide Throwback Thurzdaze events (featuring red points galore, expert commentary, and a pot-luck lunch!)
Four-Tier Suit Hierarchy. Going from two to four suit tiers will drastically alter the game, but it will have only minor impact on the Bridge, Out Ahead deal generator. That’s thanks to my wise early decision to make it a rather mechanical system without too much built-in bridge knowledge. I got sloppy in a few places, but it will be easy enough to eliminate references to major and minor suits (primarily in shaper dropdown lists, and in the user guide) and instead only refer to individual suits in the pleasing new, from lowest to highest, club→heart→diamond→spade order. If you, like. me, always thought that diamonds and spades were a cut above their dreary, leech-like tier-mates…you were right!! This change will double the size of the duplicate scoring chart, but that is of no concern to the deal generator.
Spades/Bridge Integration. Due to the popularity of the Spades side sessions at Nationals, the eventual complete integration of the two games will commence in late 2025 with the introduction of the “Nil” bid in bridge. This bid, promising as it does that one’s side will take no tricks at all, should enliven the game. It will make bidding quite interesting, especially as it can be employed at any point (that is, it occupies no fixed “rung” of the “bidding ladder”) and thus it can effectively “take back” earlier bids (for which I, for one, am grateful).
Savvy players will bone up on the official rules of the game, because if you are declaring a Nil contract and the defense causes you to win a trick against your will, you will want to incur some kind of penalty to give it back. In anticipation of increased director calls, directors are advised to up their aerobic capacity by at least 37%, and to complete any planned lower joint replacement procedures a good six weeks in advance of the advent of the “Nil” bid. Alert (no pun intended): please consult your physician before engaging in any unaccustomed physical activity. The only impact on the Bridge, Out Ahead deal generator will be supporting “Nil” calls in the Auction text box and, of course, on the corresponding auction part of the deal report.
Happy dealing, and happy April 1st!