Hi, bridge pals.
If it seems like I have been announcing changes quite frequently lately, that’s because I have been. Recent changes were prompted by my increased involvement with bridge. I started taking a class at my local club in September, and I began hosting a weekly game at my home for other beginners in the class. Also, I am trying to interest the local bridge teachers in using my website to generate instructional deals suitable for loading into the dealing machine. All of this activity has prompted me to take a hard look at my web page and to remove features that don’t actually work, to remove features that are only of interest to me as the developer (I doubt anyone else will miss the script text area), and to add features useful to bridge teachers and writers.
The result is, I think, a web page with less clutter and some mighty fine features. In this blog post I will describe the latest feature, the Handviewer button.
The deal display on my web page is fine for its main purpose, which is to show you the generated deal. It also has a neat secondary purpose, which is to let you selectively hide and display hands if you are using the page to help you study suit combinations.
My crude deal display is not so great, though, for sharing deals in print-ready form. I had decided to bite the bullet and take the time to code up something to produce deals in a more standard layout, but within minutes of searching for guidance on the topic, I found that Bridgebase has a hand viewer tool which they make available for free on the Internet. All you have to do is feed in a deal, and boom—you get a web page with a deal in the very nice format that is used on BBO.
Let’s see how it works from my web page. I added a Handviewer button directly under the Bridgesolver button:
Here’s a random deal I just generated:
When I press the Handviewer button, this appears in a new tab in my browser:
Note that instead of having to refer to the dealer and vulnerability radio buttons on my page, here, you get the benefit of Bridgebase’s graphical representation of dealer and vulnerability in the upper left of the display.
You can use your browser’s Print function to print the deal, or else save it to a document:
While this looks like (and is) Bridgebase’s bridge movie player, my website does not attempt to play the hand so there’s not actually a movie for you to play.
Now, suppose you not only want to display a deal in a nice format, but you also want to show how you think the auction would go. For instance, you are teaching the Stayman convention and you have come up with a suitable deal, and you can print it off for your students, but you have to do a lot of hand-waving to describe the auction. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could show the auction on the Handviewer page?
Well you can! You probably noticed that the Handviewer page has a place for the auction, in the upper right corner. To get an auction onto that page, let’s go back to my web page and generate a hand suitable for Stayman bidding.
Here, North has a 1NT opener, East has a puny hand, and South has 10 HCP and two 4-card majors. Paging Mr. Stayman! Let’s have an auction.
The auction feature on my page is extremely primitive. That’s because there is no intelligence behind it. It exists only to capture the auction as you, the user, want it to be, and to let you carry that into the Handviewer page.
To make an auction, you simply key comma-separated bids and calls into the Auction text box at the bottom of the page. Start with the dealer, then proceed seat by seat. The bids and calls are just as they appear on a typical bidding box: a digit followed by a suit letter, or a “P”, or “X”, or “XX”, or a digit followed by “N” or “NT”. Don’t put a comma after the final bid or call.
Here I have filled in the auction for our Stayman demo deal. Note that it is a complete auction, ending with three pass calls:
Now press the Handviewer button to get:
When you provide a complete and valid auction, the Handviewer shows the contract in the lower right of the page. It also highlights the seat that will play the first card. You can now explore lines of card play, double-dummy style, by pressing the Play button at the bottom of the page to get this prompt:
And then do just as it says—click on a card from the hand of the highlighted seat to play it:
Here, I played the three of spades in East, and now South is highlighted. You continue playing cards one at a time. The Handviewer does not have a robot playing any of the hands, but it does keep track of whose turn it is and it does enforce the rules—you have to follow suit if possible. It also keeps score. Here’s the same hand after I played through it:
One more thing—not new, but very nice to have in conjunction with your own bidding practice or making setups for students. Wouldn’t you like to know that your auction was at least reasonable, if not optimum, for the deal? Well don’t forget, we have Bridgesolver at our fingertips via the Bridgesolver button back on the main page. When generating a deal, you can’t be certain that my program will give you a deal that results in the auction you are thinking of—but if you use Bridgesolver you can quickly find out.
I clicked the Bridgesolver button only after doing the auction I showed you above, but if you are working up a bunch of deals for different purposes, I suggest you make frequent use of Bridgesolver before doing you own auction, just to make sure you are in the ballpark.
And look, 3NT was not only reasonable, it was the optimum bid:
Happy dealing!