DEALER(6)

📦
this version · 4 versions
, in debian bookworm, ubuntu noble

💖 DEALER 💖

ok so bestie, welcome to DEALER(6) — it lives in the User Documentation section of the manual, and it's literally the bridge hand generator you've been looking for 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

dealer — bridge hand generator 🃏

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

dealer [-023ehuvmqV] [-p n] [-g n] [-s seed] [-l n] [inputfile]

🦋 DESCRIPTION AND EXAMPLE 🦋

ok so here's the vibe: dealer generates hands for partnerships bidding training, OR for generating statistics you can use to design conventions, or honestly for win postmortems. main character energy fr.

running the program is a 3 step situation, no cap:

  1. first, you (yes you) have to write an input file with hand-descriptions and an action. a very simple example looks something like:
condition shape(north, any 4333 + any 4423) and hcp(north)>=19
action printall

the first line specifies a condition for the north hand — in this case, a hand with 4333 or 4432 shape and at least 19 high card points. the second line tells the program to print the 4 hands. 💅

the program reads from standard input, so in principle it's possible to enter the conditions directly into the program. but using a file is a lot more practical though, because it lets you re-use conditions and fine-tune the conditions. obsessed with that for you honestly.

  1. then the program has to be run. it reads the file, looks at the various command line switches, and then produces a number of hands. the output appears on the screen but can be re-directed to a file. ✨
  2. finally, you have to look at the output and analyze the produced hands. alternatively, the output can be used for a playing program. slay.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -e — Exhaust mode (alpha version). 👀 yes it said alpha bestie, be chill about it
  • -g number — Maximum number of hands to generate (default is 1000000). that's a million, bestie, a MILLION
  • -l number — Instead of shuffling, deals are read from the file library.dat by M. Ginsberg (see [1]). When using this, the tricks() function is quite fast and bridge.exe from GIB is not used. 🏃♀️💨

[1] ftp://ftp.cirl.uoregon.edu/pub/users/ginsberg/bridge/

  • -m — Shows a progress meter. little loading bar moment 🫶
  • -p number — Maximum number of hands to produce (default is 40).
  • -q — Suppress PBN output (useful for testing, then switch it back on when generating the "final" sample). iykyk 🔥
  • -s number — Uses number as the seed for the random generator. running the program twice with the same seed will produce the same sequence of hands. deterministic queen 👑
  • -u — Select uppercase for the symbols "AKQJT" (default is lowercase).
  • -v — Toggle verbose output, prints statistics at the end of the run (default is on). we love a stats recap 📊
  • -V — Emit a version-identification string and exit.
  • -h — Help, prints the syntax.
  • -0 — No swapping, each deal is generated normally (shuffling) (default).
  • -2 — 2-way swapping: after each shuffle another deal is generated by permuting E and W, leaving N and S in place. (NB: not fully compatible with predeal) ⚠️
  • -3 — 3-way swapping: after each shuffle another 5 deals are generated by permuting E, W, and S every which way, leaving N in place. (NB: not fully compatible with predeal) ⚠️

💀 BUGS 💀

ngl, they would prefer if you did not use this program for generating hands for tournaments. they have not investigated the random number generation closely enough to be comfortable with that thought. 😭 so like… pls don't do that one thing

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

/usr/share/doc/dealer/Manual, dealer.dpp(6), deal(6).

👑 AUTHORS 👑

  • Hans van Staveren <sater@sater.home.cs.vu.nl>
  • Henk Uijterwaal <henk@ripe.net>
  • Manpage: Christoph Berg <cb@df7cb.de>

This program is hereby put in the public domain. Do with it whatever you want, but I would like you not to redistribute it in modified form without mentioning the fact of modification. I will accept bug reports and modification requests, without any obligation of course, but fixing bugs someone else put in is beyond me.

and that's the whole page bestie 💖 this one came from Dealer, version dated 2022-08-23, section DEALER(6) — go generate some iconic hands, periodt ✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from