Scenarios - Part 2
More options

Daniel Gullberg

2024-09-03

In the first article we covered the basics of creating and using a scenario. Today we will look at more options for configuring scenarios to create any situation you can imagine. We will also check out the Scenario market.

More hand type options

Last time we only covered the HCP panel when creating a custom hand type. There are more ways to set constraints for your hand type. Let's check them out! Remember, depending on what you want to achieve, there might be multiple ways to do it. There is no right or wrong way to set up a hand type or scenario - if it works, it works!

HCP

The first option is pretty self explanatory, and we covered it in the previous article. Use this constraint to set a specific HCP range for the hand type.

Suits

The Suits option should also be clear. For each of the suits, you can specify a range for number of cards in that suit.

Shapes

This is where things get a little more complicated. A shape is written like 5431 to mean a hand with a five card suit, a four card suit, a three card suit and a singleton. If written in that manner any hand with those suit lengths will qualify, it does not matter which suit is the five card suit and so on.

If you instead want the shape to apply for specific suits, you can prefix the shape with a =, for example =5431. Now the shape will be exactly 5431, with spades coming first, then hearts, then diamonds and lastly clubs. So five spades, four hearts, three diamonds and a lonely club.

To allow any 5-4 hand you can use the shape 54xx. Depending on what you want to achieve you might have to be a little careful here. Say you want a hand with a five card suit. If you use the shape constraint 5xxx you might also get some 6-5 hands, since they have a five card suit as well! That might not have been the intention... To make this example work you could for example add suit constraints to make sure no suit is longer than five cards.

Next up, you can also disallow a shape, meaning it won't appear. This is done with the prefix !, for example !5431. This will ensure the hand type has no 5431 hands. You can also combine this negation with a specific shape by using the prefix !=, such as !=5431. This would accept 5431 hands, unless it is exactly with five spades, four hearts, three diamonds and one club.

Finally, the hand type will have a shape that is any of the permitted shapes and none of the forbidden ones. You can add multiple shape constraints. If you have added both 5431 and !=5431 you will be given some 5431 hand, except with exactly with five spades, four hearts, three diamonds and one club.

Don't worry if you won't remember all of that! There is a handy guide available when you add shape constraints as well. Just hover or click the blue info icon to show it.

Advanced

We will skip this section for now, and come back to it in a future article about the more advanced concepts of scenarios. For now, we'll keep it simple!

Editing a Hand type

Once you have added your hand type you will see it under the player. If you want to remove it you can click the red bin button. If you want to edit it you can click on the name. If a player has multiple hand types assigned to them, they will all be listed.

And or or or or and and?

And or...? What?! In this section we will talk about what happens when you combine multiple hand types or multiple constraints in a hand type.

For a given hand type all constraints must be fulfilled. If you for example add a HCP constraint of 15-17 HCP and a shape constraint to only include 5332, 4432 and 4333 shapes both of them will be true and you can open 1NT!

When a player has multiple hand types it is enough if one of them are fulfilled. In the previous article I gave the example that in order to create a 1 opening you would give the player three different hand types: weak balanced, strong balanced and natural with clubs. For a given deal the player will have one of the given hand types.

In a given deal every player must have a hand that fits any of their given hand types. A player that has not been given a hand type can have any hand. So if you give North a hand type for a 1NT opening and South a hand type with 5+ hearts and a hand type with 5+ spades you can practice transfers over 1NT! North will have a 1NT opening and South will have either of the majors.

Settings

Apart from setting hand types for a specific player, you can change settings for the entire deal. To edit them click the Settings button. Let's talk about the options here.

Flip

Randomly flip deal 180° simply means that on 50 % of the deals the hands will rotate, so that North swaps hands with South and East with West. The idea is that when you are bidding a session with your partner you want both players to experience both sides of the scenario.

Dealer

Specify if a particular player should be dealer, or select Any to make it random.

Vulnerability

Works the same as dealer, but for the vulnerability on the deal. Select Any to make it random.

Robots

If you want to play against robots and add hand types for East and West you must first specify which type of Robot you intend to face, meaning which system they will play. For most cases you would select Advanced. However, there are two special robots, Multi and Mini NT, that play those two special systems. If you want East and West to have completely random hands you can skip adding hand types for them.

N+S HCP

Like the HCP constraint for a hand type for a specific player, but this is for the pair North-South.

Add Variable

We will also skip this one for now, and come back to it in a future article.

Example

Let's proceed with an example! We will create a scenario for practising bidding minor suit games.

• North/South will have values for game
• North will have a minor suit hand

NS values for game

For this scenario we won't care if North or South has a specific HCP count, just that they as a partnership have values for game. To do this we will go to settings and set N+S HCP to 24+. I would also check the box to flip the deal, so that South also gets the minor suit hands sometimes.

North minor suit hand

We will give North a minor suit hand with either 5+ clubs or diamonds. Note that even though North is dealer, since we won't give him a specific HCP range we will get to practice both when he has an opening hand and when he passes initially.

Clubs hand

First out we will add a hand type for clubs. We will start by giving North 5+ clubs and 0-5 cards in each other suit. Then we should add some shapes constraints to make sure that clubs is the primary suit, i.e. we should not have 5 hearts and 5 clubs, since then you would typically start by bidding hearts. I will also remove the 5332 shape to avoid any balanced hands. We can achieve this by removing any 5-5 hands and the 5332 shape.

Diamonds hand

This will be very similar to the clubs hand, with one difference. A hand with 5 clubs and 5 diamonds is okay. So we will tweak the shapes constraints slightly and just exclude 5-5 with a major. We can achieve this by removing the exact shapes 5x5x and x55x instead of all 5-5 hands.

That's everything we need for this scenario! We can now practice bidding minor suit games - or avoiding them!

Scenario Market

The last thing we will cover in this article is the Scenario Market. You can reach it from the scenarios overview page. Here you can find and use scenarios created by other amazing Cuebids users! Simply click Save to collection and it will show up in your own scenario list.

When saved to your collection you can use them just like your own. Simply generate some hands and start bidding! If you want to share one of your own creations, click the share button. Over time we will take the most popular scenarios and create deal types out of them, meaning you won't have to generate the deals yourself, and can compare your bidding to more users.

Scenarios are insanely good

With scenarios you can create almost any kind of deal imaginable. That's what Ola had discovered (see the previous article) when he stated that they are insanely good. It has also been very fun to see all the great scenarios you have created and put on the market. With all the available options scenarios can be daunting at first, but after reading this article you know how to use most of them.

Good luck with your scenarios! They are currently available to our Heart subscribers.

In the next article we will dig deeper into the more advanced options available in scenarios, as well as take a look at how I used scenarios myself to avoid a disaster in the European Championships.

Thank you for reading this article and I hope you learned something!
Please share it with your bridge friends!

Daniel Gullberg

Cuebids