[ncohen]

My partner and I are playing in a team game next weekend and need to improve our slam bidding. Does anyone know of an online source of practice hands? Alternatively, how easy would it be to download a hand generator and program it to generate slam practice hands? Thx.

[hrothgar]

ncohen, on 2019-March-30, 16:26, said:

My partner and I are playing in a team game next weekend and need to improve our slam bidding. Does anyone know of an online source of practice hands? Alternatively, how easy would it be to download a hand generator and program it to generate slam practice hands? Thx.

http://www.rpbridge.net/rpbp.htm

[thepossum]

In addition to the excellent resources of already generated hands as on Pavilicek's site above, you can use one of the scripting tools available to generate unlimited hands of your own specification. They do require a reasonable amount (not huge) of scripting sometimes but allow you a lot of flexibiity in specification of the four hands, points, suit lengths, honours, controls etc. It may take too long to get the hang of it before a weekend tourney though. Its probably less than 5-10 lines of script. Can't think off the top of my head, but learning the functions takes a little while

I use bdeal (by Piotr Beling) for simulation but I believe there are many including GiB/BridgeBase has a hand generator

[sfi]

ncohen, on 2019-March-30, 16:26, said:

My partner and I are playing in a team game next weekend and need to improve our slam bidding. Does anyone know of an online source of practice hands? Alternatively, how easy would it be to download a hand generator and program it to generate slam practice hands? Thx.

You can always use BBO's bidding practice rooms. Just set the hand criteria to something simple like 25+ points between the two hands and you'll get lots of practice in slams.

[dsLawsd]

All great ideas.
For some quick hands (while traveling or at dinner etc. try the old
method CC Wei recommended for Precision:

Take out 2345(and 6?) from a deck in each suit and deal 2 hands...

[paulg]

I wrote this for pairs who wanted to do the same:

https://thebeercard....am-bidding.html

The issue with this method is that the randomly generated hands are not saved by default on BBO, so you need to save the interesting hands to a folder on BBO. The advantage of this method is that it is quick and easy.

The main alternative is to generate hands in a program like Dealmaster Pro and then upload the hands to BBO, where you can use them as a Deal Source at a bidding table. You then have a record of the hands outside of BBO.

[sfi]

dsLawsd, on 2019-March-30, 23:46, said:

All great ideas.
For some quick hands (while traveling or at dinner etc. try the old
method CC Wei recommended for Precision:

Take out 2345(and 6?) from a deck in each suit and deal 2 hands...

The issue with this is your hands are more balanced than normal. You can compensate by taking out different numbers of small cards from each suit, depending on what sort of slams you want to practice.

[Left2Right]

Try my constraint file for slam cues by clicking this URL..

If you are new to this sort of constrained dealing at the bidding and teaching tables, try my YouTube video on it by clicking this URL.

Be sure to switch the switch in the code (theSwitch=0 or theSwitch=1) to change between hands that need slam cues versus those where RKCB is fine.

[Cascade]

thepossum, on 2019-March-30, 18:33, said:

In addition to the excellent resources of already generated hands as on Pavilicek's site above, you can use one of the scripting tools available to generate unlimited hands of your own specification. They do require a reasonable amount (not huge) of scripting sometimes but allow you a lot of flexibiity in specification of the four hands, points, suit lengths, honours, controls etc. It may take too long to get the hang of it before a weekend tourney though. Its probably less than 5-10 lines of script. Can't think off the top of my head, but learning the functions takes a little while

I use bdeal (by Piotr Beling) for simulation but I believe there are many including GiB/BridgeBase has a hand generator

The download links on Piotr's page seem to be not working. Is this still available somewhere?

[sfi]

Cascade, on 2019-March-31, 22:14, said:

The download links on Piotr's page seem to be not working. Is this still available somewhere?

It looks like he made a typo when adding the links. You can browse the download directory at http://bcalc.w8.pl/download/ and pick the files you want.

[Cascade]

thepossum, on 2019-March-31, 22:44, said:

I don't know. They must have been taken down for some reason. You would need to ask the developer. His API is still available as far as I can see but the download links have gone

Its been fixed after I emailed Piotr

[thepossum]

Cascade, on 2019-April-01, 03:57, said:

Its been fixed after I emailed Piotr

Thats good news. Sorry I had deleted my post after sfi found where it was, since I thought my post was no longer necessary

[Lovera]

Left2Right, on 2019-March-31, 14:56, said:

Try my constraint file for slam cues by clicking this URL..

If you are new to this sort of constrained dealing at the bidding and teaching tables, try my YouTube video on it by clicking this URL.

This is interesting and usefull: to have informations click on urls on the second colomn, in the first one you have files and script for computers. About the url on YouTube is not available. Perhaps you have to say your nickname/account there so to find or to make it pubblic and not private.(Lovera)