NAME

       dealer - bridge hand generator

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION AND EXAMPLE

       The program dealer can be used to generate hands for partnerships bidding training or for
       generating statistics that can be used to design conventions, or win postmortems.

       Running the program involves 3 steps. First, the user has to write an input file
       containing hand-descriptions and action. A very simple example would look 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 is possible to
       enter the conditions directly into the program. Using a file is a lot more practical
       though, as it allows the user to re-use conditions and fine-tune the conditions.

       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.

       Finally, the user has to look at output and analyze the produced hands. Alternatively, the
       output can be used for a playing program.

OPTIONS

       -e  Exhaust mode (alpha version).

       -g number
           Maximum number of hands to generate (default is 1000000).

       -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.

       -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).

       -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.

       -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).

       -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

       I would prefer if you did not use this program for generating hands for tournaments. I
       have not investigated the random number generation closely enough for me to be comfortable
       with that thought.

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>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

       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.