Program "dealhelp", version 1.2

Introduction

This program facilitates dealing a board supplied in the form of a bridge file. The card distribution remains invisible, such that the dealer may also take part in the play. Based on the "dupliceerhulp" of the Dutch Ruitenboer tournament.

This program is "free software". Click here for the download .

Directions

After starting via the dealhelp link on the desktop a console window appears.
Next to it a dialog window "Select a bridge file" shows up.
In this window select a bridge file. See below for supported formats.
The output goes to the console window as well as to file _dealhelp.txt in the current directory

The process may be modified somewhat by start options, see below.

Dealing a board.

Take a deck of cards and sort it in the order spades hearts diamonds clubs, with the ace of spades on top and the 2 of clubs at the bottom. In the output of the program you have for every board 52 symbols indicating where the cards should go. Take off the cards one by one an place each one in the indicated compass direction.

Start options

There are currently 2 options, pausing after every board, and, changing the direction symbols.
The general call is:

dealhelp [-p] [-d <string>]

The square brackets indicate optional parameters and are not part of the input.
An example:

dealhelp -d "NESW"

-p
Pause after every board. Continue by the Enter key; q<Enter> continue without pause;.
-d <String>
<String> should consist of 4 symbols for the directions North East South West.
This <String> may be enclosed in apostrophs ("").

There are several possibilities to generate a command line with parameters. The easiest is to make a copy of the dealhelp shortcut, right-click on it, and adjust its properties. The command line goes in the cell "Target" and the current directory in the cell "Start in".

Acceptable bridge file formats

pbn

See http://www.tistis.nl/pbn/
Normally only the [Board] and [Deal] tags are used by dealhelp. If [Board] is missing dealhelp will derive a board number in the range [1 - 16] from the [Dealer] and [Vulnerable] tags.

dup

See www.duplimate.com/DuplimateClub/convert.pdf
Dealhelp only uses the BRI part

dlm

See e.g. a discussion in rec.games.bridge For dealhelp, the file must contain a [document] section. Further only lines starting with "to board" or "board" are processed.
Everything is considered case insensitive. Checksums are not checked.

csv

As used by Dutch scoring programs "Bridge-It" and "NBB-Rekenprogramma". Generated by BigDeal and KGB's Batch converter. A typical line looks like:

"65","JT8","AQT3","Q432","982","7","K842","AT986","KJT743","A93","J76","J","AQ","KQ6542","95","K75","3","S/EW"

The last two fields are the board number and the vulnerability.

bri, dge

Subsets of the dup format, see above. The records are padded with blanks or zeroes to 128 bytes. Generated by BigDeal and KGB's Batch converter.