On This Site
Hand Evaluation Research, and Other Articles
Links
Dealing and Software Articles
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What's New?
- Deal Release Blog
- A simple blog to use to announce new releases of Deal. Subscribe to the feed to learn about the latest point release.
- Deal 3.1.2 point release
- Deal 3.1.2 has some bug fixes, slightly better use of Bo Haglund's double-dummy solver, universal binaries for Mac OS X,
and a smattering of new features.
- New deals added to Bad Fit Deals and Doubly Asymmetric Deals.
- Found using Deal 3.1 using the new double-dummy solver
- Deal 3.1 Released!
- Includes a built-in double dummy solver, DDS, written by Bo Haglund.
- High Card Points Versus Binky Points
- Comparing values between Binky Points and High Card Points, added to the Hand Evaluation Research page.
- Deal gets mentioned in The New York Times.
- In a column about research on bidding notrump games opposite balanced
hands even with major suit fits...
- A New Address: bridge.thomasoandrews.com
- I've finally gotten a vanity domain address. The various old addresses should redirect you to this address.
- An Ajax implementation of The Impossible
Bridge Book.
- Ajax stands for "Asynchronous Javascript and XML" and it's a powerful way to write Web-based applications.
- CSS Updates for Mac OS X
- Suit symbols were not showing up in Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox on
the Macintosh. They should now.
- Updates to The Impossible Bridge Book
- These updates include an ability to "show work" so you can see
the computations that went into converting the page number into a deal
(requiring Javascript to navigate.)
Support Thomas's Bridge Fantasia
Things you can do to support this site:
- Visit one of my advertisers.
- Email me a hand you found interesting.
- Find a correction to a typo or error in some analysis.
- Give me ideas for further research.
- Sign my guestbook.
Thomas's Bridge Fantasia
On the web since 1995
To navigate through the sections, click on
the buttons to the left.
This is a new start page for users of Mozilla-based browsers, which
includes Mozilla itself, Netscape 7.0, and Phoenix.
This page works with Internet Explorer, but it loads ugly - I have to do
lots of style "corrections" with Javascript to make it look nice.
Privacy This front page uses a cookie to remember the last tab you looked at,
so when you return to this page, it remembers to display that same tab.
The cookie is forgotten when you shut down your browser and is not
used for user tracking or any other invasion of privacy.
Bridge Stories and Deals
If you can't see the suit symbols between the brackets [♠♥♦♣],
you probably can't read these articles. You might be able to fix
the problem by upgrading your fonts.
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Interesting Bridge Hands
[Non-Framed]
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A large collection (50+) of bridge hands, with my own, occasionally flawed,
analyses. I am partial to squeeze plays.
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Everybody Makes
[PDF]
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A single remarkable deal where 3 NT can be made by any declarer against best
defense.
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Par Zero Deals
[Non-Framed]
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A collection of double-dummy oddities where no contract makes.
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Bad Fit Deals
[Non-Framed]
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A set of double-dummy oddities; a collection of deals
which play best in six-card fits.
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Doubly Asymmetric Deals
[Non-Framed]
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A set of double-dummy oddities; not for the casual reader. In these
hands, north/south make contract A only declared by south, and
contract B only declared by north.
Software
Hand Generation
- Deal 3.1
- The latest version of my Tcl-based dealer which allows
programmatic analysis of bridge hands. The
GIB web site says that
Deal is "the most powerful dealing program we've seen."
- The Impossible Bridge Book
- I have a book with every possible bridge deal in it. Just
give me the page numbers, and I will give you the deals. Says
someone in Germany,
...irgendwo
zwischen Genie und Blödsinn...
which translates as, somewhere between genius and rubbish.
XML Formatting Notes
- XML Test Documents
[Non-Framed]
- All of the articles in Bridge Stories and Deals
are generated from XML via XSL and CSS. These test documents are my
method of making sure I haven't broken anything in my XML scripts.
The test documents include sample input and output.
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XML and Bridge Publishing
- More examples of bridge with XML/XSL. This page discusses the
advantages of XML and gives some examples which can be formatted by Internet
Explorer or Mozilla, the only browsers with good XSL support.
Dealing and Software Articles
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In Shuffling Cards, 7 is Winning Number
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A New York Times article about the seven-shuffle result. Essentially,this
result says that seven shuffles yield good randomness, while fewer
shuffles do not, and more shuffles do not significantly increase randomness.
If you have some mathematical knowledge, you can read a proof of the result.
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ACBL Article on Computer Deals
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An ACBL response to frequent fears that computer deals are not 'true' or
are somehow rigged, it gives a reasonable layman's description of why
the perception is there, and why that perception is inaccurate.
- Disorder
in the Deck
- Another article on computer dealt hands, from Science News.
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Deja Vu at the 1995 CNTC Final
- Fred Gitelman reports a case where computer dealing clearly was flawed.
[This page doesn't look good with Mozilla because Fred is using applets to
display hands.]
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Bridge software development mailing list
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A mailing list for bridge software development issues. Check out the
archive.
Other Software
- OKbridge
- The oldest, and, last time I checked, best, online bridge service.
I used to be a member, with name thomaso, but I let my membership drop.
- GIB
- The best-playing computer bridge program. It uses a variation
on my evaluation techniques during bidding, and its double-dummy solver
is callable from my dealing software, Deal 3.1.
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