Bridge tools

On this page I put some of the bridge tools I wrote in the last couple of years into the public domain. Use them at your own risk.

Bridge Lab

In spite of the many alternative deal generators on the market, the DOS-based programs bridglab.exe (english) and blabor.exe (german) have the advantage of being small and easy to use. And because using them is so self-explanatory you don't get any documentation. :-) In order to keep in touch with the state of the art I recently added PBN as the standard output format so that this deal generator can be used to produce input files for gibtrix.

Attention: If you are already using dealer by Hans van Staveren you probably don't need Bridge Lab.

If you should find any errors in the program, please write. If I find the time, I'll fix them and release a new version.

gibtrix

After a couple of discussions in the german bridge mailing list DOUBL I decided to write a tool to analyse the deals in a given PBN file making use of gib's double dummy solver. The result is gibtrix. This program reads the PBN file and calls the freely available version of gib's double dummy solver, together with a short documentation. Of course owners of the faster commercial double dummy solver may use this engine as well.

Possible applications are:

Analysis of the best bid in a given auction
Analysis of the best lead using the information from the auction
Quality assurance for deals to be used in bridge lessons
Analysis of hand evaluation techniques (e.g. the losing trick count)
Analysis of the Law of Total Tricks

In each case one would proceed as follows:

Create a PBN file that meets the specific criteria (e.g. using Bridge Lab).
Specify the combinations of declarer, denomination and if necessary the lead you want to analyse.
Start gibtrix using the PBN file.
Evaluate the resulting tables (in csv-Format) using e.g. Excel oder Access.

More detailed explanations are of course contained in the gibtrix package. If you have questions, problems or suggestions please don't hesitate to write.

To be fair I have to point out to you that there are two tools with similar functionality:

PS Bridge Hand by Masakatsu Sugino calculates for a given PBN file the number of tricks each side can make in every denomination and determines the par result on each board. The results are nicely summarized in a PostScript file which can be transformed into PDF e.g. using GhostScript. Compared to gibtrix this tool provides a better user interface and nicer presentation of the results. I use it in conjunction with team2pbn and rec2pbn to produce summaries of training sessions on OKbridge and to give the other players a short overview of the optimal actions according to the double dummy analysis. However this tool is not targeted at samplings, where the focus is on statistics over a large number of hands and not on the individual hand itself.
DealerPC, Henk Uijterwaal's version of dealer by Hans van Staveren provides a new function called tricks((compass),(suit)). If you own the commercial version of gib you can produce a sampling with the powerful capabilities of this program and then analyse the generated deals all in one step. Compared to gibtrix there are two disadvantages however. First this program requires the commercial version of the gib double dummy solver and second you can't prescribe the lead.

team2pbn and rec2pbn

Shortly after finishing a tourney or a team match on OKbridge you get an email containing the records of each deal you played. In order to archive these deals or to process them further I wrote team2pbn which converts the contents of the email to a PBN file. (Don't worry about the program's name. It was called team2pbn when it only could process team match emails and I did not want to change its name in spite of all the improvement I since made.) The resulting files can then be fed into gibtrix or PS Bridge Hand for further analysis or be replayed using BridgeVu.

rec2pbn serves a similar purpose. With this program you can convert rec-files produced by OKbridge in recording mode, to a PBN file.

If you have any questions or problems regarding these programs please write.

Back to my bridge page.

René Steiner October 24, 2006