Matthew's Journal

Shuffling is not the most interesting part of card games, and folk are often not that good at it; you get more interesting bridge hands if a computer shuffles, for example. Also, I've been looking at playing cards that are more suitable for outdoor use, and they tend to be less easy to shuffle. Which has got me thinking about dealing sheets again (and thus Android apps).

When playing bridge in person (such a long time ago now!) I've been dealing off a friend's handy web dealing sheets - each number tells you which pile to put the card onto, and you end up with a properly-random bridge deal.

Bridge works really well for this approach - you deal out all the cards, and their order within a hand doesn't matter. So using a dealing sheet is basically no more effort than dealing from a shuffled deck in the usual manner.

There are plenty of games where this approach doesn't work so well - games like patience or Bezique where you need to order the entire deck (I'm not sure if there's a not-totally-awful way to do that). I think there are intermediate classes of games where the deal is more hasslesome, but the wins of not having to shuffle (and always getting well-shuffled hands) might still make a dealing-sheet a viable approach...

Take cribbage - you'd still deal into four piles - two hands of six, the starter, and the rest of the deck. And most of the time you could stop part-way through the deck (I'm sure one could calculate the expected distribution of end-points...). So you could have a very similar output, and add a "stop" instruction rather than printing out the rest of the "put all these cards onto the 'rest of deck' pile".

Which brings me back round to thinking about a smartphone app - the webpage is great for bridge, and for places where you have a network connection, but I do wonder if a dealing app would be useful for offline use (and could be extended to support other deal types). Last time I collected opinions on app development there were some interesting suggestions for my stated preferences of Free, drivable from the command-line/my editor, and buildable for F-droid. I have subsequently become aware of Nativescript (for various varieties of JavaScript, none of which I speak), Kotlin (seemingly the new default Android language), and Flutter (a new language and framework entirely). I don't know if anyone's tried any of those (or other approaches)...?

Back in 2012(!) I posted how atreic and I aimed to bid. Since then we've made a few tweaks, and tenebrousphantom and N have also adopted it (which makes sense since we play bridge together a fair amount!).

Anyhow, since lockdown we've been playing bridge more regularly, which has made the prospect of more significant changes seem more sensible than when we were only managing to play monthly-ish. So we've moved to weak twos (like all the cool kids), and added a set of conventional overcalls against 1NT (which were an obvious lacuna).

( Executive summary: Acol, 12-14 1NT, Weak twos, transfers, roman key card blackwood, Multi Landy overcalls of 1NT )

As mentioned recently, I wrote down roughly how atreic and I (aim to) bid. I think there's at least one error (something to do with overcalling a 1NT bid?), so I'd be grateful for comments, but you might find this helpful, too, if you've not standardised your bidding yet...
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