Debugging BBO Bridge Dealer Scripts

Way back in the 1990s, Hans van Staveren wrote a small yet very powerful bridge hand dealing program. 

Later it was taken up by BBO and is now incorporated into their teaching and partnership bidding tables.

This means that you can write, in just a few lines, a script that will generate an endless sequence of a particular "difficult to bid" pair of hands.

For example a very strong hand opposite a weak hand with a void.

Getting such scripts to work exactly as you wish can be a little tricky.  Particularly on BBO where all they do is tell you  ERROR...  meaning there is a "problem somewhere".   This is where the original dealer app can be very useful.

I am not going to give details here in this blog post but instead direct you to where you can download a zip file which contains  

The  dealer app  (currently Windows only) and documentation as to how to write scripts and how to debug them.  Also included are a number of completed scripts.

You can find more information and the link to the zip file at

           http://rogerpf.com/aaBridge

Scroll down until you see  - OCP Dealer Scripts for BBO

Once you have a working script you can copy it to a BBO teaching or partnership bidding tables and use it to generate hands for you and your partner to bid.