[JanM]

I'm trying to set up some bidding practice to bid against different methods. So I'd like to define the opponents' hands, not the hands of those practicing. Last time I did it (over a year ago, so I'm a little hazy about exactly what I did), I know that I created a movie with the hands I wanted and then did "open movie" at the bidding practice table to do the bidding. That worked fine and will work for what I want now, but I was wondering if there might be a simple way to get the hands for the movie.

Would it work to set up a bidding practice table and constrain the NS hands to be what I want the opponents' hands to be, then run through a set passing them all out so I'd have a .lin file with the hands I want to be E/W in N/S and vice versa. Then is there a way to edit the .lin file (I've become pretty good with .pbn files but .lin files are less intuitive, at least to me) to move the positions around?

If not, what needs to be in a .lin file to get just the hands, no bidding or play? Can you tell that my experience with .lin & .pbn files is all from corecting Vugraph records, which always have bidding and play in them? I have lots and lots of .dup and .lin and .pbn files and could select hands from them to combine into the .lin file I want, but I wasn't clear exactly what needed to be in the .lin file

Thanks for any help anyone can give me.

[Cascade]

Here is a link to the lin file format for uploading hands to a tournament:

Example Hands for Uploading to Tourney

The same or a very similar format should work for partnership bidding tables.

I have a program that i have written to automatically generate lin files for my partner and my practice sessions. I could easily adapt the program to generate whatever you want. The program is not in a state to send to someone else - i just write some ad hoc code when i want practice defending against some convention or other - but usually this is no big deal. If you tell me the constraints I could probably have my arm twisted to generate some sets of hands for you - i could even use them for my own practice.

If the above format doesn't work for partnership bidding then let me know and I will provide you with a sample file from my program that i know will work.

[TimG]

I asked a similar question recently in this thread in the software suggests forum. Reading the second half of that thread should tell you how to load .lin files for partnership bidding practice.

If you use a deal generator, like DEALER, chances are you can output in .lin format or find a tool, such as LinConverter, to convert the text output to .lin file.

Tim