[NotButter]

The Deep Finesse facility is a terrific tool when we're in Kibbitz mode to see whether a declarer or defender has winning or losing choices.

But there's more to Deep Finesse than just that. In Australia, many clubs use dealing machines and the printed hand records can display the makeable contracts on each hand.

see http://www.dealmaster.com/whatsnew.htm (about two-thirds of the way down the page) to see the hand records I mean.

Could the *makeable* contracts be displayed on the screen during the auction (or play for that matter) ? If nothing else, it would be an invaluable resource for commentators during Vu-graph presentations.

I have yet to see the "makeable contracts" analysis on a hand record wrong (over a period of about 5 years).

any opinions?

Nick
Sydney

[1eyedjack]

You have to bear in mind that Deep Finesse is a commercial product, whilst access to BBO is free. The authors of Deep Finesse have made limited functionality available to BBO, which works two ways: It introduces the members of BBO to the value of Deep Finesse, which members may then purchase the full product, whilst those who do not want to buy the product still receive some benefit for free. If full functionality were available to BBO members there would be less of an incentive to buy the product (which I heartily recommend, anyway).

What I would like to see is more of an option available to those who HAVE purchased the Deep Finesse product to have its full functionality more closely integrated into BBO interface, which is possibly what is meant by the originator of this thread.

[NotButter]

I don't agree. Exposing potential customers to more features of Deep Finesse can only stimulate demand for the product, rather than decrease it.

The commercially available Deep Finesse product is a double dummy hand solver. I use it after a bridge session to input hands and see where and how I could have played or defended better.

We're grateful the DF people have made available a cut-down version to BBO, but I suspect the reason other features have not been implemented are related to the time and cost to Fred and Uday to code them into the software.

Nick
Sydney

[uday]

Fred ha always claimed that it is a matter of not wanting to abuse the generosiy of the author of DF

[fred]

I have an agreement with William Bailey (the brilliant programmer
who created Deep Finesse and graciously allows us to use his
program without any licensing fees).

This agreement limits our use of his program to what we have now.

To extend the use of DF within BBO would be illegal (not to mention
that I would see doing this as a betrayal of a good friend).

Bill might agree to allowing me to extend the use of DF for those
BBO members who have purchased DF, but I don't think that writing
the code for this would be the best use of my time right now. There
are a lot of other things I can spend my time doing that will benefit
all BBO members (as opposed to just a group that almost certainly
makes up far less than 1% of our members).

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com