[blackshoe]

I may be misremembering, but I think the travelers in common use in England (and possibly other places) have a place at the bottom for entering the four hands. You're right that those for sale here (ACBL, Baron-Barclay) don't have that.

[NickRW]

What some clubs used to have were "curtain cards" - smallish pieces of fairly thick paper (so you can't see through it) where you could write the hand - one for each person. Subsequent tables were supposed to check the hand against the curtain card. They seem to have gone out of fashion for some reason.

Nick

[jillybean]

JoAnneM, on Aug 17 2009, 04:47 PM, said:

Some of you mentioned writing the hands on the traveler the first round. How does that work? I looked at the travelers offered for sale and don't see anything appropriate. I was actually thinking that if that was done I could enter the hands at home after the game and post them with the results. At least that is something.

I'm sure your mentee's would appreciate it, however at $4 a game some of the players could be stepping up to do it for you

[Dean]

Here in NZ we pay $5 per night.

You get a hand records afterwards with DD analysis on them.. Alternatively they are on the web (along with results) about 20 minutes after play finishes. We are also going to put the travellers and recap sheets on the web.

In this day and age if you are dealing computer produced deals there should be no reason for them to be on-line. Cost is very minimal.

D./

[JoAnneM]

We do it the old-fashioned way - one card at a time. You would be surprised at some of the wild deals we get and no one can complain about "computer hands" lol

[mycroft]

Yeah, that's the issue in our club (along with people willing to try to buy a $10m building, but not a $5k dealing machine. Priorities, right?) We have several players who won't play "those damned, fixed, biased computer hands". I've done hand records by hand, and it might be the right thing for the game, but it's not the right thing for anyone sane (sorry, McBruce, but I have to get you back for That Bulletin somehow!) And yeah, unlike certain areas of the country ("triple-point clubs", anyone?), we get lots of gripes whenever we charge extra for special games.

I do make a point of griping about "those damned computer hands" whenever we get a freaky run at the club (about once every four sessions, I would say, that I notice). Usually I get "but they weren't computer-dealt, we shuf...oh." at least once.

On the other hand, we're still the cheapest bar in town. You just have to pay a cover, and push cards around for 3 hours, to get in.

[jillybean]

mycroft, on Aug 19 2009, 12:33 PM, said:

Yeah, that's the issue in our club (along with people willing to try to buy a $10m building, but not a $5k dealing machine.  Priorities, right?)  We have several players who won't play "those damned, fixed, biased computer hands".  I've done hand records by hand, and it might be the right thing for the game, but it's not the right thing for anyone sane (sorry, McBruce, but I have to get you back for That Bulletin somehow!)  And yeah, unlike certain areas of the country ("triple-point clubs", anyone?), we get lots of gripes whenever we charge extra for special games.

I do make a point of griping about "those damned computer hands" whenever we get a freaky run at the club (about once every four sessions, I would say, that I notice).  Usually I get "but they weren't computer-dealt, we shuf...oh." at least once.

On the other hand, we're still the cheapest bar in town.  You just have to pay a cover, and push cards around for 3 hours, to get in.

Hi, 2 questions, although I fear opening a new can of worms.

1. ""those damned computer hands" fact or ficton? Are computer genrated hands any more distributional, odd, than human dealt hands?

2. "I've done hand records by hand, and it might be the right thing for the game, but it's not the right thing for anyone sane" why?

[NickRW]

jillybean, on Aug 19 2009, 10:41 PM, said:

1. ""those damned computer hands" fact or ficton? Are computer genrated hands any more distributional, odd, than human dealt hands?

2. "I've done hand records by hand, and it might be the right thing for the game, but it's not the right thing for anyone sane"  why?

Re 2 - I guess that was said because someone thinks it is extremely tedious.

Re 1 - Most people do not shuffle enough - this produces a higher proportion of balanced hands and even breaks when a typical bridge club deals by hand.

There is a paper somewhere on the web that says 7 riffle shuffles are enough for complete randomness. And there is another one which says 5 is enough for practical purposes. And that to achieve a similar effect with overhand shuffling takes, I think it said, 20 minutes! A lot of people can't riffle shuffle and, even if they do, they don't do it 5 or more times.

Some people can't even overhand shuffle properly - someone I know literally cuts the deck several times - which does absolutely nothing at all except move who gets which hand around the table.

To see why a poorly hand shuffled deck produces balanced hands, think about it - someone lead, say, a diamond. Usually everyone followed. This carries on for, usually, a majority of the tricks. The hands get put back in the boards. Someone, at the next session puts all four hands together one on top of the other - there is now a diamond on the bottom - and thirteen cards up from that another one - and so on. Then someone does a couple of overhand shuffles that does almost nothing to disturb the order of the deck and deals. Hey presto everyone gets a similar number of each and every suit.

People then get used to balanced hands with even breaks and notice when you get properly randomised hands - because they get more bad breaks, more 7 and 8 card suits, more voids and more 2 suiters - on average.

Nick

[Cascade]

NickRW, on Aug 20 2009, 11:39 AM, said:

There is a paper somewhere on the web ...

... that must be true then.

[Cascade]

jillybean, on Aug 20 2009, 10:41 AM, said:

mycroft, on Aug 19 2009, 12:33 PM, said:

Yeah, that's the issue in our club (along with people willing to try to buy a $10m building, but not a $5k dealing machine.  Priorities, right?)  We have several players who won't play "those damned, fixed, biased computer hands".  I've done hand records by hand, and it might be the right thing for the game, but it's not the right thing for anyone sane (sorry, McBruce, but I have to get you back for That Bulletin somehow!)  And yeah, unlike certain areas of the country ("triple-point clubs", anyone?), we get lots of gripes whenever we charge extra for special games.

I do make a point of griping about "those damned computer hands" whenever we get a freaky run at the club (about once every four sessions, I would say, that I notice).  Usually I get "but they weren't computer-dealt, we shuf...oh." at least once.

On the other hand, we're still the cheapest bar in town.  You just have to pay a cover, and push cards around for 3 hours, to get in.

Hi, 2 questions, although I fear opening a new can of worms.

1. ""those damned computer hands" fact or ficton? Are computer genrated hands any more distributional, odd, than human dealt hands?

2. "I've done hand records by hand, and it might be the right thing for the game, but it's not the right thing for anyone sane" why?

1. Its a long time since I have done any analysis of computer dealt hands from programs that I have written. However when I did do that many years ago they conformed very accurately to the expected frequency of distributions. If anything the repeated flaw that I found with the random number generator that I was using was that there were too few extreme distributional hands (mostly long suits from memory). Which suggests that my computer dealt hands were not quite distributional enough.

Comparing this with hand dealt hands. It has been widely reported that hand dealt cards tend to be too balanced. Historically I think there are good reasons for this since players did not shuffle so well and cards were left in the order in which they were played - often running a long suit or drawing trumps. In other words several cards of the same suit would remain together in a hand. If this hand is not shuffled properly then these cards have a higher chance of remaining together and then therefore being spread around the table on the next time that board is dealt. I certainly have seen players many times collect the hands together and give the cards no more than one or two unconvincing overhand shuffles.

Its impractical to the sort of statistical analysis on hand dealt hands to accurately compare these methods. It is easy to generate literally millions of computer dealt hands but this is a life time of collecting for hand dealt cards.

The 2007 law changes should in theory improve the randomness of hand dealt deals since at the end of the hand each player is now supposed to shuffle their own cards before returning them to the board. This will counter a sloppy shuffle at least a little the next time the board is played.

Many years ago I was directing a team's series of four nights at the local club. I used my program to generate sets of hands. We didn't have a dealing machine then so I made up each set by hand and produced hand records for the players. I received many complaints about the wild computer dealt hands. Most of the complaints though were on the last night when I had actually hand dealt all of the cards after thoroughly shuffling each deck and then entering each deal into my hand record program - this took me much longer than making up the sets for the other nights.

2. I think I said earlier I think lethagy is the main problem for making up hands.

[JoAnneM]

What! We always shuffle our hands before they go back in the board, even at the end of the game. You don't all do that?

[Mbodell]

Cascade, on Aug 19 2009, 03:42 PM, said:

NickRW, on Aug 20 2009, 11:39 AM, said:

There is a paper somewhere on the web ...

... that must be true then.

The 7 shuffle meme doesn't guarantee complete randomness (what ever this means) but gets you past the inflection point. It is like an s-curve where you get diminishing returns. More shuffles are better, but the first few are where the big bang for the buck is.

Computer dealt hands is the proper way to go for sure.

[NickRW]

JoAnneM, on Aug 20 2009, 03:45 AM, said:

What! We always shuffle our hands before they go back in the board, even at the end of the game. You don't all do that?

Most do it during the session - they are not so diligent after the last round.

Nick

[jillybean]

NickRW, on Aug 20 2009, 12:17 PM, said:

JoAnneM, on Aug 20 2009, 03:45 AM, said:

What!  We always shuffle our hands before they go back in the board, even at the end of the game.  You don't all do that?

Most do it during the session - they are not so diligent after the last round.

Nick

A cursory shuffle at best. I thought this was so the smart alec at the next table couldnt reconstruct the play.

[Cascade]

I imagine that is the main reason but if players are in the habit it also has a benefit if you are using hand shuffled cards.

[mycroft]

Cascade, on Aug 19 2009, 05:42 PM, said:

NickRW, on Aug 20 2009, 11:39 AM, said:

There is a paper somewhere on the web ...

... that must be true then.

Well, three minutes of googling gets me that paper somewhere on the web. Hmm, in a peer-reviewed journal of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. I read it once many years ago (when I was at university and had access to the journal itself, not just the abstract).

Wikipaedia (yeah, I know, but I'm only quoting it for the references) gives some of the discussion since then. Seems to be in MAD magazine quality places like Stanford University technical papers and the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
</sarcasm>

Side note for JoAnne - until very recently, normal operation in other parts of the world was to sort the hands before replacing, rather than shuffle. [Edit: after every round, not just at the end. I got a few calls Out East from people who freaked out at round 2 that "my hand is sorted!" sitting next-roundish from one English Gentleman; I explained to them that likely the next 24 would be too, and they usually calmed down.]

Jilly: 1) bluejak once stated (paraphrased - I use it a lot, so it now sounds like me):
"there are three kinds of nights.
1) hands with wild breaks, distributional monsters, etc. that are computer dealt. These nights are 'those damned computer hands again.'
2) hands with wild breaks, distributional monsters, etc. that are hand dealt. These nights are 'boy the cards were freaky tonight.'
3) hands that are pretty flat, things aren't odd, finesses work 65% of the time, and so on. These nights are 'pretty boring set of hands tonight, eh?' Please note: they show up when computers deal and when humans deal."

Yes, because of inadequate shuffling, human-dealt hands tend to be flatter than random, and if you're used to that - especially if you're always playing in a club where everyone shuffles once, cuts, and deals - getting the normal distributional vagarities is tough to get used to. No-one here worries about that, of course, because they all play online. I make sure to shuffle "enough" my hands, as do my partners. We play systems that work best if all hands are represented. Strangely enough, when I run a Howell (and shuffle 9-15 of the boards myself), I rarely hear about a boring set of hands...

2) I'm sorry, I'm easily bored, and very frustrated when I get bored. I realize it can be an important job to hand-enter 3/4 of all 27 boards (or 32, I guess), but I literally would pay my entire directing salary for a year for a dealing machine *just so I wouldn't have to do it every session*. Any other benefits would be gravy.

[jillybean]

Thanks The games I play tend to be "shuffle, deal and play" and I might add, everyone does it differently - my mother has been know to deal in 3's, to ensure they get "interesting hands" (true!). But I do hear players complaining of computer dealt hands and wondered how much is fact or imaginary.

Dealing machines obviously deal the cards, can it also generate a file of the hands dealt?

[blackshoe]

The one I'm familiar with (duplimate) deals the hand from a file generated by dealmaster pro (it might be able to use files from other programs, I'm not sure).

[NickRW]

mycroft, on Aug 21 2009, 12:42 AM, said:

Strangely enough, when I run a Howell (and shuffle 9-15 of the boards myself), I rarely hear about a boring set of hands...

Yes, if I direct on a Monday or Friday session, it is normally a Mitchell or some variant thereof - but if I get roped in for a Thursday session they never have enough pairs - so it is a Howell and I like to shuffle as many of the decks as I can myself - often there is time - don't necessarily deal them - just shuffle and present an idle player with the deck and empty board saying, "Deal that please".

Nick

[jnichols]

Quote

Dealing machines obviously deal the cards, can it also generate a file of the hands dealt?

The Duplimate machine can deal from a file produced by Dealmaster (and various other "dealing" programs). I haven't used it but I suspect it can also produce random deals and provide a file.

I use the Dealer4 machine - It can deal from a file (Dealmaster, etc.) or generate the random deals and produce a file and print the hand records.