English Bridge Union
Quite a lot of clubs nowadays have access to dealing machines which produce computer dealt hands. Whereas shuffling and dealing by hand tends to produce flatter, less distributional hands, computer dealing machines are set to produce hands which are genuinely random. Perhaps an even bigger advantage is that they allow hand records to be printed out and distributed at the end of the duplicate, so that members can take them away and study them at their leisure. Dealing machines are, however, expensive and not all clubs can afford them. An alternative is to have a small computer program which will produce computerised hands and print them out to curtain cards, which can then be used to prepare the boards manually, either in advance by someone not playing in the event, or at the beginning of a duplicate by tables preparing hands they will not play during the course of the movement.
The EBU is happy to announce that it has arranged with Stephen Bligh of ScoreBridge for affiliated clubs to use his program SB Dealer free-of-charge. SB Dealer can produce sets of random hands and print the individual deals out to standard EBU curtain cards, along with printouts of all the hands at up to 40 hands on an A4 sheet of paper (if both sides are used). It will also save the deal file, so that it can be included on the results page of the club’s website. SB Dealer can also read .dup and .dlm files as produced by DealMaster Pro or ECats and produce curtain cards from these.
SB Dealer comes together with the ScoreBridge program. If you already have the latter on your computer, just click on the ‘Start’ button in Windows, select ‘All Programs’, click on ‘ScoreBridge’ and then open ‘SB Dealer’. You then have a ten day free trial. If you wish to continue using the program after that, simply send an email to help@scorebridge.com quoting your affiliated club’s name and the club’s EBU number, and you will be sent a permanent licence key. If you do not already have ScoreBridge, you can download it from www.scorebridge.com. You do not have to use the main ScoreBridge program to use SB Dealer.
For further information, a query or support for SB Dealer, in the first instance call the EBU on 01296 317200 and ask for Krys, Ian or Michael.
If importing .dup files to print curtain cards, ScoreBridge users must be on release 9.11.23 or later which will be available soon.
EBU curtain cards can be purchased from the EBU Shop — call 01296 397851 or 01296 317200 and ask for curtain cards - stock item 0003.
The EBU wishes to thank Stephen Bligh for kindly making this facility available to our affiliated clubs.
