Playing a Hand from a Diagram

Every good hand you have ever read about is a hand you could have played.

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How a Diagram Is Laid Out#

Every hand diagram in print uses the same arrangement, and it has not changed in a century. The four hands sit at the points of a compass — North at the top, East at the right, South at the bottom, West at the left — exactly as the players sit round the table.

Within each hand the suits run top to bottom in the same order, always:

Cards run high to low within a suit, and a void is a dash. A ten is usually printed T rather than 10, so that every card is one character wide and the columns line up.

Somewhere near the diagram you will find the dealer and the vulnerability — often as letters beside the compass, sometimes as a board number instead. Both matter: the dealer decides who speaks first, and vulnerability changes what every penalty and every game is worth.

When All You Have Is a Board Number#

Hand records from a club, and anything that came out of a duplicate session, often print a board number and nothing else. That is enough. Every board number carries a fixed dealer and vulnerability, repeating every sixteen boards:

Read it as: the dealer advances one seat per board, and the vulnerability cycle runs None, N–S, E–W, Both with a one-step shift every four boards. Board 17 is board 1 again.

If a diagram gives you both a board number and a printed dealer, and the two disagree, one of them is a misprint — and the board number is the more likely to be right, because it was generated rather than typed.

What to Do About the Hands It Does Not Show#

Most published hands are not complete. A column about a squeeze prints declarer and dummy and leaves the defenders out; a bidding problem prints one hand and the auction. That is not an obstacle to playing it — it is a choice about what to do with the gap.

• Deal the rest at random. The cards that are shown stay where they are, and the remainder of the pack is dealt out among the hands that were not. You get a real deal, consistent with everything the diagram told you.
• Deal them to fit the auction. If the auction was printed, it is itself a description of the missing hands — an opening bid promises a range and a shape. Hands dealt to satisfy the calls make a far more plausible deal than hands dealt freely.
• Type what you can work out. In an endgame position the missing cards are often forced: if you can see forty-eight of the fifty-two, the other four are not a mystery.

Worth knowing which you have done. A deal completed at random is a fair test of the play but tells you nothing about whether the printed auction made sense, because three of the four hands were not the ones that produced it.

Deals That Come as Text: PBN, LIN and Handviewer Links#

Anything that came out of bridge software arrives as text rather than a picture, in one of three formats. All three say the same things; only the punctuation differs.

PBN is the interchange format, written as tags:

Inside a hand, the four suits are separated by full stops in the usual order — AK4.QJ2.T98.7653 is spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs — and a hand that was not given is a single dash. The N: prefix matters: the hands that follow run clockwise from that seat, so the same four hands written W: are in a different order.

LIN is what Bridge Base Online writes. It is one long line of tag|value| pairs: md| holds the deal, sv| the vulnerability, mb| each call. Hands are written with a suit letter before its cards rather than with dots — SAK4HQJ2.

Handviewer links are a BBO URL with the deal in the query string: n=, e=, s= and w= for the hands, d= for the dealer, v= for vulnerability, b= for the board and a= for the auction. Some carry a whole LIN string as lin= instead.

You do not need to be able to write any of this. It is worth being able to recognise it, because it means a deal someone has sent you is one paste away from being playable rather than something to be copied out by hand.

Playing It, and What to Decide First#

Four decisions turn a diagram into a hand you can play, and each one changes what you are testing.

• Which seat. The interesting seat is not always South. A defensive problem is only a problem from the seat that has to solve it.
• Bid it, or start from the contract. Bidding it tests the auction as well as the play, which is the harder and more useful exercise. Starting from the printed contract tests the play alone, and is the right choice when the point of the hand was the play.
• The opening lead. If the diagram printed one, having it led is what reproduces the hand as published. Choosing your own instead is a different and often more interesting experiment — many famous hands turn entirely on the lead.
• The part-score, if any. A deal from a rubber is not the same deal without the score that was on the board. A side sitting on 60 bids differently, and should — see part-scores for why.

One caution about judging yourself afterwards. A published hand was usually chosen because something unusual happened, so the normal line is often the losing one. Getting it wrong the way the whole field got it wrong is not a mistake worth correcting.

Rase does all of this. Type a deal in, paste PBN or LIN or a handviewer link, or — on iPhone and iPad — photograph the diagram and have the hands read in for you to check. Set the seat, the board and the contract, and play it against the robots with the same analysis afterwards as any other hand.