Q. The hands have been a lot more distributional since we started using the Dealer4 card dealer.  They are supposed to be random deals, but we get lots more hands with singletons and voids than we used to. Is the computer program generating random deals or is it biased towards distributional hands?

A. It provides random deals. To achieve a similar degree of randomness in dealing by hand you would require to cut and shuffle  the cards between 50 and 100 times at the table. In the past we only shuffled the cards a few times, which leads towards balanced hands and less distributional hands.

Q. How do we know that the deal is random?

A. That is what the dealing program is designed to do. Each hand can be dealt as one of many different hand shapes. These vary from a 4432 shape which is the most common shape occurring 21% of the time, to very distributional shapes such as 8320 occurring less than 0.5%, or about once per fortnight. The probability of each hand shape is known, so in a set of 32 boards about 6 or 7 hands of 4432 shape would be expected.  If there are more than twice the number of hands of this shape, the computer rejects the excess hands and re-deals. The software tells the person doing the dealing how many hands have been rejected. Usually we only get a few boards rejected.

The computer checks for other similarities between the hands in that set.  It may reject the odd hand on this basis. 

We cannot change the way the computer generates the boards and make them more balanced. Even if we could - would you want to? Many members have commented on how they find the hands a lot more interesting - and challenging!

Q. How are the deals done and how is the hand information kept secure?

A. The deals are done in batches, for 3 or 4 tournaments ahead, so that they don’t have to be done ‘on the night’. The Card Dealing team is led by Carol Calder. They use the computer and dealing machine to deal the hands ‘blind’, so that they don’t know what the cards are in the hands. The boards are kept locked away until needed. The hands  are analysed to generate the Optimum Contract information you now see on the results information (again this is done ‘blind' so that no-one sees it).  The computer file is uploaded to the website where it can only be accessed after the event for which it was dealt.

Q. There have been two recent incidents of the same hands appearing in consecutive boards. I thought the computer didn't allow same deals? How can this happen?

A. The computer hasn't produced two hands the same in the deal. If you look at the hand information in the Results section (e.g. Thursday 14th June Hands 20 and 21), you will see that the computer dealt different hands. The problem has come in the physical card dealing. Occasionally the cards fed into the machine stick and the deal stops. If the card dealer doesn't deal with this problem correctly, then it is possible to deal the hand again, resulting in two hands the same. This is a 'teething problem' which we can correct easily.