[ahtan]

I've not been a player online until covid struck and since then, I've been playing and hosting tournaments on BBO for my club and for guests as well. I've also been teaching. I've been particularly impressed by the use of online resources for teaching (teaching table, pre-dealt hands, deal history etc).

In preparation for the resumption of physical bridge, I'm toying with the idea of buying a dealing machine. This will help teaching, but also provide more attractive tournaments. However, it is unclear what solution will fit me best, hence i'm asking for crowd wisdom.

My club already has bridgemate. We had been using bridgewebs for results. I bought dealmaster pro last year, and I've been using dealmaster pro to generate hands very satisfactorily to use on BBO. I'm based in Singapore, so would prefer a solution in which I am exposed to less risk to stuff like machine maintenance or the need to purchase special supplies. At the moment, my budget is around 4-5k USD (including any ancillary accessories).

I would greatly appreciate if someone with actual experience of these things can make a recommendation about this. Thanks!

Jin Meng

[mycroft]

Everywhere I've worked has standardized on the Dealer4(+). The Duplimate machines are incredibly rugged, but may still need barcoded cards (which you learn very quickly to ignore, but everyone hates at first). I have only worked with the Dealer4, so realize that you're only getting one side of the story.

If you treat it well, it will treat you well. The club I do most of my dealing at is in México, so it has similar issues with "don't want to send it out for maintenance" as you do. So they're very careful to clean the rollers before every run, regularly check the seating of everything, and so on. And it does just work.

If you do this, get the barcode stickers for the boards - the second time it tells you "that's board 4, you're dealing 3" instead of just putting the cards in, you'll be paid back for the price of them and the time it took to apply them. That goes treble if you're making two sets for any reason.

Packing it up and moving it is a fun game, but again, getting in the habit of doing the finicky bits every time means one less "send it away for service".

Dealer4 has a service centre in Australia, so not so bad from Singapore.

As far as special supplies goes, apart from the barcoded cards if you need them, things just work. But you will go through decks of cards faster with the dealing machine than you would otherwise (unless you're hand-shuffling), as they wear to the point of being unreadable to the machine before they're unreadable to humans. In fact, my unit gave me 30 decks of cards for my personal box simply because they couldn't use them any more and mine were getting very sticky - for the twice a year I pull it out, that's perfectly fine.

I think everything I've said here would apply to any other dealing machine (but don't get that hand-dealer, unless all you're ever using it for is teaching or the once-a-week game; it's cheap for a very good reason).

[pescetom]

mycroft, on 2021-March-13, 13:41, said:

Everywhere I've worked has standardized on the Dealer4(+). The Duplimate machines are incredibly rugged, but may still need barcoded cards (which you learn very quickly to ignore, but everyone hates at first). I have only worked with the Dealer4, so realize that you're only getting one side of the story.

My club still refuses to buy one (and don't get me started on that) but everyone else I know has Duplimate and I concur that they are rugged. The optical recognition version works, just costs a little more.

There was a Danish (IIRC) startup that a few years ago developed a wireless centre-table machine that held two packs of cards and would deal the next hand in advance, then read the sequence of play from the cards reinserted without sorting. Yet another example of how the best solutions always emerge when a technology is already doomed.

[mycroft]

Yeah, I saw that one. That was cute, required one per table. Having said that, Really Good for barometer games!

[pescetom]

mycroft, on 2021-March-13, 16:19, said:

Yeah, I saw that one. That was cute, required one per table. Having said that, Really Good for barometer games!

Cost of one per table, but a relatively simple mechanism (no need for speed or board handling) and no boards and all the related risks/delays/effort.
And automatic recording of the sequence of cards played, entry of contract.
Would not be difficult to add a touch screen on top to handle the auction.
Had bridge been destined to be played with cards, rather than with tablets or online, this would have been the way to go.

[ahtan]

mycroft, on 2021-March-13, 16:19, said:

Yeah, I saw that one. That was cute, required one per table. Having said that, Really Good for barometer games!

I saw that too, but it seems too limited (we occasionally have big games) as well as potentially expensive.

[ahtan]

pescetom, on 2021-March-13, 14:09, said:

My club still refuses to buy one (and don't get me started on that) but everyone else I know has Duplimate and I concur that they are rugged. The optical recognition version works, just costs a little more.

There was a Danish (IIRC) startup that a few years ago developed a wireless centre-table machine that held two packs of cards and would deal the next hand in advance, then read the sequence of play from the cards reinserted without sorting. Yet another example of how the best solutions always emerge when a technology is already doomed.

Re: duplimate.
I'm wary of using barcoded cards etc due to the need to maintain these. I understand its needed for speed? We max out at perhaps 15 tables.

The youtube video demo says "automatic board recognition"? I guess I don't understand this. It needs special boards to do this? recognize vulnerability etc?

There does not seem to be documentation of the software. I would like to retain use of dealmaster pro (for pre-dealt hands, analysis, hand records etc). It only needs to be able to import a suitable format.

PS. I suppose I can email duplimate with these questions in detail. At the moment, I'm just looking for ideas about the best machine to buy and 2 people have recommended duplimate already - thanks!

[sfi]

ahtan, on 2021-March-14, 01:05, said:

Re: duplimate.
I'm wary of using barcoded cards etc due to the need to maintain these. I understand its needed for speed? We max out at perhaps 15 tables.

The youtube video demo says "automatic board recognition"? I guess I don't understand this. It needs special boards to do this? recognize vulnerability etc?

There does not seem to be documentation of the software. I would like to retain use of dealmaster pro (for pre-dealt hands, analysis, hand records etc). It only needs to be able to import a suitable format.

PS. I suppose I can email duplimate with these questions in detail. At the moment, I'm just looking for ideas about the best machine to buy and 2 people have recommended duplimate already - thanks!

I've been involved with the purchase of dealing machine elsewhere, but it was a few years ago and I'm not familiar with the latest technology. But our club has a few technology components that are separate and don't talk to each other, and I think this is fairly standard.

• First is the software to create boards. There is both free and commercial software to generate random hands, and it is easy to take one of those and write a small wrapper program to generate them in bulk. But the output is a file in a standard notation that contains the hands for the event (one file per session). We use BigDeal and I wrote something that lets us create hundreds of sessions at once, all with the same prefix and sequential numbers, but other programs may already have those features. We didn't use DealMaster Pro because there were questions about the randomness of its dealing algorithm and dealing in bulk did not seem to be an option.
  
• You then import that file into the dealing machine - via USB key is normal - and the machine will deal the boards for you. Using plastic boards and cards without barcodes I can deal a set of 32 hands in about 15 minutes. The machine I use reads a range of standard cards cheaply and commercially available and the OCR is fine.
  
• Next you need a program to run and score the session. You probably already have one of those and can import hands into it. If so, that part of the process doesn't change at all. The important thing is that this part of the process is completely separate from the dealing.
  
• Finally, you need a program to create and print the hand records. We use Dealmaster Pro, but I'm sure there are others out there. You also need to import the hands into here, but we actually get Dealmaster to generate the files we use in the scoring system.

If you're just looking at the dealing machine, make sure it can import files in the format you can create. I don't remember which machines I have used, but they are robust and the people we bought them from offered a straightforward way to arrange repairs or replacement in the event of failure. In normal times, they just require a bit of cleaning to clean off dust. I would strongly recommend you get one with OCR capability, that does not require barcoded cards. It means you are not locked into purchasing cards from a specific provider, and can use either current cards or new cheaper cards. I would also remember trying out a machine if you know a club that has one.

You also need to consider security - who will have access to the machines, dealt boards and files. And you will need to consider who will be doing the dealing. It's not the most fun job, so either a having a couple of volunteers or a school student who wants to earn a bit of extra cash is valuable.

[ahtan]

sfi, on 2021-March-14, 01:37, said:

I've been involved with the purchase of dealing machine elsewhere, but it was a few years ago and I'm not familiar with the latest technology. But our club has a few technology components that are separate and don't talk to each other, and I think this is fairly standard.

• First is the software to create boards. There is both free and commercial software to generate random hands, and it is easy to take one of those and write a small wrapper program to generate them in bulk. But the output is a file in a standard notation that contains the hands for the event (one file per session). We use BigDeal and I wrote something that lets us create hundreds of sessions at once, all with the same prefix and sequential numbers, but other programs may already have those features. We didn't use DealMaster Pro because there were questions about the randomness of its dealing algorithm and dealing in bulk did not seem to be an option.
  
• You then import that file into the dealing machine - via USB key is normal - and the machine will deal the boards for you. Using plastic boards and cards without barcodes I can deal a set of 32 hands in about 15 minutes. The machine I use reads a range of standard cards cheaply and commercially available and the OCR is fine.
  
• Next you need a program to run and score the session. You probably already have one of those and can import hands into it. If so, that part of the process doesn't change at all. The important thing is that this part of the process is completely separate from the dealing.
  
• Finally, you need a program to create and print the hand records. We use Dealmaster Pro, but I'm sure there are others out there. You also need to import the hands into here, but we actually get Dealmaster to generate the files we use in the scoring system.

If you're just looking at the dealing machine, make sure it can import files in the format you can create. I don't remember which machines I have used, but they are robust and the people we bought them from offered a straightforward way to arrange repairs or replacement in the event of failure. In normal times, they just require a bit of cleaning to clean off dust. I would strongly recommend you get one with OCR capability, that does not require barcoded cards. It means you are not locked into purchasing cards from a specific provider, and can use either current cards or new cheaper cards. I would also remember trying out a machine if you know a club that has one.

You also need to consider security - who will have access to the machines, dealt boards and files. And you will need to consider who will be doing the dealing. It's not the most fun job, so either a having a couple of volunteers or a school student who wants to earn a bit of extra cash is valuable.

Looks like Dealer4 has all the characteristics you mention.

A probably stupid question that occurs to me is if you generate hands in DMPro and then import it into the machine, how would you make sure the hand records as produced by DMPro match the vulnerability and dealer on the boards the machine will deal into?

[sfi]

ahtan, on 2021-March-15, 20:50, said:

Looks like Dealer4 has all the characteristics you mention.

A probably stupid question that occurs to me is if you generate hands in DMPro and then import it into the machine, how would you make sure the hand records as produced by DMPro match the vulnerability and dealer on the boards the machine will deal into?

The dealing machine doesn't know about that - all it does is put cards into four piles. What you need to make sure is that the boards they go into match the vulnerability and dealer set by DMPro. Luckily, these are standardised and any set of boards you get should match DMPro. All you have to do is make sure the boards are in the right order when you put the cards in them. If you get the rectangular plastic ones where the lid unclicks, you just put the board itself into the dealing machine and almost all the work is done for you.

[AL78]

ahtan, on 2021-March-15, 20:50, said:

Looks like Dealer4 has all the characteristics you mention.

A probably stupid question that occurs to me is if you generate hands in DMPro and then import it into the machine, how would you make sure the hand records as produced by DMPro match the vulnerability and dealer on the boards the machine will deal into?

Based on how I deal boards for my club:

The machine takes boards that are numbered and have the correct vulnerability and dealer for the board number. This is universal, so will be hard-coded into any hand generation software. When you come to deal the boards, the software will send the deals to the machine in numerical order, so you start with inserting board 1, and follow with board 2, 3, .... The software tells you what board you should be inserting. The boards also come with barcode stickers on them which the machine reads to check the correct board number has been inserted (on the software I have used, this can be switched off). The software also has the option of hiding the deal on screen as it is being dealt by the machine, so anyone who is dealing boards for a session can later play in that session without having any knowledge of the hands.

[mycroft]

My pattern, in a non-tournament:

• ensure I'm using the right file
  
• check board 34 of the HR and the dealer for consistency (and remember to avoid using 34 for anything if possible)
  
• deal N sets of boards as needed
  
• On a couple of boards, pull the first card from one hand, and quickly check the HR for that board to ensure it's in that hand. Try not to look at anything else.
  
• find an honest associate, determine where they're playing today (only works in two-winner movements), give them HR for that seat for boards 1 and 19 (and possibly 26) and have them confirm them, for all sets. (In a tournament, I do this. But in the clubs, TD is either "playing" or "ultimate spare, if necessary", so if I do end up playing, I don't know where I'll be.)

Stickers, as everyone has mentioned, are critical. Only turn "check board number" off if you're doing something deliberate, and triple check it (cue story about boards placed on table caught the coffee and spilled it all over the boards. Quickly, remake 16, 17, 18 and give them to the table. Board 19, North looks at her hand, apologizes, and walks with it to the director's table...) and *always* put it back on again.

Turn off the hand viewer, again, unless necessary for something (usually "this card won't read, I need to confirm it belongs in the pocket that only has 12 - as opposed to 'we misread the ♠7 as the ♣7 and now the ♣7 is 'duplicate'"). Even if you're a non-playing director. Sometimes you deal in semi-public areas, and people do look. Otherwise it's just a distraction, and will slow you down.

With minimal practise, good equipment, cards, and setup, you can deal 36s in under 10 minutes, and 27s in less time than that. One of the TDs I worked with, who actually loved making boards (and we were very happy to do everything else for that time!) has it down to 6:30 for a 36.

I actually have a weird case - I live in a dry climate, and my hands and cuticles are fragile. Dealing 6 sets of boards (more particularly, pulling cards from 6 sets of boards, and opening and closing the hinges) ripped my hands to shreds for week after. After working with latex gloves (which are great, but don't breathe, so got really grotty really quickly) for a bit, I was gifted a pair of (thin) gardening gloves, with grabbing dots on the palms. I'll do 5 sets a session for a weekend now and don't have a single problem (except for everyone asking me why I'm wearing elbow-length teal gloves when I have to get up and take a call, of course). In case anyone else has this issue.

[pescetom]

mycroft, on 2021-March-16, 09:21, said:

I was gifted a pair of (thin) gardening gloves, with grabbing dots on the palms. I'll do 5 sets a session for a weekend now and don't have a single problem (except for everyone asking me why I'm wearing elbow-length teal gloves when I have to get up and take a call, of course). In case anyone else has this issue.

Also works well for cracking open almonds using your hands, in case anyone else has this weird habit.

[ahtan]

Great Advice all! Thanks very much. Now i gotta go and see about funding it 8-).