Including Hand Diagrams, Hands, Cards, and Bids

If you want to write cards or bids, use the letters C, D, H, and S; for example, “Against 5H, West led the C3.” I will run a program on your submission to automatically replace the letters with suit symbols, i.e. “Against 5♥, West led the ♣3.” Or you may write it out longhand, e.g. “Against five hearts, West led the three of clubs…”, in which case no change will be made. To include a hand, write it like AKT.AKT93.T5.KQ7 and it will automatically be converted to ♠AKT ♥AKT93 ♦T5 ♣KQ7.

To include a hand diagram in your online article, just copy-and-paste the following text to your document to save me time.

Make sure the blue text (diagram1) matches in both places and is different for each hand diagram. Change the hand in purple as appropriate. The hands are separated by a space and listed in the order West, North, East, and South. Periods separate the suits which are in the order spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. Use T for a ten. When the hand is from a unit game, you can copy it from the GIB format which is linked from the top of the ACBLmerge report, instead of typing it by hand. You may specify fewer than 13 cards in each hand if you want to show an end position. For a void, skip the cards for a suit, e.g. .K..65 means ♠- ♥K ♦- ♣65. Finally, change the red value (15) to the correct hand number. The hand number is used to determine the dealer and vulnerability. When your document is fully formatted for the web, the hand diagram will look like:

If you do not know the hand number, you can specify the dealer and vulnerability explicitly as in this example: