¶ Using Deal Source on Bridge Champ
¶ 🧩 How to Use Deal Source on Bridge Champ
Welcome to Bridge Champ!
The Deal Source menu lets you create, edit, manage, and play your own custom bridge deals. Whether you're a teacher, tournament director, or a player who loves to experiment, Deal Source gives you full control over your boards.
📚 Preparing hands for a class? Teachers have their own guide to Deal Source, written around building a lesson folder and reusing it week after week: Deal Source for teachers. The full set of teaching tools is in For Teachers.
¶ 📂 Accessing the Deal Source
You can open the Deal Source menu from two places:
- From the main menu, click Deal Source in the left-hand sidebar.
- Or open it while you're already in the playing stage via the sidebar.
¶ 🗃️ Creating Deal Sets
Deal Source is organized by folders. Each folder is called a Deal Set.
- Click NEW SET at the top of the Deal Source panel to create a folder. TEMPLATES, next to it, opens the expression templates used to generate hands.
- Click a folder to open it. Its icons, from left to right, are Add Deals, Import, Print hand records, Export and Remove. The tick box selects the whole folder.
¶ 🛠️ Creating Custom Deals
Open a folder and click its Add Deals icon to begin.
- Choose how many deals you want to create.
- Select whether to make them Random or Empty.
- Click Create to open the Deal Editor.
¶ ✍️ Editing Deals in the Editor
In the Deal Editor, you can fully customize each board:
- Assign High Card Points: Click the
+icon next to a player (e.g. South) and choose a range like 12–21 HCP. - Set Suit Length: Click a suit (e.g. Hearts), then
+to define a minimum and maximum number of cards. - Change Board Settings: Modify:
- Board number
- Dealer position
- Vulnerability
¶ 🔧 Useful Buttons in the Editor
- Random Fill: Fill the deal with random legal cards.
- Clear: Empty the deal completely.
- Restore: Return to last saved state.
- Analyze: Opens double dummy analysis for the deal.
- Apply Constraints: Generate a deal based on all your defined ranges.
- Rotate: Rotates hands clockwise.
- Save: Save the deal for future use.
¶ 📥 Importing External Deals
You can import deals from these formats:
- LIN (.lin)
- PBN (.pbn)
- Bridge Champ exported JSON
Click Import and select your file, your deal will appear in your current Deal Set.
¶ 📥 What the import understands
- You can import several files at once into a set, and the import dialog shows which file each deal came from.
- Boards that already exist in the set are skipped and reported by board number instead of failing the whole import.
- PBN files with director rulings (skipped or insufficient bids, revokes, adjusted results) and PBN files with a result but no declarer import as deals. A file without usable boards says so.
- BBO handviewer links can be imported directly.
- Games from LIN files show the claim and the final result, and finished deals open with the last trick still to play.
- Files from teaching tools import correctly: auctions without card play, board lines with player-name tags, boards dealt out of the standard rotation.
- A preset set with non-consecutive board numbers plays all its deals in order.
¶ 🧪 Working with Saved Deals
Once saved, your deals have extra options next to them:
- Play: Loads your deal into the play stage.
- Analyze: Opens results view (outside of play stage).
- Export: Download the deal in Bridge Champ JSON format.
- Remove: Permanently deletes the deal.
¶ ⭐ Favorites and Bulk Actions
- Favorite a deal: In the Results screen, click the star icon to add a deal to your favorites folder.
- Bulk actions: Use checkboxes next to each deal to select multiple for group operations.
¶ 🎯 Ready to Build Your Own Deals?
The Deal Source tool is a powerful way to create learning experiences, fun challenges, or training exercises tailored to your needs.
👉 Log in to Bridge Champ and start creating your own deals now!
¶ Related guides
- Deal Source for teachers: build and reuse a folder of lesson hands.
- Hand Editor for teachers: build a hand that makes one teaching point.
- Save Hands as PDF: print a whole folder as a hand record for your students.
- For Teachers: all the teaching tools in one place.