Answers

Were the hands specially selected ?

No ... these are just ordinary sets of deals, one for each day. I deal them here using one of the standard dealing programs, and they were not changed or in any way altered - they are exactly as dealt. In the past, we used to deal more boards than were needed. Brian Senior then looked at them and reduced the number to the required amount, occasionally altering the order of the boards so that, for example, board 40 would become board 6 and board 6 would be discarded.

The EBU has ruled that this is contrary to Law, however, and we are no longer permitted to do this. We may be permitted to deal 3 or 4 sets of the right number of boards and then select a set from those, or we may have to use just straight deals. This means that the hands may well show a strong bias in favour of one direction, or even in favour of one player, but that is the Law of Duplicate Bridge and I am afraid that is the way it has to be.

The old way simply tried to ensure that each player had a fair crack of the whip (well, a fair number of points, bids, defensive hands etc anyway). It didn't always work perfectly, as obviously some people are more aggressive bidders than others, different systems may preclude bidding on some hands or perhaps permit bidding on weak hands. However, rest assured that we never altered a hand, nor did we rotate hands -but now we are not allowed to do it anyway, so ...