That's pretty simply. This will deal out hands where north has exactly six spades and two of the top three spades. Two weeks later, you and your partner decide that you will also consider a suit worth a weak 2 if it contains three of the top five cards, which, specifically, really means you've now allowed suits led by QJT , KJT , and AJT . This is not an uncommon agreement. For this, you will need to use the Deal 3.0 feature, holding functions.
Deal allows for extremely fast shape class and shape function computations.
For example, lets say that we want to write a shapeclass which returns 1 if our hand is right shape for a one spade opening. This defines a routine, spadeshape , which returns true precisely when the hand has 5 or more spades and at least as many spades as any other suit. Consider it this way - when you pass a hand name to a shape function, it sets these variables to the suit lengths, and then evaluates the code. A sample shape function Shape functions can return any string. They can be extremely powerful.