 Obviously, the deals that are identical except for swapping—say—the 2 and the 3 would be unlikely to give a different result.To make the irrelevance of small cards explicit (which is not always the case though), in bridge such small cards are generally denoted by an 'x'.Thus, the "number of possible deals" in this sense depends of how many non-honour cards (2, 3, .. 9) are considered 'indistinguishable'.