[bobade]

I've been looking carefully at my hands and results in the ACBL Individual, and have noticed a recurrent pattern. Don't try this with your favorite partner, but opening 1 NT with 14 or 18 balanced, on many occasions, let to top MP scores. What I don't know is the denominator; how often a non-standard NT opening led to a bottom.

Is this a viable strategy for success with robot partners, or is it an example of playing differently than the field and ending up with tops and bottoms?

[bobade]

Incidentally, another variation of non-standard NT opening that was successful in this tournament, was opening 1N on a hand like this: AQTx Axx x AJTxx

[Stephen Tu]

The bots are susceptible to this because of some major flaws in defense:
- way too rigid in assuming declarer is 15 to 17, won't postulate opponent's hands slightly out of range
- same for being off-shape when opening NT
- since no disclosure about the singleton possibilities probably not as aggressive about leading long suits as it ought to be against opponents with such propensities
- no concept of defensive signalling, so it can find a good lead or shift against your weak suit, but then inexplicably stop continuing it after you duck a round or two, or find a way to block the suit, that good human defenders would never do.

- also not great at bidding over 1nt, Capp is a crappy defense to begin with IMO, and GIB operates it particularly badly bidding 2M on 4cdM a lot.


So a lot of the top robot players advocate opening 1nt an awful lot of the time in the "best hand" format.