[thepossum]

Hi all

Would be interested in any advice on how to bid this hand. It went horribly wrong, no doubt partly my fault but partly my partners. Cost me a 19 point swing in an IMP tourney I was doing really well in. If I can remove these bad ones I may do ok

Any suggestions for the next bid or alternatives to earlier in the auction

I was a bit unsure how strong the clubs were to get that 5C bid, not sure which bid to choose given that there seemed to be a few possible games and slams on offer. I nearly bid 6C but wanted to explore more. Highly distributional hand I assumed but I didnt know how to bid and had a disaster. I suspect it was only a disaster because partner was not human but I'm not blaming North

regards P

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[LBengtsson]

Pass. You have showed your hand. Better + than -

[hrothgar]

The answer depends completely on the partnership agreement with respect to the 5♣ bid.

For example, in my serious partnerships, 5♣ would be a fit showing non jump and show spade support.
A club slam would never be in the picture.

(The reason behind this is that there just aren't enough hands that would conceivably want to pass over 3♥ but want to choose a new strain after a 4♠ bid)

Playing with robots, anything could be correct.

[thepossum]

hrothgar, on 2019-March-27, 04:06, said:

The answer depends completely on the partnership agreement with respect to the 5♣ bid.


(The reason behind this is that there just aren't enough hands that would conceivably want to pass over 3♥ but want to choose a new strain after a 4♠ bid)

Playing with robots, anything could be correct.

I will post the hand but north had 8 playing tricks, 5 losers, 10 hcps, 15 distribution points and a hand valued at 17+ by K-R

Hardly a pass hand

Either some players are good guessers or are more familiar with GiBs idiosyncrasies than me.

I did consider bidding 6C but suspected other possible options. Passing in 5C would have been OK but 6C and 6NT were easy makes and 4S was a comfortable game

Very disappointing

There is too much guessing required even after 10 months familiarity. It seems to me that masterpoints are somewhat devalued by this kind of lottery. Also it bears no real relationship to peoples bridge ability looking at the traveller

[hrothgar]

thepossum, on 2019-March-27, 06:19, said:

There is too much guessing required even after 10 months familiarity. It seems to me that masterpoints are somewhat devalued by this kind of lottery. Also it bears no real relationship to peoples bridge ability looking at the traveller

If only people had warned you about the level of play of the bots months ago...

[etha]

north might actually be stuck over 3♥. let us imagine he has an ok hand with clubs and no stop and is playing non leaping michaels.

[Tramticket]

We are told from the system description that North has a strong natural club bid - the alert describes this as "Strong Rebiddable C 13-14". This alert is amusing since it seems to imply that a 15-count is too strong and a 12-count too weak. The bid is made at the five-level and is presumably bid in the expectation of making (you don't sacrifice against pre-empts).

But North did not choose to bid at the four-level on the previous round. What has changed from the last round to this round?
- Maybe North did not compete on the last round as it had good defensive values against a 3♥ contract? This seems unlikely, since it is difficult to conceive that North has more than three hearts on the bidding and anyway, if North has defence against 3♥, North must also have defence against 4♥!
- Maybe your 4♠ bid has improved North's holding? Certainly (say) ♠Q10XX would be much better holding, once you bid. As hrothgar says, many would play that this bid shows a fit - but this is not indicated in the alert.
- Many would play this as a cue-bid in support of hearts - but again, this is not consistent with the alert.
- Maybe, as Etha suggests, North did not have a 4♣ natural overcall available because it plays non-leaping Michaels? But this would be inconsistent with our guess that North's hand has improved due to a spade fit. If it plays Non-leaping Michaels, it would have been better to jump to 5♣ initially, rather than make the bid in response to the 4♠ overcall. Maybe North didn't have a 4♣ bid available because it thinks it is Gerber! [Eek!]

From the above, you can see that I am struggling to find a hand for North that is consistent with the auction and the explanation of the bid from the alert. So any guess could be right.

[thepossum]

hrothgar, on 2019-March-27, 06:35, said:

If only people had warned you about the level of play of the bots months ago...

Of course they did and we all know their level of play and everyone keeps playing them.

There are better bots out there but this is the only one whose company has a deal with the ACBL to dish out very questionnable masterpoints

Where does all the revenue from these tournaments go. It certainly doesn't seem to go into improving the quality of the bot play or listening to users. In fact I will go further and say that obviously those who want to protect GiB and the dodgy ACBL masterpoint arrangement will do anything they can to attack and undermine on me on these forums.

Note, that isnt directed at anyone on this thread

[thepossum]

Here are the North south hands

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I ran it through Qplus with 2/1 GF and it nicely overcalled 4C, South bid 4NT Blackwood ending in the very good 6C slam

Note 6NT does also make but I wouldnt expect it to be bid very easily

Where my auction went wrong is that I tried to force the auction to slam, bid 5 diamonds and GB for some mysetrious reason thought that was a good contract. I wasnt alone in that. Some people just bid 6C immediately and some people seemed to know that a 5H cue bid would have the desired effect of getting to a 6C slam. Maybe 5D isnt the best bid but how on earth could it be interpreted as the preferred game suit after I had overcalled 4H with 4S and North had clubs like that

Anyway rant over. People will attack me and my bid rather than the pass by North of course

[hrothgar]

thepossum, on 2019-March-27, 15:57, said:

Of course they did and we all know their level of play and everyone keeps playing them.

There are better bots out there but this is the only one whose company has a deal with the ACBL to dish out very questionnable masterpoints

Where does all the revenue from these tournaments go. It certainly doesn't seem to go into improving the quality of the bot play or listening to users. In fact I will go further and say that obviously those who want to protect GiB and the dodgy ACBL masterpoint arrangement will do anything they can to attack and undermine on me on these forums.

Note, that isnt directed at anyone on this thread

With the exception of a couple Yellows, I can't think of a single regular forum poster who have any incentive to "protect GiB and the dodgy ACBL masterpoint scheme" (and said Yellows have been studiously neutral wrt your postings). I certainly can't think of anyone who critiques your postings who falls into this category. Rather, I think that the most of us are simply burnt out on the whole subject.

• Yes, the Bots are quite weak compared to other robots on the market
  
• Yes, most ACBL online tournaments are deliberately designed to be crapshoots.
  
• The best way to quickly improve the ACBL tournaments is to increase the number of boards played, however the market has spoken and the market LOVES the masterpoint lottery that currently prevails

As a practical example I can probably dredge up posts from 15 years back where I argued that BBO should work on defining a standard interface so that third party developers could link their products into BBO. Fred made a conscious decision not to go down that path. Ws it the right thing to do? Who knows.

FWIW, I take solace in the old Polish saying "Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy"

[Cyberyeti]

I'd be interested to see the auction rolled on with what partner thought your 5♦ meant, I really cannot see that pass should even be in the frame for any meaning I'd give it.

[Winstonm]

This hand does bring up an interesting point to my mind and that is does a jump to 5 of a minor still show the same strength as would a lower level jump over a preempt? To be clear, 3H-4S is standardly played as quite a strong hand. I think the same would be said for 2H/2S-4 minor. I think it is much less clear if 3H/S-5 minor is still as strong.

[hrothgar]

thepossum, on 2019-March-27, 16:49, said:

Where my auction went wrong is that I tried to force the auction to slam, bid 5 diamonds and GB for some mysetrious reason thought that was a good contract. I wasnt alone in that. Some people just bid 6C immediately and some people seemed to know that a 5H cue bid would have the desired effect of getting to a 6C slam. Maybe 5D isnt the best bid but how on earth could it be interpreted as the preferred game suit after I had overcalled 4H with 4S and North had clubs like that

There is an art to playing with GIB, part of which involves avoiding ambiguous bids.

In this case, there's really no way to know what GIB thinks that the 5♦ bid shows.

• Is it a cue bid?
  
• Is it a second suit, retreating from 5♣

Who knows? The safe course of action is to chose something unambiguous.

• Pass (hard to go wrong here)
  
• 5!H Can't be a second suit
  
• 5!S must be natural, to play
  
• 6!C Must be natural, to play

Given that GIB's 5♣ bid is so random, I have no idea which of these is the right bid to make.
However, I would make any of them before I bid 5♦ partnering GIB.

Opposite a better program, I'd probably bid 5♥. Then again, opposite a better program I'd never be facing this dilemna

[hrothgar]

thepossum, on 2019-March-27, 16:49, said:

People will attack me and my bid rather than the pass by North of course

North's pass is atrocious. I don't think anyone disagrees.

However, 5!♦ is probably the last bid that I would consider with your hand.

[johnu]

thepossum, on 2019-March-27, 15:57, said:

Where does all the revenue from these tournaments go. It certainly doesn't seem to go into improving the quality of the bot play or listening to users.

GIB has basically reached its end of life. GIB has sprung more leaks than the programmers can fix and only a complete rewrite or replacement can make it substantially better. I'm sure BBO has concluded that minimal spending on GIB is the best business decision.

Most of the money from GIB goes to improving the "free" playing site (also used in robot tournaments), and paying for support staff and servers to keep everything running. BBO is just rewriting the BBO website to use HTML5 which has taken months and months (a couple of years?). Some minimal ad revenue and some income from non-robot tournaments seem to make up the rest of BBO's income.

Maybe BBO should spend more money trying to improve the robots and improve the paying customers' experience, but it would probably be a waste of money since relatively few players are going to stop playing because GIB has major bugs.

[apollo1201]

johnu, on 2019-March-27, 18:39, said:

GIB has basically reached its end of life. GIB has sprung more leaks than the programmers can fix and only a complete rewrite or replacement can make it substantially better. I'm sure BBO has concluded that minimal spending on GIB is the best business decision.

Maybe this (sry it is in French) and the introduction of Argine (CQ name on French decks) will help in some months?

http://dl.goto-games...O-Funbridge.pdf