smerriman

The last two replies above are from BBO employees :) The point of this format is not to see how you compared to the whole field. Everyone on the leaderboard gets dealt different hands, so even if it did tell you that you were 50000 out of 60000 this doesn't mean you did badly; it probably means you weren't dealt high scoring hands. It's more to see how close to the top (in absolute terms) you can get after you get dealt some good hands so you can get your name on the leaderboard. If you really want to see how many players are playing, bid 7NTxx and concede all 13 tricks (only takes a minute) - but it's not that meaningful a number.

Exactly. Any bust-showing bid would be comparable to a 2♦ waiting (unless of course an immediate 2♥ shows that.)

If, say, double were being played as showing a bust, that would be a comparable call under the subset rule, wouldn't it? Because every hand that doubles would have bid 2♦. It would be the wide ranging nature of the pass that seems more problematic..

I'm not seeing anything wrong? Each tournament starts at 5am on one day, and finishes at 5am on the next. (Perhaps you're missing the little arrows before 5:00am on the ending day, showing that it runs *up until* that time, confirmed by hovering over or clicking the link).

No. It was a proof of concept (exemplifying the problem), not an actual hand.

The point of duplicate is that you should always care. 1♣ is a completely normal contract, and you should be aiming to beat everyone else in the same situation. If others get to different contracts because of poor bidding, there's nothing you can do about them.

Ouch, that 3rd challenge really hurt :) Threw my normal bidding out of the window for the last one and managed to get 20 IMPs back, but not close to enough. https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:ef15aec6.5d9d.11ec.b879.0cc47a39aeb4-1639569344&u=smerriman&v3b=web&v3v=6.0.2 Congrats billyfung2!

It most likely wasn't. But the players should be providing some sort of written agreements to resolve issues like this. If they're not going to do so, then perhaps treating this as undiscussed will help them do it next time..

The question here appears to be - could 3♣ have been interpreted as something else if not for the UI? The best way of answering this is based on the notes they provided, of which there are none. Asking them what their agreement is doesn't seem to be an appropriate solution, since the UI has already affected that. Perhaps polling the rest of the club to see what they believe 3♣ would mean if undiscussed is therefore the best way of seeing if there is a logical alternative. Whether that's what the laws say to do, I'm not sure; the laws are often silly :( Incidentally, if 5♦ was a near bottom and not many found 3NT, what exactly did others do? Probably not relevant, unless it implies that the system they've stated they play indeed isn't what others would expect..

Heh. Had to look this one up and found the story at the bottom of here. That's pretty funny :)

Right - so it's easily possible that a poor set of hands would rank at 50k even if played optimally.

It took several months for them to prioritize it, then they failed to fix it properly. https://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/84587-gib-makes-dd-error/page__view__findpost__p__1034241

Yep, BBO tried a different fix that doesn't work at all. Their change: if a +/-/= box has already been added to the card, then don't overwrite it with another one. This works in the original example since the order returned by the DD analysis is ♦8, ♦T, ♦A. So after it calculates the results for the ♦8 (=), it doesn't overwrite it when working on the ♦T like it used to. But in the most recent example, the order returned by the DD analysis is ♦J, ♦9, ♦7. It calculates the results for the diamond J, thinks the diamond ten doesn't exist due to the off-by-one bug, and applies the same score to the ♦9. Now when it comes to the ♦9 loop, it has the correct value but the new code logic tells it not to override it with the right one. In fact, take another look at my post above where I posted this sample hand that I expected to be broken before, but was working: [hv=https://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?n=DKHAKQJT9876543&e=DAQJ98765432CA&s=SAKQJT98765432&w=CKQJT98765432H2&d=w&a=1NPPP]400|300[/hv] Lead the king of diamonds and press the GIB button to see the exact example I provided is now broken in a hilarious way. Seriously, just change the one character I mentioned originally and it resolves everything..

I'm not sure what you mean. If you get dealt 4 hands where you can't make any games, even if you play them 100% perfectly for the optimal number of tricks, you will still be extremely low on the leaderboard. All of the players at the top of the leaderboard would have been dealt 4 hands where all have makeable games/slams. If you play enough times, then by the law of averages, yes, you will get the opportunity to get a better score too. If you want to see how many people are on the leaderboard, try bidding 7NTxx on each hand and concede 13 tricks.

lol, really BBO? All you had to do was change a *single character* in the javascript file.. and that one-character bug is still there. Somehow the developers must have done something else as a workaround for the first hand, without resolving the actual problem. The one-character change still perfectly resolves the last diagram. Now to figure out what they *actually* changed and whether that has unexpected consequences..

No, I didn't say that at all. The hands are different for everyone. Yes, that means it's a luck of the draw thing whether you get hands that can generate high scores, but that's why people play duplicate games elsewhere on BBO instead.

Actually, it's new to the HTML5 version. Was never an issue with Flash, as there were no hovers / taps involved.

Indeed.. I thought I made it extremely clear in my post how nonsensical the sequences were in GIB's system. Was just answering your question of what it means to GIB and how I'd bid as a human.

Huh? There is no remote chance of "leaving 4Hx in"; even GIB isn't that bad. Passing just allows it to show what minor it actually has; you know it has one if not both. And if it bids its 3 card major, I'm correcting to 5♣ as mentioned (after which it can bid diamonds if it really has a running diamond suit).

It looks like the other half of the challenge was completed a few days ago, so I've added them in. Billy - please send me the first challenge whenever you're available to play. (Have added you as a friend so if you follow me first, you can start the challenge immediately).

Are you looking for what the cue bid should mean if a decent bridge player made it, or what it means to the robot? They're unrelated, so you won't find any understanding of the latter or how to follow up via a Google search. I'm guessing the latter given you posted it in the GIB forum. You can assume GIB has less than 4 spades, since it will always double or bid spades with 4 or more. You can also pretty much assume GIB doesn't have a heart stopper; while 3N is described as showing "4- clubs", don't believe it as it will bid 3NT with both Jxx Kx xxx AKQxx and Jxx Kx AQx AKQxx. It might have a good hand with clubs, but it will also cue with Qxx xx AKQxxx Qx because cuebidding is fun, so don't expect it to have clubs. As for your followups, none of 4NT, pass, or redouble show anything in the robot's system, so it's probably not going to matter much what you'd do. I'd pass, see which minor GIB bids*, pass again and hope you didn't miss a grand slam. If you did, it's not like you could have gotten there with GIB anyway. * If you pass, GIB might follow up with 4♠, promising 4+ spades. You already know it will never have this (eg it chooses this continuation with QJx x Kxxxxx AKx for no apparent reason), so then all you can do is bid 5♣ and hope you survive.

Done this multiple times in the past on the forum. But fine. Go to MyHands, extract your hands for the last 6 months. Copy and paste resulting source code. Parse source code and only extract the MBC rows. Restrict rows to those with you, glotook, and two GIBs (and no passouts). 848 hands found. Ignore no trump hands. 666 hands found. Reduce hands to where you declared, since no doubt the bias is against you, not the bots. 388 hands found. Reduce hands to where you had an 8 card fit. 174 hands found. Count trumps in the opponents' hands. Results: 8-card fit: 118 3-2 breaks, 49 4-1 breaks, 7 5-0 breaks. Which is 67.8%, 28.2%, and 4.0%. There you go, proven wrong. If you suspect I'm making up these numbers, I'll happily send you links to the 174 hands so you can count them yourself. Here are the 5-0s as a taster. I could repeat it for finesses, but a) any finesse that's offside for one side is onside for the other, so it will work out to 50% even if there is bias, b) most people think they are losing lots of finesses because they take lots of finesses in dummy straight after the opening lead. This is nearly guaranteed to lose, due to fact that GIB leads passively, rarely from an honor. This isn't bias, but conditional probability.

That works the same way.

If you're talking about "Just Play Bridge", then you're likely reading the first number from the "players online" figure. The other players are not online right then; they got their score earlier in the day.

This sequence (along with many others) is not defined in SAYC, so it's not something you should ever bid unless you have an agreement. Probably the best agreement would be to make it a support jump shift - showing invitational values with 5 hearts AND support for diamonds, which can be hard to show if you start with 1♥.