smerriman

Huh? I'm saying that if BBO is biasing the hands and you think this is obvious, then it should be *easy* for you to look at the hands and determine which are the biased sets. If there is no bias, then you will unable to do so. If you're unwilling to take a simple test that will actually prove whether your claim is right or wrong, then I guess enough said, and there's no point anyone spending any more time on it.

Actually, scrub the last paragraph. Easy to run that test without bias - just have someone else mix in groups of deals that come from BigDeal, and deals which come from challenges (or even simpler, BBO IMP vs BBO MP). Your task would be to guess which was which. If you are correct that there is an obvious difference, you should be able to guess consistently better than average. Let me know if you're game and I can set up the deals for you.

I think this is absolutely true. But it's also absolutely true for 100% random hands as well - playing MPs is far, far more complex than playing IMPs. It's well known that when playing IMP tournaments, the majority of hands are completely meaningless - the whole tournament comes down to a small number of decisions in a small subset of hands - while when playing MP, every trick in every hand is important. So the fact there are far more decisions to be made in MP vs IMPs doesn't imply non-randomness - it's what you'd expect as a baseline. Nope, I have no idea how you could possibly test this. The fact that neither of us do in a sense strengthens the argument against you - the only way BBO would be able to bias such hands is for them to have an algorithm for testing this, so they knew which hands to throw out, and do so in a way that doesn't affect the overall distributions, etc. I do not believe they are capable of having such an algorithm. Since a large scale test is unfeasible, I would recommend you get a source of deals dealt via BigDeal, load them through a teaching table, and play 'as if it were a challenge'. I am confident that you would see exactly the same 'obvious' signs that the MP versions involve considerably more decisions. If the manipulation is indeed obvious, and you go into the test with the right mindset (which is tough, since you'll be wanting to look for evidence you're right, rather than being unbiased), you should notice the difference straight away. You can then elaborate on specific differences that you noticed, with examples.

Mythdoc, I'm really not understanding your posts at all. Firstly, you say that you do not believe the generation of deals is flawed, and that you are only referring to the "deal pool". You included a reference to how BBO describes the deal pool. But then you talked about noticing the effects in robot challenges. Deal pooling, as defined by BBO, is this. For every board in a daylong, a fixed number of hands is randomly generated (a pool). Each time a human plays each board in the tournament, one of that board's hands is selected at random from the pool. That way every hand is the pool is played approximately the same number of times, while avoiding the effects of cheating by people that enter the tournament multiple times. This is not a secret; it's just a trivial algorithm. In a robot challenge, both players get the same boards. Deal pooling is therefore 100% inapplicable. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears you've seen the words 'deal pool', misunderstood them, and are talking about something completely unrelated - that you believe that BBO are intentionally biasing the hand generator by not dealing random hands, but by throwing out 'flat hands' based on the scoring. So let's continue based on that. You then stated two things: a) That it was "immediately obvious" with a "clear difference" solely by playing challenge hands. b) That the only accurate way to test whether this is true or not is to get a large set of players to complete truly random generated hands and compare with BBO's "maybe-not-so-random" hands. And that testing this is basically impossible. Your earlier posts lined up with a) - you made it extremely clear you thought this was testable: If this is true, all you have to do is clearly quantify the factor that made it completely obvious to you. Then that can immediately be put to the test. Yet when pressed to quantify it, you've moved towards statement b), which basically admits that your 'immediately obvious' was completely made up. So which is it? I am happy to run tests based on a). All you have to do is quantify what was 'obvious' in your head.

I think you're still missing the whole point here - the *only* part of interest / relevance when it comes to bridge deals is how you 'pick a random number between 1 and 52' in a way that not only satisfies random distributions but is also not predictable based on previous random numbers. A simple pseudo random number generator seeded with the internal clock is not even remotely close to good enough, and would be extremely easy to crack, and also wouldn't be sufficiently random, given the limited number of values the clock may take* About 5 years ago the ACBL random number generator was cracked; given three consecutive boards, it was possible to determine every layout from then on. You might like to read this article on how BigDeal works, and everything it had to consider. Especially interesting is how they were able to generate a seed from human keystrokes. * Well, it may be good enough for BBO, given the immense number of things going on in parallel on the server, which nobody could really keep track of. But you'd still need to use a good PRNG that doesn't repeat as often as most basic ones would.

Get the host to check 'permission required to play'.

It may be the definition of a minimum, but to me 4♠ is a minimum with no values outside of spades and diamonds. So clear 2NT.

Note that he did say in that article he wasn't talking about situations such as the one discussed in this thread:

Haven't played it myself, and perhaps something has changed in the last 5 years, but if Kit Woolsey strongly recommends it, it's hard to argue..

Yes, its evaluation system is insane, but that's just standard GIB.

GIB just bids 2♣. Often the descriptions don't line up with the actual logic.

GIB values East's hand as 11 total points, which falls below the limit of its opening 1 bid. But that hand is above the limit of its preempts.

It's already there. Just right click on the player name and you'll see an option to kibitz that player only.

I wouldn't say that at all; it's more the reverse implication - leading something else almost always denies having an AK, since that's the #1 choice of lead in almost all situations.

I wouldn't say 3♦ is obvious at all; this seems too much of an underbid to me, so I'm with the 3♣ bidders. But from responder's perspective, if opener did bid 3♦, you still have a natural, forcing 3♥ response.

Is there an alternative to 4♠ (via 4♥, assuming you play a direct 4♠ as something else)?

Well, yes, it should. The opponent has made a mistake (by asking you, rather than privately to your partner). If you're 80% sure it's forcing, and 20% sure it's non-forcing, does that mean the opponent's mistake forces you to choose the 20% option (logical alternative) to avoid the use of UI? Common sense says no. (If you mean that the first infraction was your partner explaining their bid to the whole table rather than just the opponents, then sure, that's UI and the opponents can't override that - but that's a different scenario from the one discussed here).

Yes. Just like I kept telling you: In your example you were the one that made the different lead, not the robot.. when the robot simulated hands at your table, it discarded ones where you don't have the 4 of diamonds, while at other tables it discarded ones where you don't have the 5 of hearts. Thus causing completely different results from that point forward.

I'm with TylerE here - I'm only bidding 2NT if I'm 100% confident in how I'm going to follow it up, and in this case I'm not. In this case West is caught halfway in between a minimum and extra strength, which is why they had a difficult decision.

The explanation is pretty obvious here; North doubled and is therefore guaranteed to have the remaining honors. It's a major issue with GIB that it overly trusts opposition bidding, and is unable to distinguish between lines which rely on that information and lines which don't. But it's been like that forever.

I know you said your post is not about distribution, but I've done the same analysis numerous times over tens of thousands of daylong hands. And the results for shape are exactly what you would expect from random hand generation. Incidentally, if you had a sample since the start of the pandemic, why did you restrict your conclusion to 'the last several months'? As for your "conspiracy theory" about BBO adding more variance to the hands, to be honest, I don't think they'd know how if they tried. But if you wanted to quantify any numbers behind how you think they're doing so or what you think shouldn't be happening, I can attempt to refute them, like I have every other similar claim.

What was the auction? [edit] [hv=https://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?s=STHT97D643CAKJ863&n=SAKQ876HA54DJ2C747&w=S542HQJ863DT75CT5&d=s&a=3CPP3NPPP&n=SQ75HT84DJCQT9832&e=SKT862HAQJ9DQ72C4&s=SA93HK3DAKT863C65&a=1S2DDP2H3DPP3HPPP&d=e]400|300[/hv] I think it almost certain that N/S were not cheating :) Note that a club lead is also down 9.

Nowhere anyone on BBO does it say that in Prime, the robots will behave exactly the same way at every table given the same input. Instead, it says that Prime offers free advanced robots. Advanced robots are specifically programmed to give different results every time they analyse a hand. If you don't like that, fine, but don't blame BBO for misreading what you signed up for. Simply quit. Back to ignoring you again..

Why do you keep posting the same thing over and over? You've already been told multiple times this is not a bug, and it is working as intended. Here was the last time, where I even quoted barmar, in case for some reason you specifically didn't believe me and would only listen to messages from BBO management.

Thanks, this is now the best comment I've ever read on BBO.