smerriman

GIB is programmed that bidding a second time shows 4-5 total points. Yes, not a great rule, but I'm still not sure how you were intending to find 4♥.

.. either your humor is beyond me or you missed the point of this thread entirely :)

Wow, that's crazy. Not even just the lead, but South's card too..

Agreed, as North I would have bid 3♦ rather than pass 2NT but I'm not sure what that has to do with finding an 8 card heart fit. South should bid 2♠ over 2♦ surely?

I'm puzzled by 1♣, a pass, 2♥, 4♣, 4♦, and 5♦, but I definitely agree with 1♠ :)

From your perspective, yes. From the forum's perspective, consider that there are 45000 people online right now - 45 of them are experiencing streaks at least as bad as yours and wondering why the dealer hates them :) They tend to notice and post it about it on the forum much more than the 45 people on the other end of the spectrum who have been averaging 12.5+!

The probability you averaged 7.48 hcp over your last 25 hands is 100% :) For the probability you average 7.48 hcp over your *next* 25 hands, you can estimate it with a normal distribution - for one hand, the mean is 10 and standard deviation is 4.1302. Over 25 hands, the mean is 10 and standard deviation is 4.1302/sqrt(25) = 0.8620. Plugging that into a normal distribution gives a probability 0.1%. There have been numerous posters who confuse the 0.1% with the 100% though, and think this means something was 'wrong' with the deal generation - while rare, over a huge population, these 0.1% still can and will happen regularly.

I'd expect the computer to find a low diamond a clear favorite at MPs. At IMPs, probably still a diamond, but it's a close call between that and the club ace. But as Mike mentioned, this is the best lead under the assumption that your partner can see your hand after you lead it, not necessarily the best lead.

Yeah, the robots are notoriously bad at slam bidding. With a human partner, it's trivial to avoid slam after 4♥ - 5♣ - 5♥, but the robots simply don't know how to control bid properly and no doubt would launch into blackwood after the normal 4♥ cue. I've done far too much analysis of daylong hands and any sense of non-randomness is purely in your mind. My impression is that their biggest flaw is the fact you get the usual number of boring hands, which give you unavoidable 50% scores and drop you down the table.

The $1 Daylong Reward is especially good for BBO points quickly at the moment (shameless plug). Though of course, BBO points are entirely meaningless.

To be succinct: 1,2,3) Purely random. 4,5,6) No. OK, BBO haven't denied the latter, but: - the last update was two years ago (bidding only; I believe the only cardplay change in the last 10 years was about 7 years ago which was a staggering complex change of.. forcing opening leader to cash an ace against 7NT). - the BBO representative who used to respond to bug reports on the forum said he'd start doing so more regularly, then suddenly stopped and hasn't posted in 3 years. - my first bug report on this forum was a simple bidding sequence back in June 2016 (RHO opens 2S; I overcall 2N, GIB transfers to 3H and then passes with a 1624 13 count). The founder of BBO himself replied and said he'd make sure the programmers looked at it. It is still 100% replicable today. So, if that isn't a no, I don't know what is.

The solution outlines why playing for a 4-1 trump split with a singleton honor does not succeed. You will lose the 4th round of trumps even after you take a successful finesse on the second round. The only way you can ever take four trump tricks is when QJ is doubleton.

Robot tournaments don't show up because they're used to generate future Instant Tournaments. ACBL virtual club games don't show up because ACBL said so.

No, just a standard Windows PC. Works fine for me in Firefox, Chrome + Edge. I've never seen it happens to others watching bridge videos either. I suspect if this was widespread there'd be far more complaints about it, so there must be something particular about your setups that is causing problems, as opposed to "why didn't they do that in the first place?".

Has been about a week that the 'Prime Bidders challenge: and the winner of February is...' has linked to a 404 page. Not that I'm really that interested in who won, more when someone will notice it's broken :)

It can be useful when you want declarer to make an early guess from KJ. And against weak opponents, they'll probably assume you didn't underlead the ace and always try the jack. But you'd better be confident you're not throwing away a trick for nothing.

It's intentional; nobody sees their own username, only others.

For what it's worth, when I join a table, the chat *does* automatically switch to Table (if I sat), or Kibitzers (if I kibitzed). And it always has. So the people posting in this thread must be doing something differently from me.

The manual is completely wrong. You should never assume anything about the cards that GIB plays. Even the part about signals when following to an opening lead are often incorrect. Partially correct enough that there was probably some code somewhere that was intended to do it originally, but provably buggy (especially the part I found about it playing at random from a doubleton, but even the other instances which were guaranteed to not have been simulation based). Perhaps there was similar code that handled count signals originally, but the randomness and bugginess of GIB kills any potential advantage you could get by reading into it.

It's not a bug; I've told you this before. If you don't believe me, then you can believe barmar, who confirmed that they only use the same seeds in tournaments.

While I would have used Smolen as West, slam isn't looking good if either of East's club honors were moved to diamonds, so I think I'm happy to settle for 4♠.

I'm in the 2♦ camp. We're not going to miss a 4-4 heart fit that way, and without that I'm happy going low. Opening 1NT would be my second choice.

In all of the versions near yours, the line of code that does this when searching user content is: $this->settings['search_ucontent_days'] = ( $this->settings['search_ucontent_days'] ) ? $this->settings['search_ucontent_days'] : 365; So it does look like 365 is a configurable setting by a forum admin without any upgrades necessary. While Google search is a potential alternative, it makes it hard to distinguish posts I've started and ones I've posted in, so I do agree the 365 limit is a bit annoying.

It's already there. Right click on the player of interest and choose 'Kibitz'.

I suspect if anyone had a clue what you were talking about, they would have replied by now, so you might want to get to the point :)