smerriman

@all - itt appears that challenges are being scored and added to your 'Recent tournaments' page within BBO, but may never show up in your Mail like they normally do. So please check that page for results. @gordontd - it appears you only completed 9 boards against hrothgar and none against muddylane. Please don't let challenges expire as it really messes things up for everyone - sounds like Muddylane is OK with replaying, but I'll need to figure out an adjusted score / penalty in favour of hrothgar.

You're missing the point - it's South's play that is a terrible play that no human would do, but standard for GIB; covering the 9 with the J guarantees declarer takes all the trumps.

https://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:01c37f3c.74a0.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1585804116&u=smerriman smerriman 50 - 4 barmar

You're promising 19+ total points. That's probably impossible given the bidding; I don't know how GIB simulates impossible situations, but for example, if you had the A of spades rather than the J (and West opened a balanced 10 count), 4♥x still scores better than 5♦ even though 5♦ makes.

GIB plays as if the other players are playing double dummy. From a double dummy perspective, it makes no difference what card it plays; it's not clever enough to leave declarer a "guess".

Do you mean this which I recall has been answered by BBO on the forum multiple times?

Both seem to have completed correctly: http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:61160527.7280.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1585570629 http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:756361bb.7280.11ea.b96d.0cc47a39aeb4-1585570663

lol

Sure - have updated the spreadsheet. Will check with @barmar re the advanced robot upgrade.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kcdxbdguuq490t4/Event%2019.xlsx?dl=0 Announcement - if you have completed 9/9 matches, you may challenge those in the other pool who have also completed 9/9 matches (but not others). This tournament will be IMP, best-hand. Scores converted to VPs as normal. We have a comfy 19 entries, so I've added GIB to make two pools of 10. The twist? The top ten in each pool will progress to round 2. That's right, this is actually going to be a full round robin, since that works out to be pretty much exactly the same number of challenges to reach the semifinals as previous events. But we'll stick with completing one pool at a time, so people don't get too far behind (or ahead, if nige1 attempts to play 19 challenges in a day ;) ). Otherwise, you've all played before; you know the drill. The deadline for the first [half] round is 15 April, 11:59pm EST. The deadline for the second round is May 3rd, 11:59pm EST.

Ah, I see now, thanks.

I'm probably missing something obvious here, but how is this a line? If you lose a trick to the ♠Q, you still have 2 diamond losers, so need the trump K onside. If East covers with the ♠Q and you ruff - or it drops in the first two rounds - you still haven't achieved anything in diamonds and need the trump K onside.

https://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/51209-diagrams-with-play-included-how/page__view__findpost__p__944941

That's in trump contracts. The correct lead from AKxx vs no trump is usually 'another suit', but if you're going to, any card could be right; even humans don't have hard and fast rules there..

GIB randomly breaks leading rules for no reason.

Alright. Let's do a quick one week registration and get straight into it, assuming BBO is capable of handling the load at the moment. IMPs, popular choice of best-hand/non-best-hand. Registration deadline is 7pm, 28 March, New Zealand Standard Time. Usual wall of text for first-timers:

Congrats billyfung2!

The danger seems to be that if West passes like they should, you'll be playing in 2♣.. .. though tbh now that I think of it, I can't really see much alternative.

Google 'why toilet paper' and you'll find many many articles :) There's absolutely no connection whatsoever between toilet paper and the coronavirus, but it seems it's just some weird psychological effect.

Good luck to the finalists - nige1 vs billyfung2.

I'm not quite following the logic here - if more people play with 12 boards, there will be more challenges to complete, so you're still be playing the same number of boards in terms of time commitment. Is it something to do with the 3 day expiry?(Would definitely be nice to have that increasable, but I expect it's to limit the number of matches the server has to remember - not that 16 hands and 1 in progress takes up much room when compressed.)

I think you might be right. A while ago I did some probability analysis on 2000 GIB challenge hands - once you restrict it to one of West/East holding QJ and someone playing a high honor earlier in the trick, that reduced it to a tiny sample of 8, but 8/8 of those occasions GIB dropped the queen. That must have been deleted from the code along with the other notes about signalling etc. That is awful. Perhaps spreading the news about this might be the catalyst needed to get BBO to actually do something about the code (at least opening it up to others), rather than say it's too hard to fix anything but bidding holes.

According to GIB system notes it randomises its card when it has equivalent cards in a doubleton, though there's other stuff in the system notes that is 100% provably wrong. I don't have evidence either way, though I don't recall seeing such a pattern. Could do some digging to find out.

Only two things: a) Advanced simulates more hands than Basic when making decisions. b) Basic always makes 'book' bids; Advanced runs simulations during the auction to determine whether other possible bids would lead to a better result.

Thanks, appreciated. Elyk25 told me the day before he had played half the boards and was about to complete the rest, which is pretty disappointing. Semifinals are: nige1 vs cherdano billyfung2 vs Garant_7 As usual, 4x16 boards, and let's aim for about a week a match.