Ditherer

Sorry that I didn't explain why I consider this hand to be interesting. The bidding was nothing to be proud of, but the lesson is that sometimes only one distribution of the cards allows a contract to be made and (at least at IMP scoring) one needs to play for it. Suppose declarer rises with the Ace of Clubs when the 10 is led; then the slam is certain to fail unless the King is singleton (in which case the 10 would not have been led). Instead, declarer should play for King 10 doubleton and trumps 3-2, discarding losing Spades on winning Clubs. (If you don't think this hand is interesting, please ignore the post rather than make rude comments.)

Sometimes luck favours the bold ... https://tinyurl.com/22msalgr :-)

A French AI research team has challenged some top players to a tournament against their bridge playing robot. It is being live streamed on YouTube today and tomorrow: So far, they have shown people chatting in French, plus the team leader welcoming the human competitors in English. Hopefully, they will start showing the matches soon ...

Thank you for running these stimulating and extremely popular competitions. Here is a suggestion to add to the fun and to facilitate analysis of robot behaviour (as it will provide daily performance data relative to 10,000+ humans): Automatically register a house robot to play in each competition! Its result on each board (and overall) is a "par", enabling human competitors to compare their results with the house robot's. (To highlight the par, you could make the house robot everybody's friend by default.) Note that human competitors would have the in-built advantage of knowing that theirs is the "best" hand at the table. Should you wish, you could even quantify how much better your advanced robots are than your standard robots (when playing against other robots) by registering both. WDYT?