harleyf

Thanks very much for the reply. The thought of risking letting the opps make the slam / -2 vs a guaranteed -1, I guess I'd always just set the contract. Still too new at this to worry about IMP vs MP differences. But I see why this might be in the long run. I'm not good enough to try to imagine hands yet - I'm still concenrtating on what I've got and how to play it. I'm going to have to stare at this and see if there's some general principle I can glean from it

There's lots of threads talking about robot bidding here, but I have a question about robot play/defense. I'm working on my skills playing the daily robot tournament, getting my atrophied skills back into shape. Ran across this hand this week: [hv=pc=n&s=sakt4h9862dkj2cq8&w=s873hak73dt643c42&n=sqj9hdaq98cakjt63&e=s652hqjt54d75c975&d=n&v=0&b=1&a=1cp1hp2dp4np6nppp]399|300[/hv] This was a Just Declare, so the bidding isn't mine, hand was given to me and tried to deal with the mess. The lead is the HK from west. Looking at my hands, I can see I can discard basically anything. I discard the D8 from dummy and the H2 from my hand. Opps take 5 hearts, down 4. That sucked, but at least it will be flat I say. Nope. Score comes back, 6NT-4 = 20%. Played 100+ of times. WTF? Reviewing the hand, very interesting. It's scored -12, -4, -3, -1, and makes 6. Down -12 is easy -- a few people saw this mess and just conceded all the tricks. Down 4 is me. Down 3 -- discard a high heart at trick 1. This results in the robots not managing the suit well and end up taking the fourth heart with the heart Ace, never getting the last heart. Down 1 -- discard the S9, followed by either another spade or a club. Robots switch to diamonds. Makes - discard the club 3. Somehow, with this incredibly clever move, the robots switch suits at trick 2. So, my question is whether any of this is predictable. Is there some logic I'm missing here? I realize they are just robots, and perhaps they just do dumb things.