thie

I also noticed that 4 nt showed the minors. One player was in 6♠ though after the same initial bidding. In his case 4nt was explained as blackwood for spades (which actually makes more sense to me. Why not reserve 5♣ over 4♠ to show the minors?) So something must have changed (it was an instant tournament so 6♠ was played with an earlier GIB version). Most players passed 4♠ which is rather too pessimistic for my taste seeing as how little you need pard to have for a decent small slam at the least. Still I don't quite understand the pass, as I certainly did not promise a heart stopper anywhere 4 nt might easily be 4 down from scratch, you would expect that to be factored into the simulation. And I guess I don't like the simulation then on the second board :) Passing in this situation without much defensive values / trump values is just about a deadly sin in my book.

I am wondering why the new and supposedly improved GIB version 31 would pass on this and this hand where I thought the bidding was clearly forcing. The results were obviously disastrous.

I would like some feedback on a bid I made in the following situation. Sitting south I held: [hv=d=s&v=n&s=skxxhktxdkqxxxcjx]133|100|Scoring: MP[/hv] Since I agreed to play solid openers with him, I passed and pard opened 1♣ and he is known to be a very solid opener normally, especially when opening a minor (1 major in 3rd hand could be light). I respond 1♦ and he rebids 1 NT. I rebid 3 NT. Pard held: [hv=d=s&v=n&s=skxxhktxdkqxxxcjx]133|100|Scoring: MP[/hv] and he went down 1 because ♦ broke 4-1. He was a bit upset and called my 3 nt bid a 'rookie mistake'. I should have bid 2 nt, which would put him in position to judge whether or not he should bid 3 nt, having precise information on my hand (a good 10 to a bad 12 count). If I had bid 2 nt, he no doubt would have passed. I think however that there is one positive feature about my hand that he can not know and therefore not take into account: the 5-card diamonds, where he is likely to hold 3 himself. I could easily have had a 3-3-4-3 or 4-4 in the minors, in which case 3 nt is much less attractive, and I might have bid 2 nt with that. Also I think that 3 nt on our combined hands is a very reasonable contract that was just unlucky to fail (at least half of the field was in 3 nt actually). What do you think? Was this really a 'rookie mistake'?

The (probably few) people for whom that would be an issue could just put the notes on a memory stick (which they likely own already anyway if they are working from multiple computers).

A typical scenario that happens to me a lot: I have either agreed with some of my regulars to play around a certain time, or I am just online waiting for some friend to show. While I am waiting I am doing something else, e.g. reading a book in a chair at some distance from the computer. At a certain point my computer produces a sound indicating a private chat message, so I walk up the computer only to find that it is a message from one of the clubs of which I am a member announcing a tourney. It would be very nice if I could assign different sounds to messages originating from: 1) someone I marked as a friend 2) someone that is marked neutral 3) 'group-messages' sent to members of clubs.

I must say that this strikes me as a minor design flaw, both from a privacy and a technical point of view. I did not know that the 'notes system' worked this way and I am only keeping a couple of 'harmless' notes re system agreements with a couple of regulars, but I can definitely see that some people might have a problem with the fact that others like BBO technical staff is able to view the notes they keep on theirs friends, enemies or others, not to mention that this information actually goes over the wire everytime that you log in. One might of course argue that you then just should not store private information in there, but I do not see what would be against it to just keep this information completely local in a file that is preferrably also accessible via other (text processing) tools so you would be able to do scripts based searches / replacements in the notes if you like. This would at the same time remove any limits. There is a ton of open source code out there to help implement a feature like this. Just my 2 cents, keep up the good work.

OK, I can appreciate your argument, if there are actually people out there - and you seem to think there are - who are trying to polish up their obviously microscopic self-esteem by employing these methods, I can only pity them. It probably does not happen often enough for me to get bitten by the new policy anyway as ben explained. I guess for me it is more psychological / frustration with the bidding and playing skills of the GIBs than anything else: here I am playing with this bot, whose behaviour I cannot influence, we bid to what I think is a very nice contract in which I will be declarer, but now instead of passing he (she?) has the impertinence to make another bid causing us to stumble into a completely unmakeable contract and convicting me to be dummy. Now with the new policy I have to remain seated and watch the entire painfull process of my bot friend miserably failing to make the contract - and of course the contract I had in mind would have been just about perfect - while all them bots are burning MY cpu cycles. And of course his/her bot brother/sister opps get the credit. It just feels like a small cyber conspiracy on my account. Also it is a minor pain in the neck that I just cannot undo my misclicks but maybe that is what I deserve for not cleaning my mouse on a more regular basis. I guess I have to live with all of this or pick another type of scoring.

The redeal button is disabled when you have selected 'duplicate IMPs', the way of scoring that happens to be the default and also the one I like best. I know about the requests to NOT use IMP scoring when playing with the bots, however I think shoeless is right in claiming that it does not affect the field scoring as long as the humans at the table do not fool around, which I for one don't. I guess the simplest way of fixing this would be if the redeal button is just enabled for all types of scoring (can someone explain why this is not the case in the first place, this also goes for the undo button).

While in general I applaud the new policy with regard to booting and bailing, there is one exception: When I am playing with 3 bots it happens on a fairly regular basis that my bot pard screws up the (typically slam) bidding (strangely enough this seems to happen more frequently to our side than to the bot opps, or could this be psychological, hmm). Anyway, when that happens there is an easy way out, to avoid having insult added to the injury incurred, just abondon the table and restart. I am quite sure that the bots don't mind a bit, plus what is more important of course, if the table is on IMP scoring the field score is not screwed up. So what is the deal here, does bailing a table with bots 'count' in terms of application of this new policy or not?