Wentys

In the recent Sunday daylong (free robot, playing through a browser) the robot North opened 1C - P - 1NT (my bid) - P - P - P I've missed something either about 2/1 or about the 1NT being forcing for one more round, or I'm misunderstanding the GIB bidding. Going back now to the tournament history, here is how the Robot says it interpreted my 1NT bid: 2-4C 2-4D 2-3H 2-3S 6-10HCP 7+ total points What am I missing here? I expected my 1NT bid to force for 1 round. Aargh, the force is only 1M .. 1NT apologies. Now, how to delete this post entirely? Thanks

I seem to often get kicked out playing the eighth board of a 8-board robot clocked tournament. Even though (I think) I was still within the 25-minute time limit and had time on my clock. Scores for the board are shown as A==. And then I don't end up in the result list anywhere. Have I just exceeded the overall time limit for the tournament, or is there some mechanism that says something like "last three finishers get booted out"? How does the mechanism work, and why, when there are typically 40 entries, are there typically only 35 finishers? Thanks

Viewing History | Recent Hands shows the 50 most recent hands with the most recently one played at the top of the list. Nice. :-) But switching between My Table and Other Tables always loses the scroll position in the list, and re-focuses / scrolls to the bottom of the list. :-( First prize would be to remember the board / item the user is viewing, and when switching MyTable / OtherTables to get the focus back to where it was. Second prize would be to rather put it at the top of the list - most recent hand, rather than on the oldest hand.

Thanks for the comprehensive analysis and answer, I appreciate it. So re-reading the thread about the "bidding and the history of cards played" represented as a string which seeds the robot simulation, I can understand how my random play might introduce future robot variations. For example, if I hold 234 of a suit and randomly pick the 2 to lead, my "history" is not the same as another player who randomly picks the 4. Even though the two plays are equivalent in "bridge logic", they create different seeds for the robots, and potentially different choices for their play. Does my understanding now seem better? I quite liked the suggestion from someone that perhaps the robot seed should be determined once at the start of playing the hand, i.e. on final contract only. So it won't matter how you got to your contract. The question of whether I played a 2 or a 3 from "bridge equivalent" cards would then probably create the same robot future plays from the robots.

My observation is that there does appear to be an element of Robot non-determinism. At a hand I just played in a 40-player individual tournament, about 8 of us ended up in 1NT. I went down badly, so went back to see what others had done. The initial four tricks are exactly the same on all the boards I examined, apart from W discards on trick 4. The E robot on lead seemed to randomly decide whether to pursue the attack on spades or switch to hearts. In all cases where it switched suits, the contract made, all others it failed. But it did appear that even for exactly the same discard by East on trick four, at one table it switched suit, at one table it didn't. So my crisp question is "If exactly the same bidding and first 16 cards are played at different tables, might the Robot on lead make a random choice between whatever it evaluates as best plays?"

At an invited game or some tournaments we get compared to perhaps 15 other tables, all human. I'd like one of those other tables to be 4 robots playing the deal, so we have a refence point on how well they do compared to humans, and we can inspect their bidding. Alternately, is there an easy way to re-create the deal and ask some robots to bid and play it? thanks

The 2/1 GIB CC (I followed the first link at https://www.bridgebase.com/doc/gib_system_notes.php) does not tick the Drury checkbox under the sections for Major Openings. Yet when I examine some bidding by robots on "Practice > Just Declare", they use 1M 2C and explain this as Drury. Is the Convention Card out of date? Or are the "Just Declare" hands based on a different software version? If I enter an individual tournament with a Robot partner, is this the applicable convention card? What am I missing? Thanks

Under Solitaire there is an infinite stream of "Just Declare" hands that are supposedly all makeable. Does that mean always makeable by all those with flawless bridge logic, or does that mean always makeable provided the player makes some lucky guesses? Thanks

While busy on "Practice > Just Declare" I keep getting an annoying pop-up that "BBO thinks you are away from your keyboard, etc. and you will be logged out". Even while I am actively playing (all with mouse gestures rather than the keyboard, of course. Is there any way to suppress this or change a setting for the timeout? I'm not in the US, and it may be related to an occasionally slow connection. Thanks

Aha, there is another "Just Declare" under the Solitaire section, different from the Competitive Daylong tournaments. There I don't believe there is a way to compare to other players.

Someone posted that he took a wrong line on Just Declare, went down, and yet scored better than average. I cannot find any way to see how other tables have done on the hands I've played under Just Declare. Is there a way to compare my play to other declarers under Just Declare? Thanks