Mbodell

I was able to successfully listen to voice yesterday for a while, but now later yesterday and today I'm getting an instant disconnect with 2 connect to voice server failed messages (there are 2 commentators, not sure if I'm getting one for each, or just 2 for no great reason). the start listening instantly switches to stop listening. I don't think it is on my side since I was successful with the same computer, same account, same information. I've tried both with normal sign on and invisible, so I don't think that effects it. I'm not sure if there is some global gap that is being hit or what not.

You could well be right, but I wouldn't be shocked if some partners might think 5♣ over 3♠ is exclusion keycard and be off for a disaster.

If the alternative is to contrast blast or pass with making a keycard call that may lead to a bad answer, that still might be the right call. For instance if the blast and pass answer says to blast, then trying keycard even if it may get you too high may be advisable if when you (surprisingly) get a really low answer you can stay lower and/or if you get the very positive answer you can show all the keys and allow for a 7 to be in play. I'm not saying that GIB is bidding right in all cases or in your case, but I think there are times when the bid is sensible even if there is some chance for a bad situation.

X for me. You can pull 4♠ to 5♣, raise 3♥ to 4♥, over 3♠ I guess you try an in tempo 3nt unless you know something special about RHO in which case maybe 4!C in that case too, but 3nt down 2 unlucky seems a spot of destiny. Maybe opponents will be kind enough to X 3nt if it is going down.

Some people want to play the weak and/or wide ranging only in 3rd seat where game forcing is off the table. And if you said the nt opener passed with 5 or 6 in the minor, and hence a known 8+ card fit, that seems a reasonable non-forcing treatment.

FWIW I know I'm not necessarily normal in my schedule but I actually like the times. In the free practice I played around midnight or 1am West Coast time. I plan to play from Toronto and will be likewise playing in the shortly after midnight or 1 am time period, possibly later if I were to play zip KO, so for me if it were 3am-3am that would be worse and 6am-6am would not be great. I figure it will take me about an hour, maybe slightly more, to play each session, so I do prefer playing them before going to sleep, since I'm likely to wake up around noon on NABC days and not want to play before or during in person NABC events.

I think best would be full random, but if you aren't going to do full random, a reasonable way to goose the points without restricting the opponents information is that the human player always has 10+ hcp. Then you don't know, the opponents may both have better hands than you, or your partner may have better. You'll still declare and have more of the points since you always have at least the average number of points, but you can't count on anything for the other hands. You know the opponents will never have 31+ hcp, but you know that by looking at your hand, not by applying another rule.

11 Smerriman vs 22 (43) Mbodell Q1 mbodell 30 (30) smerriman 11 (11), +19 net in quarter, +19 net overall. Hands http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:c129ae02.5ae4.11e7.be39.0cc47a39aeb4-1498532419&u=Mbodell. A good first quarter for both of us IMO with 11/16 push boards. BTW, from the other thread I'm very pro the non-best hand setting and mildly pro-IMPs.

I've experienced something similar in some instances where the first time a program is run things aren't initialized right and get 0. I solve it by re-running the command in the case that 0 is the answer.

I think most players do, but to be clear stratified is different than flighted. Flighted means if you aren't in the top flight, you don't play against the best players and can't win the overall most prestigious result, and are only compared against others in your flight. Stratified means you play against everyone and can, in theory, win the best overall award, but if/when you don't, you can still win awards for best result for those in your stratification. The event gives out more points to more people when it is stratified, so I think most people prefer that. Making big championship events non-stratified makes them more like real national events and is a way of field strengthening, in theory, as people who feel they have "no chance" overall, but "some chance" in the lowest strat, might have played if stratified and might not play if not. Stratification may also present challenges for this event in a couple of ways: 1, BBO often moves their strats around in ACBL tournaments to fit the field and this might be more difficult if each 18 person comparison section is a different field strength; 2, it will make more clear that the tournament isn't seeded (which I assume it isn't) where some player will have 90% of their comparisons against A strat players and someone else will have 90% of their comparisons against C strat players.

Good match mlbridge, it was fun. Ended up mbodell +47 net. Final score mbodell 122 - mlbridge 75. (first two quarters already reported) Q1 mbodell 26 (26) mlbridge 1 (1) +25 net in quarter, +25 net overall. Hands http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:96233f85.5718.11e7.be39.0cc47a39aeb4-1498114876&u=Mbodell Q2 mbodell 14 (40) mlbridge 24 (25) -10 net in quarter, +15 net overall. Hands http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:e0865a77.57df.11e7.be39.0cc47a39aeb4-1498200471&u=Mbodell Q3 mbodell 37 (77) mlbridge 29 (54) +8 net in quarter, +23 net overall. Hands http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:0e1c6995.58c8.11e7.be39.0cc47a39aeb4-1498300191&u=Mbodell Q4 mbodell 45 (122) mlbridge 21 (75) +24 net in quarter, +47 net overall. Hands http://webutil.bridgebase.com/v2/tview.php?t=ARDCHALLENGE:1e27fd68.5926.11e7.be39.0cc47a39aeb4-1498340590&u=Mbodell The most interesting boards were likely the third quarter, where the most combined imps were scored, especially the second half of that quarter where for that part of the match GIB EW had a winning card.

The 4 session championship pairs at the Santa Clara regional (d21) is not stratified. Neither is the 4 session championship swiss in the Sacramento regional (d21). So there can be some regional events that aren't stratified still.

Sorry I missed that, I accepted this next challenge and played the boards front my side. I got an error from bbo trying to challenge back a second 16 board match though.

Phil hooked me too, and I had seen a couple of challenge youtube vids. I'm in.

+1 for The Americans. I haven't started this current season yet, but it has been top notch so far.

And usually in sports trading the rule of thumb is whoever gets the most valuable player/resource is the one that wins the trade. Because quality trumps quantity. The danger with trading a lot of value for one pick is all your eggs in one basket. If there is an injury or a player that doesn't translate as well, that is a huge hit. But conversely, if the player lives up to the billing, likely they'll have been thought to clearly win this deal.

The increase in branching does make it harder for humans, but not equally so, because humans don't generally exhaustively consider every possibility. We are generally very good at patterns and strategies and consider only a few (2-4) lines of play that we focus on right away. So if you increase the branching factor our ability to select these may be slightly less optimal, but we still basically do the same thing. If a computer is searching everything possible, it impacts them more because they don't know how to consider only the few right lines as well (when they are naively thought of. A lot of the "trick" of normal game AI work is to figure out how to do this pruning and evaluation to consider the fewer better lines, normally done with explicit rules and heuristics and this is the thing about the AlphaGo that is most interesting in that it mostly didn't do this through explicit work but only through indirect deep neural net pattern matching that is more black box to its designers). In the world computer championships the system restrictions are draconian, even by ACBL standards. See link. No precision, no polish club, no mini-nt, no transfers over 1M(X), no romex, no keri over nt, etc. And I imagine that the inability to actually accurately program all the long rare auctions, particularly when playing an "individual" or when competitive bidding is in play is a similar effect on the computers. One can see this with all the threads about GIB "bugs" in bidding sequences.

Because each side takes 4 moves at a time in a single turn, that raises the branching factor by an exponent of 4, more or less. There are at most 361 moves per turn in a 19 x 19 go board (and decreasing over time, plus some symmetry early) - all over about 250 on average for the branching factor of go. In a typical chess position there are about 35 moves per turn for chess. For Arimaa you'd expect that could mean about 35^4 = 1,500,625. In actuality, because the pieces in Arimaa don't move quite as freely as the pieces in chess it is quite a bit less than that, and the real measured average branching factor for Arimaa is 17,281. But still, it was largely the branching factor for go with 250 >> 35 that made go considered much harder than chess. And 17,281 >> 250 which makes Arimaa much harder as a game. Since a lot of computer uses some form of minimax processing considering what is my best choice move assuming you make your best move assuming I make my best move, etc. it means that you are doing a search down these branching factors. So if you are looking 4 ply (2 turns for each of us) down the tree than in chess you need to worry about 1,500,625 possible sequences of moves. For go it would be about 250^4 = 3,906,250,000 possible sequences. In Arimaa it would be about 17281^4 = 89,181,645,395,627,521 possible sequences. Now all of these algorithms would have optimizations with pruning and symmetry and memoization of same position from different paths and other optimizations. And it is possible static evaluation functions for the various games are different degrees of difficulty, but still the branching factor is an obvious reason why the game would be hard for traditional computer AIs.

There was a game designed to make it hard for computers to win, Arimaa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa), but computers defeated humans at that in 2015 (there was a 10K challenge each year since 2004).

I open pretty much every 5m422 hand in range 1nt no matter the honor placements. Leads to better auctions IMO (both when we open 1nt and when we don't). And if I'm in a position where I'm debating is this a 1NT opener or a different opener, I'd nearly always rather open 1NT.

So if you bid 2H and then the bidding continues 2NT would you be bidding 3C or 3NT or something else? And would you agree with 2NT from the 3316 hand with Axx of spades?

You aren't really allowed to choose a defense after the situation comes up. But the opponents must have pre-alerted you, which then gives you the chance to choose a defense. Note, you are also allowed to have your own written defense, not just the pre-approved defense, if you fancy it.

Yes, but in the context of this case it is possible that the morning discussion of the pair was just "garbage stayman". As others note, their explanation was more complete (but possibly not more correct).

How *I* play it doesn't matter. How many people play it, or what could be meant by "garbage stayman" with no other discussion *is* potentially relevant to assessing the explanations given. Especially when the hand in question matches a very common treatment different than what's been explained.

2C is 4+, right? I would hate to raise with only 3, plus buries the heart suit. I think 1♦-2♣ 2♥-2nt 3♣ gets us much more information and shows the late club support. Of course, some might want that to be a patterning out of 1=4=4=4 or 0=4=5=4 shape. Of course 1♦-2♣ 2♥-2nt 3nt appeals as well (but I always prefer 3nt).