Tournament robots are nuts

[lcsmw]

I've played bridge for about 50 years, competing in live ACBL events. I'm an ok player that plays from time to time, but I do have significant playing experience.

 

To do well in BB tournaments, I have developed some bad habits; i.e. being in very shakey NT contracts. The robot seems to get off to the most favorable lead for the declarer and when they have you nailed attacking your weak suit, they invariably let you off the hook and shift. Bottoms in live play, become tops playing against robots.

 

I remember one hand where I made 7 (multiple over tricks) because the robot pitched winners to avoid being end played.

 

Regarding bidding, most of the auctions are ok, but too many force you to make a guess when it shouldn't be necessary, i.e. bidding NT without a stopper in the opponents suit when the robot had it stopped multiple times and never said boo. Another pet peave, is being punished by your robot partner for competing, when you know your partner isn't likely to balance.

 

I've played in over 1000 tournaments in the last year and it is nice diversion, but isn't real bridge.

The biggest advantage of robot play, is you can play when you might be interrupted and won't annoy a people partner.

[Stephen Tu]

Post bug reports on the auctions that are not OK. The more reports that are made, complaints generated, the more auctions eventually get fixed and we can get the auctions closer to resembling real bridge. As bad as they are now, I remember GIB from 12 years ago when it was maybe 3x worse! The # of rules in the database has swelled enormously since then, and although new bugs sometimes creep in as rules conflict with each other, on the whole the bidding has gotten quite a bit better.

 

As for GIBs getting off to the right lead but then not continuing since they can't read signals, this might not ever get fixed, oh well. And the basic robots are super-time limited, gibson single-dummy disabled, so their play is terrible. Hopefully as server power gets cheaper they can tweak things and get them playing with more thinking time.

[georgi]

Although GIB could do mistakes, there is no such thing as penalizing partner for something.

 

Main idea which GIB follows is to help partner to emerge, not to sink. If second looks to happen, it's likely a bug occur, unpredicted rare sequence where GIB simulated incorrectly or another issue but usually GIB will try to give you the best result it thinks it could be achieved.

 

So you could accept that if something is wrong, it wasn't yet amended (some things sooner, some not so soon), but not planned to pull you down.