Why wouldn't GIB cover the club 10?

[Chick]

I asked this question to the "support" link on the GIB homepage, and was told, "Sorry I can't tell you "why" - the answers to such questions are far too complex and technical for me to even attempt to explain them to you."

 

I guess I just have a lot to learn about third-hand play. Perhaps the developer in this forum can shed some light, or perhaps just fix it.

 

 

http://galaxiesablaze.com/cy/gib-1.jpg

[Stephen Tu]

GIB doesn't think like humans. Basically it deals a bunch of hands consistent with the auction, assumes other people are playing double-dummy, then picks randomly among the best equal options. Here, apparently it judged that you can't have both the CAK since you didn't lead one of them, and given the appearance of dummy it didn't see any advantage of playing the J vs. ducking, so it randomly ducked. It happens to be right on this hand, you didn't lose anything, you were never getting a club trick.

 

It's hard to "just fix" things like this. There's no "third-hand high" algorithm in GIB (only code to play the J rather than the Q in this type of situation, if playing high). Given BBO's current developer's capabilities (GIB's actual inventor abandoned the project a decade ago, sold the code to BBO), you more or less have to live with GIB's play/defense errors as they are, except ones that are caused by grossly bad ideas of what people can have because of bidding bugs. The only thing you can really do is play more with the "advanced" bots, which are much, much better than the "basic" bots. The basic bots have been lobotomized plus they play very fast and don't take into account as many possibilities. Or if you are still using the PC client app as your screenshot appears, give the GIB slider in your options settings more thinking time. But it's potentially a waste reporting bidding bugs from the PC client, because that's using an older buggier database than the web versions. The problem you report may or may not have been fixed already.

[Chick]

Are you telling me that when I play an ACBL tournament using the Windows Client, I'm at a major disadvantage to people using the web browser?????

[Stephen Tu]

Are you telling me that when I play an ACBL tournament using the Windows Client, I'm at a major disadvantage to people using the web browser?????

 

No. When you play tourneys everyone gets server-based advanced GIBs.

 

It's only when you play in the main bridge club, if you are playing the window client running GIB on your own machine, there are pros and cons:

con:

your bidding database is older, more unfixed bugs.

 

pros:

adjustable thinking time, better bidding judgment/play than the "basic" web robots. This makes it a tougher game; it's easier to beat up on basic bots. I think this is good, but if you want to run up your average score in myhands which nobody really ought to care about, this will hurt you.

[Chick]

Well, thank goodness for that at least. Thanks for the reply, Stephen.

[Bbradley62]

Or the ♥10...

 

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