GIB discards from long suits could show attitude

[Cat1111]

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With a long club side suit to the K, GIB would like a club lead. Instead GIB throws it's lowest club.

 

The GIB defense notes mention that: It doesn't use any signals when making discards, it just tries to make safe discards. In a suit contract it will frequently discard from a short suit while it has trumps left. Otherwise, it tends to discard from a long suit that's safe to shorten.

 

With a long suit (6+) surely it would be safe to also provide a signal as to whether it wants or does not want a lead of this suit. Can you please add that, at least for long suits?

 

Thanks

 

PS - Is there something I'm missing with the link feature to the right of the smiley face? I thought a picture of the hand should appear or at least a url with functionality to go to the hand even before I post.

[Stephen Tu]

As a newbie to this forum, you should learn that BBO doesn't really have the personnel resources to address GIB's card play limitations at this juncture of time. GIB's inventor abandoned the project about a dozen years ago in favor of running his own business and programming for other games (crosswords I think), some years later licensed GIB code to BBO, but with him went the expertise needed to really make play improvements. BBO's programmers are limited to fixing bad bidding caused by poorly defined bids & options in the bidding database which is far simpler than programming GIB to handle signaling.

 

GIB doesn't do signals (except count signals in some cases), won't get them anytime soon, and can defend really badly because of this. So posting hands where this occurs is at this time is just kind of pointless for the forseeable future. But post lots of bidding bugs if you run across them, plenty do get fixed eventually but there are so many possible sequences that it seems this will continue endlessly, though hopefully these fixes cause GIB to get incrementally better.

[1eyedjack]

There was a post some months ago by (I think) Barmar or Uday confirming that some limited resources were being applied to card play bugs. Perhaps not system changes.

 

Hopefully some time (soon?) that will be considered a priority over bidding bugs. After all, many of the bidding bugs now being fixed will prevent a travesty on only a tiny proportion of hands, ie when those conditions repeat. A basic defensive signalling system will come into its own on the majority of hands when GIB ends up in defence.