As mentioned, I have been playing with the bots. I have found it useful. Playing pickup on BBO is fine but we rarely have any but the most basic agreements. The bots have a more highly developed approach and they tell you what they are doing. Of course explaining your bid is forbidden in a serious bridge game, but the bots don't mind.
An uncontested auction from yesterday:
I have a 2NT opener.
2NT 3
3
4
Whatsit? Of course the bots tell you. It is a strong raise to 4
. A perfectly reasonable meaning and maybe I would understand it playing pickup, but I would probably be a bit worried.
My hand:
AKQ2
AT
K94
AT83
The exact bot explanation was "4+
, 10+ total points". I generally treat the bots as if they were human, they like that, so my thinking was that there is no purpose in this strong spade raise unless partner can imagine some hand I might hold where 6
has a reasonable play. This then seems like such a hand so I bid 6
.
8765
K9762
A73
K
AKQ2
AT
K94
AT83
OK, not quite on ice, 30 hcp slams usually aren't on ice, but very reasonable. I won the opening diamond lead on the board and cashed two spades, everyone following. Now all I need is for hearts to be no worse than 4-2 either way and I am home. When I played A, K and a third
the E bot, who was dealt 3 spades and 2 hearts, made the mistake of ruffing and now I took 13 tricks. This was only 3.8 imps since several others did the same.
There is actually a line for 13 tricks that does not require a defensive error but I would not recommend being in 7
on these cards. And probably there are better ways to play for 12 tricks. But 12 are highly likely on any reasonable line. Some did go down in 6
, but through bad planning.
My main point here is that simple but effective bidding agreements have surfaced several times while playing with the bots. I have mentioned some of them in past posts. Not all of them are described in the summary of the bot's methods so if I get my act together I plan to organize a list.
