[iandayre]

Do you ever play the Instant tournaments? 8 boards at IMP's or MP's for BBM points. 15 human competitors. In the IMP tourney today 14 of the 15 GIB Norths opened 3D with xxx, KJ, QT9xxxx, x. Opponents never entered the auction, 3D usually either made or went one down, some bid with my hand and went down. But at my table my GIB partner passed, RHO opened 1H and I made the normal 1S overcall with KJT9x, AQ, Jx, Qxxx. It went 2C, 2S, P, P by me, then 3H and now my GIB made the fatal and nonsensical error of competing to 3S. RHO bid the cold 4H for a huge IMP loss, totally out of my control. Have others seen a GIB partner make the same opening call at every other table except your own? Would love to hear management's take on this one.

[1eyedjack]

Yup, we all have examples of this. When instants first came on the scene I thought it was a fatal flaw. Now just rub of the green.

Sometimes it works in your favour. More often not, because all of the robots at your table are the most advanced, and there are two opposing to one partnering.

After trying it out for an extended period I have come to the view that in the long term this disadvantage, which acknowledged as such, is not sufficient to overcome the benefits of the format.

[Bbradley62]

iandayre, on 2014-April-15, 14:08, said:

Would love to hear management's take on this one.

I am not management, but...
for a discussion of this subject, see: http://www.bridgebas...447#entry752447
In a more recent post, Barmar told us that they are now using tournaments from 2012, but you are still operating in a somewhat different world than all of your "opponents".

[johnu]

I asked a question about which GIB version was used in those instant tournaments several months ago. IIRC BBO said they were going to use more recent tournaments so that you would have a level playing field by playing against the same version of GIB. Except on the first day after an upgraded GIB comes out, I don't know why they couldn't always use tournaments based on the same GIB as the current release. I suppose an unscrupulous player could cheat by searching through the archives to find the results of a recent tournament, but so what? BBO points don't cost anything to award, and the results of each instant tournament doesn't have an effect on other's scores.

[1eyedjack]

It would have to be not only the same robots but also the same random number seed used for sims. Not saying that this isn't possible - doubtless these parameters are stored in the background - just an aside observation.

[uday]

We update gib about every month or two. So if we wanted to restrict the hands to only the hands played by the current bot, we'd be unable to find any hands for the first few days.

There are definitely going to be some rub-of-the-green wins/losses.

One way out might be to use an older bot when using older hands. That feels dirty to me.