I am new to Forum and this is my first post so I won't attempt to do anything more than type.
The money bridge games and tourneys are very enjoyable and it appears that they will be funding my entries in the ACBL tourneys for a while unless I lose all of my recently acquired gains in one bad night.
I set some criteria for myself when I started to play money bridge. When the $25 stake was gone, I would quit. That criteria went away the second session. Another $25 stake, a few days later a $50 stake. By then I had figured out some things about GIB and was starting to stay out of the hole. A few days passed. Then came the upgrade that told me how GIB would take my bid. Voila! But then I dared to try the 2 cent game and after opponents bid and made 2 slams in a row suddenly the system said I didn't have enough money for that stake. What????? So I sadly retreated to the 25 and 50 cent games and then back to the 1 cent game. My stake grew and I tried the 2 cent game again. And now that I've figured out some more things about GIB I am happily looking at my stake that after those ups and downs has grown from that last credit card payment of $50 to over $160. Here are some of the things I've learned.
1. As someone else said, GIB does not understand cue bids after a suit raise. It expects that to be another suit. My conclusion is that, no matter what the explanation is of how GIB will interpret the bid, at a low level many GIBs treat the bid as a help suit game try and at a higher level as a slam try and will leap to the contract if it likes that second suit bid. So I never cue bid a short suit Ace to my GIB partner!
2. I have learned that GIB has excellent declarer play most of the time and I get good scores when I let it play the hand instead of trying to finagle the bidding to let me play the hand.
3. I have learned that quite often GIB will not return my opening lead and wants to take command of the defense. So now when GIB does that I say "ok, you lead, I will follow" and quite often GIB is right.
4. And the main thing I have learned from playing less complicated robots on another site and GIB here is that, if I bid conservatively, we will usually end up in the right place but, if I do anything strange like cue bid a short suit, or if I take the position that this nice 11 looks like a full opener and I will open it in first or second seat on the rule of 20, we will end up too high and go down.
All I can say about the GIBs here after playing more "vanilla" ones at the other site is that I am impressed by how much they do know about playing bridge. So while some are complaining about what GIB is doing to them, I respectfully suggest that it is sometimes the consequence of what they are doing to GIB in their bidding.
Help
