[barmar]

From ACBL Robot Duplicate tourney

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When I lead the spade from the board, I was planning on taking a safety play to avoid losing two trumps if either of them had QJxx. Imagine my surprise when my sure loser disappeared because East put up the queen.

I've explained in other threads why I think GIB does this when you lead towards a KJ in dummy. It assumes you're going to finesse, so it doesn't hurt to insert the queen. But in this case I was leading towards the closed hand, and it had no reason to think I have AJ.

It was apparently doing this for everyone, so I don't think it was just a bad set of simulations by my bot. And it didn't really give me a big bunch of matchpoints, because everyone playing the spades this way got the same gift (the difference in the number of overtricks depended on the timing of the play in diamonds). But the players who simply cashed Ace and King were penalized almost as much as if the suit HAD broken badly. It's like we were given a bonus for knowing how to play suit combinations correctly.