BBO Discussion Forums: Conventions playing against robots - BBO Discussion Forums

My wife and I are trying to practice by playing against each other with robots as partners but I can't find a way of setting the convention to ACOL, Which is what we play.

I think the system allows me to specify ACOL when playing with my wife as partner but there doesn't seem to be any way of changing it when we play against each other.

Am I missing something or is the system just limited when using robots?

Thx

GIB only plays one system and it can't be customised. GIB opponents will assume you are playing their system as well.

There are much better bots out there; perhaps someone can advise how to play against them. Multiple requests to BBO for access to these bots on this site have fallen upon deaf ears. BBO’s market position, especially after acquiring Funbridge, means it doesn’t need to do anything to please its customers; BBO’s traditional base is made up of large numbers of people who don’t care. The fact that many of us who are forced online may become regular customers if improved playability were implemented does not seem important.

As smerriman says GIB plays only one system (its own version of 2/1 game forcing). If you want to practice bidding acol, I suggest you and your wife play as partners against 2 GIBs. You can bid acol even though the robots won't recognize many bids. For most hands, it won't make any difference if the robots think you are playing 2/1 GF, and you get to practice your bidding.

We've discussed internally switching to Argine, FunBridge's robot.

But adding a new bot is not trivial, there isn't a standard bot interface that allows them to be interchanged. So we'd need to develop code to make Argine look like GIB to all our bot-related software.

barmar, on 2020-May-08, 16:28, said:

Does Argine have customisable systems? Is it one of the best bots out there?

Vampyr, on 2020-May-08, 20:21, said:

Yes.

The ability for the robot to play a weak no trump and four-card majors would be a big plus for EBU players.

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It is but with the current "very poor" robots scoring well above average in the EBU NGS ratings I wonder if everyone really wants a stronger robot?

How many partnerships will be broken by one player preferring a robot to their regular partner?

paulg, on 2020-May-09, 01:20, said:

LOL

My regular partner is pretty robotic.