GETTING THE BIDDING RIGHT.

It's been nearly two years since a Saturday bridge column, have I really been that preoccupied with the world gone wrong?  In that column, though, I had yet another gripe about the simulation being programmed to do some odd things in bidding.  That 18 January column depicted a disastrous down three on a grand slam contract, and the 4 January column depicted more artificial intelligence quirks, with the bot chickening out on a relatively mundane jump raise.

Sometimes, though, man and machine get it together.  In the following diagram, the East bot deals.

East passes, I open 2♣, West passes, North bot has the expected 2♦, thereafter neither East nor West bids. I show my long suit with 2♥ and North raises to 2♠.  I continue with 2NT and the bot offers 3♣.  Here's where it would be useful to have a live partner who understands that my 4NT is a call for aces.  (There are several different interpretations of 4NT in play, and several different methods of responding.)  North, with no special Cliff Notes interpretation of what's next. continues 5♠ and I offer 5NT.  North then offers 6♦, showing a second suit, I offer 6♥ and the bot raises to 7♠.  That would be feasible with these cards, but I'm still fearful that in a slam bid on a suit contract, the defender will open with a long suit, the other defender will be void in that suit, and a low trump messes up the contract.  Thus we play for Seven No Trump.

The opening lead is the ♦3.  (Why not the ♣3?  The artificial intelligence might change the way people play the game, too.)  Take stock: four Spade winners in hand, and an extra winner on the board.  Two Heart winners in hand, save one of those losers for a Spade lead off the board.  Two Diamond winners in hand, and two more on the board, as well as two Club winners in hand, and an extra one on the board.  That's ten winners in hand and four extra winners on the board, more than enough to account for those three Heart losers.  Just save enough entries.  Win the opening lead with the ♦K (short side first), cash the ♥ King and ♥ Ace, discarding a low ♣ and a low  ♠, then cash the ♣ Ace and ♣ Queen, finally leading the ♦4 to the board, using the two additional Diamonds and the ♣ King to wash out the low Hearts, and we're done.

Something else Bridge Base has done recently is revised their scoring system.  That deal, plus the three other hands in it, scored as 21st best in their history.  That's encouraging when more recently the system is telling me some fifty thousand people have handled the deal better.