[LCarey13]

Hi everyone. I've really enjoyed playing on BBO, with my friends, and watching others play, and playing with Robots. It's been really a pleasure during this COVID shut down.

I do have a question. When I play with paid robots, I'm very often the dummy. Why would the software set it up that way? I'd think that for humans playing with robots, you'd have to misbid to be the dummy. Otherwise, what's the point?

So tonight, to get a handle on this, I dealt hands and kept score. Out of 36 hands dealt, I was dummy 8 times, declarer 4 times, and defender 24 times. Which seems in line with my general experience with playing with robots.

Why is that happening? What's the point of making the only human player be dummy twice as often as they are declarer?

[smerriman]

LCarey13, on 2020-December-08, 21:02, said:

Why is that happening? What's the point of making the only human player be dummy twice as often as they are declarer?

It simply isn't set up that way. Deals are completely random, so will be declarer approximately a quarter of the time, unless you're bidding in a way to bias this.

Being declarer only 4 times out of 36 isn't *likely*, but it's not so unlikely that it shows anything is wrong either (and there have been countless threads recently debunking claims like this - it's usually due to confirmation bias).

If you are just wanting to declare, most robot *tournaments* online are best-hand - but if you're playing at a normal table, you have to just put up with randomly generated deals.

[johnu]

smerriman, on 2020-December-08, 21:42, said:

If you are just wanting to declare, most robot *tournaments* online are best-hand - but if you're playing at a normal table, you have to just put up with randomly generated deals.

I can't think of a reason why BBO hasn't enabled human declares when playing with 3 robots. The code to switch the human player to be declarer is already written, debugged, and working just fine, and just needs to be copied and pasted (a little more complicated than that, but not much more).

[Joe_Old]

If you are defending two thirds of the hands, it almost certainly means that you are not bidding enough. Defending that often is just about a guarantee that you will get a bad score.

[dsLawsd]

For speed of play. Use it to compare with the top players by choosing either a specific event or random Vugraphs. Then see how they did it. You are not really compared with others.
Otherwise you can play solitaire...

[gamingrams]

If you are playing at a table it is the same as playing at any table. You certainly would not expedt to be declarer if you are playing with a human partner!

There are many robot tournaments where the human is the declarer. Often the free weekend Survivor is "Just Declare" where the bidding is done first so you are always declaring whether you like the contract or not LOL.

The only robot tourneys where the GIB declares are the "classic" IMP and MP.