gszes, on 2019-August-15, 20:23, said:
It will help you enormously if you read how each bid will be interpreted by your robot partner. You will normally wince at how bad these expectations are but they are what you have been stuck with.
even with a human partner I would not consider the 1d bid to be a suit unless the opps were playing a 2+ club opener. That means 3d would still be played as natural (what would you do with 984 742 KQJTxxx void or similar) over a 1d opening bid? The practical bid is 3h asking for a heart stop. We already are just short of 100% sure there is no long spade suit so the mere presence of a heart stop
should give us reasonable play for 3n opposite our partners unfavorable 2c bid. It is a robot so don't go throwing too much money away at your nearby casino betting that partner has what you might expect for the 2c bid:)))
robot bridge is, by definition, unworthy of being in the 'interesting bridge hands' forum. Look at how you had to answer the OP: by stating that it is not only useless but actually counterproductive to make a normal call.
By the way, I am not at all sure that 3D here shows a diamond stop and asks for a heart stop. The usual rule, that when the opps are bidding 2 suits, we bid the one we stop, may not apply here, because we are a passed hand, and we have to be able to suggest a good raise without necessarily saying that we looking for 3N. We need one of the two cuebids to show the good raise, and requiring that we hold a red suit stopper in order to cuebid makes little sense to me.
Say I held AQx xx xxx KQxxx: with partner coming in red, and with the vulnerability being what it is, I have to do more than 3C, yet if 3R shows a stopper, what can I do?
In this sort of situation, I think that one has to be more flexible. I would play 3D here as simply a maximum raise, silent about diamond stoppers, and 3H as a maximum raise with a heart stopper. If partner has interest in 3N, he can bid 3H over 3D to show that stopper, and allow us to bid 3N with a diamond stop.
Note that if we flip the cuebids, it doesn't work: if we play 3D as a stopper, and 3H as ambiguous, but denying a diamond stop, partner has no way to ask below 3N (arguably 3S could be an ask, because at a high level of inference, advancer should deny 4 spades by bidding 3H....a 3S bid HAS to be based on values to bid to 4C, and should only be 4 or a very weak 5 card suit, since we are potentially driving to the 4-level in clubs, so have a good hand, yet passed over 1D. However, I would not try that with many partners).
So I have contradicted myself: if presented as a bidding problem, the hand has interest. But if presented as a 'how to bid this at a form of the game that bears no resemblance to bridge' it lacks any interest, at least to me.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari