[Bbradley62]

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Why does North think we have 9 trump? I could have made a support double instead of bidding 2♠, but that would have been unlimited so I (and all the other players who held my cards) thought 2♠ was more descriptive.

[Stephen Tu]

If you're playing support doubles 2s is supposed to show 4. Don't see why 2s would be "more descriptive". It's misdescriptive. It's more *limited*, HCP wise. But that doesn't really help you all that much because partner is going to by default play you for minimum range opener.

In any case, the 2s only said 3+sp, and GIB judged anyway to bid on regardless of your spade length, and judged well, given that both contracts make. You don't know for sure why North bid 3s, it could have been simulation, you don't know that it thinks that you have 9 trumps for certain.

Don't really think you should spend time reporting stuff like this; lots more egregiously bad bids to fix first, before you worry about very minor description flaws on boards GIB gets right! I'm worried way more about bids where it's defined such that GIB is allowed to bid 4 cd suit where it should be 5/6 min, and GIB thus sometimes bidding on 3 cds!; not so much hands where it's +/- 1 card on the actual hand and the description itself is reasonable.

[Bbradley62]

 Stephen Tu, on 2012-June-21, 12:28, said:

If you're playing support doubles 2s is supposed to show 4.

That sounds reasonable, but if that's the case, the description should say so. Many players play a variety of conventions/treatments only with GIB, so having accurate descriptions is useful.

 Stephen Tu, on 2012-June-21, 12:28, said:

You don't know for sure why North bid 3s, it could have been simulation, you don't know that it thinks that you have 9 trumps for certain.

Then it shouldn't say so.

 Stephen Tu, on 2012-June-21, 12:28, said:

Don't really think you should spend time reporting stuff like this; lots more egregiously bad bids to fix first, before you worry about very minor description flaws on boards GIB gets right! I'm worried way more about bids where it's defined such that GIB is allowed to bid 4 cd suit where it should be 5/6 min, and GIB thus sometimes bidding on 3 cds!; not so much hands where it's +/- 1 card on the actual hand and the description itself is reasonable.

Of course, some issues are more important than others; some are also more easily fixed than others. It doesn't seem right to me that the description of 3♠ includes "6+ total points". Can he really have 13+ opposite partner's opening and make this bid? It should be simple to make the description more accurate and useful.

[Stephen Tu]

Then be a bit more specific about exactly what you want changed in the descriptions in the original post?

My personal feeling is I want the programmers concentrating on fixing places where the bid meanings are far off the norm, or places where lack of negative inference apparently causes partner to do unwise things (mainly yanking from 3nt, when 3nt description isn't restrictive enough on major suit lengths), vs. spots like this, where the inference of upper limit can reasonably be inferred from common sense and it doesn't really affect anybody's further bidding.

Would it be nice if every negative inference were explicitly stated on every auction? Sure, but I don't think it's feasible given the way GIB generates its descriptions from how barmar has described how it works.