MightyMoe, on 2012-August-21, 10:05, said:
The standard excuse of "It is just like a human partner making a mistake at the table.", doesn't cut it. Not even the worst LOL partner would come up with a stupid bid like this.
I don't know about that. I've seen plenty of nutty bids from humans in my life. Maybe they are unlikely to make *this* particular bid, but they can certainly come up with laughers if you examine the travelers closely.
I think it's just a bit more jarring coming from GIB since its baseline bidding level on most hands is quite a bit better. One expects weirdness in the bidding when playing with a human beginner. But playing with an advanced partner, it's jarring when they do something unexpectedly bad.
This particular bug has been reported a bunch, we've been complaining about it for a long time now. GIB's floor for bidding 2h is way too high (requires GF values), preventing it from making that bid. It doesn't want to neg-x since it has only doubleton spade (I don't like neg-x either), and it feels 2d is better than passing. So it's not totally ludicrous. They just need to allow it to bid 2h on weaker hands. If opener had been say 4-1-5-3, a fairly common distribution, the bidding would have worked out fairly well, I don't think you'd be complaining here quite so vehemently with the "atrocious" and "how can ACBL offer masterpoints" comments.
BTW South also contributed with the non-std 1d opening, GIB expects 1c on this shape, not "better minor". When 4432 is the only 3 cd diamond opener, raising on 3 is more attractive.