[158FC79]

Hi everybody? Why GIB uses cappelletti? I play 13 years on BBO vs GIB and it never happened to use cappeletti, it simply do not exist or with very low possibility, instead to overcall 1 nt with diamond suit happens very often; it is frustrating that I can not overcall 1 nt by bidding 2 diamonds cause it misinterpreted as 5/5 into Majours, yes you may say bid 2 clubs (one-suiter) . Ok only to overcall 1 nt I must first bid 2 diamonds and then to bid 3 clubs! Why go to level 3 if you may show your club suit simply bidding 2 clubs

nice BBO sessions!

[barmar]

Most experienced players prefer NT defenses that allow them to show 2-suiters easily, since they come up more often than 1-suiters. Cappelletti is one of the most popular among intermediate players. Very few play just natural overcalls.

For me, they make Capp bids a few times a week. I don't get to make the bids myself very often, because I mostly play best-hand tourneys so the bots rarely open 1NT.

[pescetom]

barmar, on 2025-September-22, 10:54, said:

Most experienced players prefer NT defenses that allow them to show 2-suiters easily, since they come up more often than 1-suiters. Cappelletti is one of the most popular among intermediate players. Very few play just natural overcalls.

For me, they make Capp bids a few times a week. I don't get to make the bids myself very often, because I mostly play best-hand tourneys so the bots rarely open 1NT.

I find it hard to believe this is not somewhat tongue in cheek, coming from a decent player and BBO guru
Cappelletti is unheard of outside of USA and is significantly inferior to the apparently similar and hugely popular MultiLandy defence.
Double is always penalty rather than the razor sharp 4 major 5 minor option of Multilandy.
The 2♣ "any suit" (rather than a major) is whacky (as OP suggests) even when played between humans and downright frightening with a robot (which BTW fails to explain any follow up bid comprehensibly).
Using 2♦ rather than 2♣ for both majors nukes the 2♦ response and forces one to play 5-5 rather than the much more realistic and frequent 5-4.
More to the point here, the robot soon gets lost in follow ups to any part of the convention.
My rule when playing with a robot is to avoid overcalling 1NT for any reason and to resign myself to a bottom if the robot overcalls.
I suspect most other humans do the same.

[johnu]

pescetom, on 2025-September-22, 12:48, said:

I find it hard to believe this is not somewhat tongue in cheek, coming from a decent player and BBO guru
Cappelletti is unheard of outside of USA and is significantly inferior to the apparently similar and hugely popular MultiLandy defence.

Cappelletti, also called Hamilton, or maybe Pottage in the UK. Old habits take a long time to die out, especially for lifelong intermediate players in the US. They don't like new things.... IIRC, Cappelletti was reasonably popular before Multi-Landy and some other conventions started to get adopted.

pescetom, on 2025-September-22, 12:48, said:

More to the point here, the robot soon gets lost in follow ups to any part of the convention.

In defense of Cappelletti, GIB gets confused over just about any convention once it get past the initial bid and systemic response.

[pescetom]

johnu, on 2025-September-22, 14:00, said:

Cappelletti, also called Hamilton, or maybe Pottage in the UK. Old habits take a long time to die out, especially for lifelong intermediate players in the US. They don't like new things.... IIRC, Cappelletti was reasonably popular before Multi-Landy and some other conventions started to get adopted.

I seem to remember that Multi-Landy is attributed to Robinson and Woolsey and was basically a bugfix of a similar convention by Kokish... I imagine they were all already familiar with Cappelletti, but underwhelmed.
Cappelletti remains unknown in Italy but Multi-Landy rapidly swept the country, under the name of Versace who made it popular.

[Huibertus]

158FC79, on 2025-September-22, 03:41, said:

Hi everybody? Why GIB uses cappelletti? I play 13 years on BBO vs GIB and it never happened to use cappeletti, it simply do not exist or with very low possibility, instead to overcall 1 nt with diamond suit happens very often; it is frustrating that I can not overcall 1 nt by bidding 2 diamonds cause it misinterpreted as 5/5 into Majours, yes you may say bid 2 clubs (one-suiter) . Ok only to overcall 1 nt I must first bid 2 diamonds and then to bid 3 clubs! Why go to level 3 if you may show your club suit simply bidding 2 clubs

nice BBO sessions!

Well, as a defense to 1NT openings Cappelletti is not great. But is is a lot better then all natural. However when you play with humans that can't remember or are to lazy to find out what NT defense they play, then indeed it is worse instead as you point out. There is however no solution to it, the moment you start bidding all natural you'll run into humans who, for all the right reasons, point out you ARE playing Cappelletti.

For that reason only I'd welcome it if Cappelletti is binned here.

[barmar]

I was definitely not trying to defend Capp as the best convention, especially over strong NT. But when we were choosing the system for GIB, many of the decisions were based on what would be familiar to typical BBO users. And while BBO may be an international service, the US was arguably the the largest market, so we used them as the target.

Back when I used to play frequently with pick-up partners (mostly when I was on OKbridge in the 90's), Capp was almost the universal preference. If you suggest Multi-Landy to a random American partner, I think 99% of the time you'll get back "what's that?".

[pescetom]

barmar, on 2025-September-24, 10:21, said:

I was definitely not trying to defend Capp as the best convention, especially over strong NT. But when we were choosing the system for GIB, many of the decisions were based on what would be familiar to typical BBO users. And while BBO may be an international service, the US was arguably the the largest market, so we used them as the target.

Back when I used to play frequently with pick-up partners (mostly when I was on OKbridge in the 90's), Capp was almost the universal preference. If you suggest Multi-Landy to a random American partner, I think 99% of the time you'll get back "what's that?".

I can see that But Capp already has the dual defects of being both unusually low frequency and not very good: add in that the robot cannot really play it and this becomes a recipe for disaster, in an important zone of the competitive battle. All this costs lots of matchpoints and user frustration. I would seriously suggest replacing it with some simpler convention the robot is capable of playing (as OP suggests, even natural 5+ cards would be better).