I've even found pairs that play *any* bid of 4C anywhere, in *any* situation as Gerber.
Yeah. I understand why people want to do this; they want to completely avoid ambiguity (and honestly, you don't often REALLY want to play in 4C, and these people are probably not using cue bids). But if they're not sure whether they want to be ace asking or not, ace asking probably won't help them...[1] As we say, it's rare that gerber is actually useful (I suppose it does have the advantage of letting you ace-ask a bit lower than 4NT, but that's most useful for bidding a club slam, when Gerber is the worst possible convention :)).
It's even more common to assume any 4NT is blackwood: most partnerships haven't agreed how strong a natural/quantitative 4NT should be anyway, so they almost never do use it for anything else, but it's still problematic to assume 4NT is ALWAYS Blackwood. (If only because it encoourages you to treat other conventions as pattern-matching a particular bid, rather than knowing what you expect your partner to be saying.)
[1] I'm sure I heard of someone playing roman key-card gerber, with the obvious meanings, although I don't know if they really did :)
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Yeah. I understand why people want to do this; they want to completely avoid ambiguity (and honestly, you don't often REALLY want to play in 4C, and these people are probably not using cue bids). But if they're not sure whether they want to be ace asking or not, ace asking probably won't help them...[1] As we say, it's rare that gerber is actually useful (I suppose it does have the advantage of letting you ace-ask a bit lower than 4NT, but that's most useful for bidding a club slam, when Gerber is the worst possible convention :)).
It's even more common to assume any 4NT is blackwood: most partnerships haven't agreed how strong a natural/quantitative 4NT should be anyway, so they almost never do use it for anything else, but it's still problematic to assume 4NT is ALWAYS Blackwood. (If only because it encoourages you to treat other conventions as pattern-matching a particular bid, rather than knowing what you expect your partner to be saying.)
[1] I'm sure I heard of someone playing roman key-card gerber, with the obvious meanings, although I don't know if they really did :)