What will my Deliberate Practice routine look like? I need to design it in a way that I get immediate feedback and work on skills just at the edge of my comfort zone.
Fortunately, there are a lot of great tools out there.
I’m going to break my training into two categories: Individual and Partnership. Although it is a partnership game, most of bridge is individual. Declarer play is entirely individual. But so are hand evaluation and opening leads. Most of my work will be by myself, working on my individual game. My regular partner Greg Humphreys and I want to improve as a partnership as well as individually, so we will be putting in work together.
Individual Work
Reading
I’m putting together a reading list for the year. My goal is to read at least one book a month. I will share my thoughts on each with you, especially the nuggets I found most useful. This should become a great digest of bridge tips and insights.
I’m going to focus on a lot of “problem and solution” and “over the shoulder” type books. Those offer the opportunity to work on a problem and get immediate feedback. I think Eddie Kantar, Terence Reese, and Mike Lawrence are the best at these types of books. I’ll share my reading list in a future newsletter. I’m eager for suggestions.
I also have a lot of old issues of The Bridge World to get through.
Robots
Playing against three robots is a great way to practice because you can take as long as you want—robots don’t get impatient. BBO’s GIB robot gives accurate count signals pretty consistently, so it’s a great way to work on counting out hands, both as declarer and on defense. (Robots are notoriously terrible bidders, so I don’t intend to use them for bidding practice.)
There are a number of options for robot games. Please suggest others I haven’t thought of.
BBO
BBO has a number of robot games available. They and Funbridge are the only sites able to issue ACBL masterpoints for robot games. The end goal here isn’t masterpoints, but that could be a short-term goal along the way. One expert I talked to suggested a daily masterpoint goal in robot games as a good incentivizer: a mistake will cost you time, as you need to play another game. And I do need to get a few thousand more points to get to Grand Life Master.
Each game has plusses and minuses.
Daylongs
These run all day (shock!) and are played by several hundred people. (They don’t all play the same hands, to make it harder to cheat.) Some very good players play them occasionally, so that gives the opportunity for high-quality comparisons. It’s a little tricky to get those comparisons, though. And you don’t get the results until the next day (obviously). You get an immediate percentage, but you can’t review other tables until the next day. Because you don’t find out how many masterpoints you won until the next day, you can’t do the daily masterpoint goal idea. I guess you could do a weekly goal, and play more instant games on Sunday if you’re behind. I think that would dull the immediacy of the goal, though.
Instant Tournaments
You don’t play against other people directly in these. Instead, a set of 12 boards that have already been played several times is randomly created when you launch the game. You can see your results instantly and get your masterpoints as soon as you finish. You never know who will be in the comparison pool, so you’re often playing “against” mediocre competition. But I like being able to see results immediately.
Live Tournaments
There are tournaments that start at a fixed time and have a time limit. (Unlike the Daylongs or Instant Tournaments, which you can stop and come back to.) I feel uncomfortable playing in these, because there don’t tend to be a lot of top players in them, so I feel like a ringer, so I don’t plan to play any of these. The Instant Tournaments are against no one, and the field for the Daylongs is large and pretty good.
IntoBridge
IntoBridge has a challenge game that pits you against people near your level in a single-board board-a-match challenge. Win, lose, or draw. A lot of my friends find it addictive. It has all the elements I’m looking for: immediate feedback (you won or you didn’t), a strong field (once you get up there in the rankings), clear goals, and markers of achievement. Their robot is pretty bad, and part of the game is knowing how to manipulate it. That’s a drawback of any robot game. There is a modest monthly fee, but it’s a lot less than I would spend on BBO robot games. I think this will be my primary vehicle.
VuGraph
The top bridge events are broadcast electronically and archived. It’s simple to go onto BBO or LoveBridge and watch an old match. You can “kibitz” one player, putting yourself in their shoes. This seems the best way to learn: every bid and play gives you the opportunity to get immediate top-level feedback. I would have bid 2♠. Jeff Meckstroth bid 3♠. What did he see that I didn’t?
This will work best when I know the partnership’s bidding and signaling systems. It’s not going to help me to watch Grue and Moss have a relay auction. It will also work best if I can ask people about a bid or play that I don’t understand. I won’t abuse this, but I have a lot of good friends in the bridge world, and I’ll be leaning on them in this endeavor.
I’m going to start with Steve Weinstein and Bobby Levin. They’re one of, if not the, best pairs in the world. I know their system pretty well, since I help them keep their system notes. Both are friends. Steve has been my primary mentor for ten years or so and is one of my partners at Bridge Winners. I’ll bug him with questions until he gets sick of me. What better place to start?
I have a few friends who play primarily with clients in top-level events. This is a slightly different skillset, and one I’m interested in, since I play with students a lot. Most of these pairs play a fairly standard system, so following what they’re doing shouldn’t be an issue. I’m going to start with my good friend and another Bridge Winners partner, Gavin Wolpert.
Other Skills
I want to get faster at some basic skills. Counting and identifying patterns are the primary ones. There are a few useful tools out there.
One of my favorites is the BBO Counting Game developed by Fred Gitelman. It’s very simple: you’re shown three numbers and have to finish the 13-card pattern as quickly as you can. So you are given 5-1-2 and have to enter “5” as quickly as you can. It’s a great tool to practice pattern recognition.
Unfortunately, the current version doesn’t focus on the most common hand patterns like it used to, so it’s not as good a tool. Richard Pavlicek has something similar, though you have to use a mouse for input, rather than a keyboard.
Greg wrote High Card Hunter for Bridge Winners. It’s also simple: you’re given a hand and have to enter the number of high card points. You’re given a timer, and you have to get as many right as you can before it runs out. A correct answer gains you extra time.
I’m looking for a basic arithmetic drilling program. I am notoriously bad at simple addition. Simple ones like 5 + 7 I can do instantly. But get into double digits and I start relying on my fingers and toes. I want all of those—at least up to 52—to become as natural and quick as 5 + 7. That should be simple to drill.
Partnership Practice
There are two basic elements of partnership: bidding and defense. It’s much easier to practice bidding than defense; there are a lot of tools for this. I’m still looking for good ways to practice defense. I think they will mostly come down to “What type of signal would we give in this situation?” I can bring in questions like that from my VuGraph studies.
For bidding practice, I want to focus on things that provide immediate feedback. Both The Bridge World and the ACBL Bridge Bulletin have a monthly bidding contest. They give you the East and West hands, you bid them as a partnership, and then you can see how two expert partnerships bid them. Perfect.
There’s also a great app called Cue Bids that allows for asynchronous bidding practice—i.e., we don’t have to be working at the same time. You get a batch of hands, make your bids, and then get notified when your partner has bid and it’s now your turn. The problem with it is that you can lose the context and have to reconstruct the auction each time. Sometimes you are planning out a sequence, and it’s easy to forget what your plan was. Or at least it takes a little bit to catch back up. Still, I like the platform a lot, and we’ve been using it a lot.
There’s also just playing. Greg has a job, so we don’t get to play in person much other than the Nationals. But we can play a lot online. We’ll set up as many matches as we can with top players. Everyone is looking for good people to practice against. The better the players, the better the feedback. On BBO, you can play hands from VuGraph matches, so you can also get immediate feedback about how you did relative to the experts who played the hands.
What is your training regimen going to look like? Do you have other ideas I can incorporate? We’re all in this together, so please, I’m open to suggestions!
I play with a number of different partners who are comfortable with where they are at, working on getting a regular partner who also wants to improve their game.
For non experts, the competition in the ACBL Open games can be quite challenging. I played against Jeff Meckstroth one set