Reflections From Memphis

A good but disappointing tournament

I’m home from the Spring NABC in Memphis. I’m always a bit exhausted after 10 days of tough bridge. That was compounded by my 6:00am flight home Monday morning. But I had to get back to work. So I’m a little tired, but also energized by all of the support and enthusiasm I received in Memphis. So many people came up to me at the tournament—people I knew and people I didn’t—to tell me about what they’re doing to level up or how much they’ve enjoyed the podcasts. Thank you all for your support!

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Greg and I are going to do a thorough post-mortem of the entire tournament, and I’ll post that once it’s done. But I wanted to share my initial thoughts on how the tournament went.

Let’s start with the positive:

My two lectures went great. I got a lot of good feedback, especially about the lecture on being a good partner—something we can all work on!

We ate very well! The highlights were Flight and Chez Philippe. And all the BBQ! Central BBQ was my favorite. And I drank a lot of sweet tea. Yum!

Greg and I played pretty well all tournament. There were plenty of decisions we got wrong, and there are always a couple of brainless mistakes. But those were pretty rare, and overall I was happy with how we played.

I was very good about meditating in the morning and at the lunch break everyday. I slept well and got a walk in most days. I kept myself well hydrated. During the final Swiss, I tried to drain my 16 oz. water bottle during every match. I was peeing a lot, but I was hydrated!

My student Marla won her first Platinum points as we easily qualified for the finals of the Mixed Pairs. She played great, and we had a really good time.

Greg and I played particularly well in the Jacoby Open Swiss on the final weekend. We won 11 of our 16 matches. Unfortunately, all of the wins were small—mostly low single digits—so we didn’t amass enough victory points to post a high finish.

We played well in a regional Swiss Teams event, anchoring a 6-person with two pro-client pairs each playing half. We finished 4th, winning 15.8 gold points.

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And the not so good…

My results overall were not up to my standards. Greg and I didn’t make it to the second day of the Platinum Pairs. It’s a really tough event, and a lot of great players—including Hall of Famers like Bob Hamman!—didn’t make the cut. Still, not making it to Day 2—let alone Day 3—is disappointing.

I thought we played pretty well in the first session, but we didn’t get enough gifts, and what feels like a 60% board is often a 40% board in this event. So we were right around average for the morning. Nothing good happened in the second session. We didn’t play as well, but I didn’t feel as though we played badly. The frustration at bad result after bad result may have compounded and gotten our spirits down by the end of the afternoon. I’m not sure that we deserved to qualify, but I’m also not sure that we didn’t.

More disappointing was our play the next day in the NABC+ Pairs. That’s a much easier field—mostly the pairs that didn’t qualify in the three National events that started the previous day. It’s an event in which I expect to qualify for Day 2 without much struggle. Of course, matchpoints is a fickle game, and when nothing goes your way it’s easy to have a bad day even when you play well. And even easier when you don’t. We were not on our A-game that day and finished under average both sessions. That meant a regional Swiss Teams on Sunday, where we played pretty well, but didn’t place in the overalls.

We had a third disappointment in the Silodor Pairs on Thursday. The field for this one is somewhere between the Platinum Pairs and the NABC+ Pairs: it’s not as exclusive as the Plats, but there are a lot of good players who have been knocked out of the Vanderbilt. Again, the combination of poor luck and poor play landed us below the cut line.

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It used to be that making it to the second day of these National events was really exciting and felt like an accomplishment. Now I expect to make Day 2, so not qualifying is pretty demoralizing. Especially given all the work I’ve been doing to work on my game this year.

I can’t really say how much my work this year contributed to the successes or failures at the table. I felt like I was playing better. I was counting things out more easily and knew what was going on faster and more consistently. That affected a few decisions and led to good plays.

I still dwelt on a few mistakes. I misplayed a slam on the first board of the second day of the Jacoby Swiss. It was a relatively subtle error, but I should have taken my time and gotten it right. We had had a slow and pained auction and I was conscious of time. But that’s no excuse.

The mistake I was most frustrated about was being a bad partner by pointing out a mistake Greg had made but not realized. We had 1NT set after good defense and a misguess by declarer—we just had to play a club and lock declarer in the dummy. Greg led a heart instead, giving declarer an entry to his 7th trick. I was quite pleased with myself for the defense and frustrated when Greg produced a heart. But that should have been the end of it; I should have shrugged and moved on to the next board. But before I could stop myself the words were out of my mouth: “You didn’t have a club left?” What’s the point of that? Why give him something to dwell on if he doesn’t see the mistake? And even more frustrating because I had given a lecture on not doing that just two days before! Do as I say, not as I do!! :-)

I tried listening to music before the game the first few days of the tournament. It was a little awkward; it’s not particularly social to have your earbuds in at the table. I don’t think it was effective, either. I was listening to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. It’s strident and energetic and I thought that would be uplifting. But it got stuck in my head, and I found myself humming it when I should have been concentrating on the cards. So I gave that up.

My plan had been not to drink at all during the tournament. After we got eliminated from the NABC+ Pairs on Saturday and I was playing in regional events the next two days, I let myself have a glass of wine at dinner. And I felt like I played better the next two days. I didn’t drink while I was in the Mixed Pairs or the Silodor. But then we got eliminated and I had a glass of wine with dinner…and played better the next day. Maybe that’s confirmation bias, and it certainly doesn’t make any real sense that having a glass of wine with dinner would improve my bridge the next day. But it didn’t seem to hurt it. And I love wine with a nice dinner. So we’ll see about this one going forward.

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Partnership-wise, Greg and I had a good tournament. We had a couple of bidding mix-ups, so that’s something we’ll be going over. There’s always something that comes up that we hadn’t talked about. The notes just keep getting longer!

We made a few fairly significant changes to our system a few weeks ago as we were going over the notes. In the long term I think they were good additions and will serve us well. We didn’t have any problems with them the few times they came up. But we hadn’t really had the chance to practice them comprehensively, and I wonder the extent to which not being 100% comfortable with our system affected our overall results. It’s not just about having that agreement come up and being on solid footing; it can create an overall sense of anxiety and uncertainty that can manifest in unexpected ways. There’s no telling whether that played a part in our disappointing results. The fact that we played better as the tournament wore on suggests that maybe things picked up as we felt more comfortable.

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I’ll be ruminating on this more in the coming weeks, but these were my initial thoughts upon coming home after the tournament. I was hoping to see all the hard work pay off and post some really impressive results in Memphis. Sometimes you need to go one step backward to go two steps forward. Sometimes you play well and it’s not your week.

At the end of the day, I felt like I played better than usual for most of the tournament. Greg and I played well together. Far from perfect, but things are heading in the right direction.

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