It always takes a little time to get back into the swing of life at home after returning from a tournament. I’ve had a lot to do this week, catching up on work on top of going over the tournament with Greg. So I didn’t get a ton of bridge in. A bit of reading, a few robot games, some Bridge Master. But mostly it was doing a post-mortem of Memphis and starting to practice for the Team Trials.
Greg and I spent about ten hours this week going over our results from the major events we played in Memphis. Greg takes great notes at the table, so we have a record of the auction and lead on all the hands we played.
We’ve learned a few things from this exercise.
The biggest is that we need to do it the day of the event. This was something <spoiler alert> Larry Cohen told me in a conversation for an upcoming episode of my podcast: when he played with David Berkowitz, going over the hands in the evening after the game was sacrosanct. It was an iron-clad rule that they did not go to sleep without having gone over all the hands from the day.
Even with hand records and good notes from the table, it’s not easy to recall everything from every board from events two weeks ago—especially when you’ve played A LOT of bridge since then. The more we remember about what happened—and what we were thinking—the more useful the review process is. There were a lot of hands where we couldn’t remember enough details to get anything meaningful from the discussion.
I think going over the hands the night of, with some time pressure—I need my sleep!—will also make us more efficient. We both like to get into the weeds on things. “Double dummy says you can make 4. Let’s spend 20 minutes figuring out how.” We spent almost three hours going over the 26 boards from the first session of the Platinum Pairs. We played 14 sessions of bridge together over the tournament, so that pace was unsustainable. That was pretty obvious, so we were able to go through the other sessions faster, mostly by spending almost no time on the nothing deals.
No obvious trends materialized. In some ways that’s good—there’s not a glaring deficiency in our game, like our opening leads are consistently costing tricks or we’re missing too many slams. But it also means there’s not an obvious area to concentrate on. We both misplayed a few hands. But we also both played some very well. We got some opening leads wrong, and we got some right. Our aggressive preempt style showed some big wins—and some big losses.
The closest we found to a recurring theme was “bidding judgment.” We sacrificed when we shouldn’t have, we didn’t try for game when others did, we didn’t compete with our 9-card fit and it was wrong. Of course, we got some of these decisions right as well. But most of the mistakes fell into this general category.
I’m not sure of the best way to work on this skill. Mike Lawrence has a book called Judgment at Bridge from 1976 (which I have in my library) and a sequel from 2017 which I do not. I don’t remember the first book. It’s Mike Lawrence—newly inducted into the Hall of Fame!—so I’m sure it’s great. But I’m not sure if it’s the expert-level thinking I’m looking for. I’d love some insight from folks who have read these recently.
Perhaps the Master Solvers Club is the best place to go. Or some of the over-the-shoulder bridge books. I could also use bidding problems on Bridge Winners as a tool. I’m interested in your thoughts.
I’m also getting ready for the Team Trials—aka the United States Bridge Championships—which start April 24 in Schaumburg, Illinois (near O’Hare airport outside of Chicago.) This is the event that determines the teams that the United States Bridge Federation will send to represent the USA at the world championships, which this year are being held in Denmark at the end of August.
Greg couldn’t get time off for this one, so I’m playing with another of my favorite partners, Anant Rathi. Anant and I play a 2/1 system very similar to what I play with Greg. Fewer gadgets—we don’t play together as much—but Anant likes Flannery, so I have to bone up on that. We have great teammates—Phil Clayton and Danny Sprung.
Sixteen teams have entered, which makes for a perfect knockout bracket. We are the 15th seed, so we have drawn the second-seeded Fleisher team in the first round: Marty Fleisher-Chip Martel, Kevin Bathurst-John Hurd, and Joe Grue-Brad Moss. Those are three really good pairs. We are certainly the underdogs, especially in a two-day, 120-board match. But we’re going to give them everything we’ve got!
The US sends two teams to the Bermuda Bowl, so this year the USBC is a double-elimination tournament: the losers in the first round go into a second bracket, from which the USA2 team will be determined. Teams that lose in the later rounds of the main draw will drop into the second bracket.
It’s going to be a lot of fun! It will all be broadcast on VuGraph, so you can watch us as we shock the world!
I’d love to hear about your experience in Memphis. Did the leveling up work that you’ve been doing this year show any dividends? What have your post-mortem exercises looked like? How are you re-focusing yourself going forward?
See you at the trials! We have Wolfson (Meckstroth, Zia, et al.) in round 1. We knocked Meck's team out of the Jacoby which seems like a good omen...
My conclusion from Memphis was that my errors have in fact become better, but that I am out of practice at playing that much bridge in a row and need to be sure to enforce self-care while doing so. That is rather in conflict with going over hands on the day, although I agree with that as optimal also. Also, playing three different systems in 6 days is hard, gee, surprise.
Cuebids has I think been very helpful. I'm considering whether I should start to stream robot play, not for the audience but rather as a tool to *make* me slow down and talk through my thinking.