Things are progressing well. It’s been two weeks at the gym, and my body seems to be acclimatizing. I can walk around the next day now after a workout, which is an improvement. I don’t know that I feel stronger or more fit, but I can certainly do more without getting winded and feeling sore the next day, so I guess that is progress.
I’ve been good about sticking to my routines this week. I did my robot tournament and VuGraph study every day. I (finally) completed my review of our performance in the Team Trials. I’ve been looking at our second match—the first round of the USA2 bracket. I had one really bad set, which we lost 67-11. We had one other bad set, but I didn’t play particularly poorly in that one. All of the other sets we either won or were within 3 IMPs. But we couldn’t overcome the two big losses.
Going over these results has been good; I just wish I had done it sooner, while things were fresh in my mind. Maybe it’s good to have some distance and perspective. But often I find myself asking, “What the heck was I thinking?!?” It would probably be better if I could remember that and work on improving that thinking.
I’ll continue the VuGraph study with other matches from the Trials. I’ve usually looked at Steve and Bobby’s matches, but I think I’m going to focus on Adam Grossack and Eddie Wold. They play a very simple system and obviously had a lot of success. I was very impressed watching them in the Bermuda Bowl.
Greg and I are taking a pass through our notes that we’re calling COP—Cut or Practice. We don’t want to play anything that we’re not extremely comfortable with. We’ve added a bunch of new stuff, and practicing it on Cuebids has ironed out most of the wrinkles and we’re feeling good about them. But there’s a lot of esoteric stuff in the notes that never comes up, and it’s just not worth it unless we’re confident we’ll both remember it and not have a misunderstanding.
So we’re going through the notes and marking everything we’re not 100% comfortable with as COP. Then we’ll go through together and decide if they’re worth keeping, in which case we’ll load up some Scenarios on Cuebids and drill them.
It’s always good to take a deep dive into the notes. There’s still a lot that I want to do to make them more readable and easier to use. And there’s a lot of stuff in there that makes a lot of sense but is unusual or infrequent enough that I’m not sure that it’s worth it. When you’re not playing together all the time, there’s a fine line between good agreements and practical agreements.
Have a great week!