Playing "perfect"

[bglover]

In my game, I strive for making as few mistakes as I posibly can. This includes always competing to the correct level, always giving correct count (on appropriate hands), using good judgment on sacrificing, etc.

 

A couple times in the last month or so, my partners and I played "perfect" bridge in short (10 boards or less) tourneys. I came in 3rd both times. Now, I realize that with a short tourney there isn't a lot of time to generate swings playing the way I strive to, but that really is not my question. I was happy with how my partners and I played both days (who wouldn't be).

 

My real question is this: When playing in live competition at high levels (flight A or above), how do you approach your game? Do you strive for the fewest mistakes possible or do you assume that everyone else will make about the same number as you and so try to "goose" your results by taking some chances? Perhaps pysche more or preempt on hands you might not usually open, etc.?

[inquiry]

A ten board event, especially an imp ten board event with 40 or more tables is a crapshoot. You are not going to win with normal results. The reason is someone, somewhere is screwing up. And if they are not screwing up against you, they are screwing up against someone else. How mayn 4 HXX down two at one table while you defend 2H at yours can you take?

 

This doesn't mean you should leave all your lessons behind. Winning or losing means nothing. Simply play for the love of the game. Make the RIGHT bid, make the Right play. Sometimes, your opponents at your table will give YOU a gift or two. And if you played well on the other 8 hands, you have a fair chance to win.

 

Now, I psyche at about the same frequency in f2f, long event, and short event. Because when I psyhce I think it the right thing to do....

 

Ben

[paulg]

It certainly depends on the length of the match.

 

Your 10-board tourney experience illustrates how to play better teams in short events - play right down the middle and you can easily beat anyone.

 

In longer matches, my advice is to play down the middle and try to keep the score close. Against a good team you can never win the match in the first quarter but you can certainly lose it as it's very difficult to get IMPs back from them after a poor start.

 

As typically the stronger team, I often take more chances at the start of the match to try and build an early lead - in the sense that I will take an aggressive stance on 50-50 decisions.

 

But if you bid your games and defeat the obvious contracts then you can keep a match close.

[Free]

In real life:

at imps I will always try to play 'perfect', it's just good enough to end up pretty high.

at MP's, I'll sometimes try something funny, sometimes psyche,... A little risk won't cost me dearly.

 

In online bridge:

imps or MP's are about the same for me here, I just want to get everything out of a hand, getting in the right contract or messing up my opponent's bidding. I've also noticed that my f2f partner does the same thing, but even more agressive (bidding slams like crazy for example), and if he makes them he might ask me if I aprove his bidding :) Like that few boards against Misho and Ben, we played 3 slams right after eachother (2 doubled), and all were made!! It's just fun when it works :P

 

(I consider online bridge more as practice, but when playing serious tourneys I still try to play like irl)

[keylime]

Playing "perfect", depends on the events you're prepping for and quality of opposition. I'll give you a likely scenario and how I will prepare for it.

 

My regular partner and I are going to reunite for a week at a regional (no hints on "where" however - haha). It will be during the early summer. We are deciding on the schedule but most of the events will be knockouts and swiss teams, so IMP scoring. The quality of competition should be high.

 

We are playing a lot of tourneys, experimenting with new concepts and testing out the "when" to try certain takeout bids and fit bids. We don't care about results, we do care about the "do" and "do not" elements at work for this. These bids are new to our system, and practice doesn't truly simulate the aggressive ferocity that some players like to bid against a forcing club pair. Luckily now that the bugs are fixed we can closer simulate bids but it's all about "feel" that we try to accomplish. Competitive bidding is a BIG area of contention right now because you must compete well to compete in the game. Taking "flyers" is not winning bridge and we are trying to cut down on those as much as possible, with mixed success. Much discussion is offered and is being offered right now; we've started preparing already.

 

As time gets closer, we will have the final system, the piece and body of work we will take to the site and start intense bidding practice about 2 months before the event. There will be fewer tourneys but more serious ones entered. Serious ones I define as large fields and/or 12 or more boards because those represent segments to me. We will measure at IMPs the IMPs per board ratio. If this ratio is acceptable (our target goal is 2 imps/board - high standard but we Keylimers aim very high), we will be happy. If not, then we will denote where the system either failed or did not get to the best result, factoring in opposition strength. Playing again weak opps or very strong opps doesn't help us much because at knockouts you play closer to your peer than matchpoints due to the mechanics of the game.

 

About 1 week before the departure, we will rev up our workload to play as many matches as we can get our hands on. We will play it like we would at the playing site, even MPs tourneys just to make sure our tactics are sound. Then I arrive, we have a long sitdown among key lime pie about IMP tactics and then go play. Hopefully we win some points.

 

Preparation is the key to getting better. We prepare very thoughly. You'll never play "perfect" but you can play your style and system if you're willing to put in the hours in practice and going over those errors that are bound to happen and get it right. Making tweaks only works if they work in general cases - if it's for bidding sequence x-y-z that only comes up once a blue moon, not good for morale.

 

Good question...made me think a little bit :(

[inquiry]

Dwayne,

 

+2 imps per board seems not only unrealistic, but totally unrealistic. Especially if you don't achieve this you then go and modify your system because of this "failure", especially if you are getting your stats from the BBO site. The reason why is your opponents reach a reasonable 4♥ that the entire field should reach and you get -3 imps cause some didn't bid it.

 

You play a perfectly normal 4♥ that everyone should make, but 2/3 of the field play stupid and you get (from a real world perspective) and unjustified 7 imps.

 

In the long run, keeping track of your stats on myhands can be useful. With very good play, you might average more than 1 imp per board, especially if you primarily play with regular (and good) partners. But I know you are like me, and play with a wide variety of pickup and varying skill partners. I remember running a imp/board breakdown on all the players I thought were good. Rado, at that time was actually negative imps per board. The reason was clear when looking at his results, he was playing with a novice a lot of the time, and the remainder of the time only in a game with essentially all four gold stars. So his serious games came out roughly zero and he took a huge statistical hit playing with the beginners.

 

Only two players out of more than 50 I examined averaged more than 1.0 imp/board, and I was looking at all top players. Over the short run (one or two hundred hands), I found some pretty high averages, but once they played 250 to 300 boards or so, their averages seemed to more or less level out.

 

I have kept running averages on me over the past year, but more because myhands only keeping a couple months now. In the 471 imp hands I have played my current average per board is "only" 0.843/board. You will have to take my word for it that this is fairly good, and that this is lower than my long-running average, which includes over 2000 BBO hands, but not by much. I actually think I can average a little higher than this in open play if I played with just selected partners, but for these 471 hands I played with 16 different partners, a couple of them for the first time. I know that during this same time, you played 230 imp hands with 10 or 11 different partners, some are shared between us, others are not. But your average comes nowhere near approaching 2.0, or 1.0 for that matter. I would think a reasonable goal would be to ignore the imps per board, and instead look to see how you bid was "sound" bridge or not. (Although if you play in team matches with good partners to provide "protection" so that opp bid and make 4♥ is average, then +2 against pick up opponents should be reachable).

 

And remember, if you play equal competition, over the long haul your AVERAGE imps/board should be zero (or of course it is not equal competition). So any of us with plus averages are not playing equal competition by definition.

 

Ben

[Trpltrbl]

I play perfect before midnite, after that I am doing everything that bridgegods hate, even though some of you still consider that bridge too B)

 

Mike :D

[inquiry]

I play perfect before midnite (snip)

Too bad it is always after midngiht somewhere... B)

 

BTW, perfect is the enemy of good. If you always strive to make the perfect bid, you will find yourself losing out. Take the idea of preempts. The best strategy is to apply pressure (pressure bids) as quickly as possible. These bids aren't perfect, but if you wait for the perfect hand to make a particular bid, you hurt yourself twice. Once when you do make it, the opponents know exaclty what you have, and two, when you don't make the bid you miss opportunties to harash the opponents.

 

Ben

[keylime]

Ben,

 

Our average at IMPs is only just over 1 imp a board ourselves and that's every hand we've played from September forward on BBO and the Zone. The reason why we set the goal target at 2 imps/hand is because we look at hands in 24 board segments, like KO's. So, if we get 24 imps per 12 hands, we are pleased. Does this happen, lot of time no - many times the slam hands are way skewed in our favor and some of the partscores go the other way. It's part and parcel of the game.

 

I wanted to emphasize more of the prep work involved in playing your best over the goal average. It's very rarely obtained admittedly.