Club bridge, hand records missing

[JanM]

Although the question you asked was how to persuade clubs to produce hand records, I'd like to suggest that another alternative, that might actually improve your game equally well, would be to work on your memory. Try writing the auctions down on your scorecard & then after the game go over the hands and see whether you can recreate the hands and the play. I know some people who started this sort of process by writing their own hands down on the scoresheet. I find the auction easier to write down and usually enough to jog my memory.

 

One of the most important things all of us can do to improve is to do a better job of visualizing all 4 hands during the bidding and play. In fact, one expert I know suggested that the reason men are usually better than women (at the top level) in bridge is because they are better able to visualize things (males usually do better on spatial relation type tests for instance). I know that it takes me a serious effort to form a picture of the entire hand and that when I do so I play better.

 

I remember one session I played with my former husband, before hand records existed, where I happened to leave on a trip immediately after the game. When I got home, he commented that he'd gone through the scores and had recreated all of the hands relatively easily. I know another expert who routinely goes through his scores and not only recreates the hands but writes up what happened and what he thinks he and his partner could have done to improve. I'm sure there are many reasons why both of these players are world champions, but the fact that they pay enough attention to each hand to be able to recreate the hands and what happened later is surely one reason.

Do you mean including all of the spot cards?

In one case (Lew, who really has an incredible memory for bridge hands - I remember a time when he was playing with someone with whom he'd only played a few times several years earlier and some auction came up and after the hand he said "the last time we had this auction you had ... (quoting the exact hand from the previous time)."), yes, he'd include all the spots. In the other case, Kit, no - in fact, I was discussing this with him and he vehemently denied that he could reconstruct the hands, until I said I didn't mean every spot card. ;)

[jillybean]

How important do you think hand records are to the players?

Depends on the player, or on the result they get in the game: few with bad scores want one. I think having a facility to post them on the Internet is important. Once players realize you're always going to do that, you don't need to print as many copies. I usually print about 1.5 per table and leave the file open so I can print more if needed.

 

However, I do believe they are a key element in building a game, and building a reputation as a TD who cares.

I wish more TD's had this attitude. For those of us with the ability to erase the last hand and move on to the next board with a clear mind, handrecords are a vital part of the package.

 

I love playing at the clubs but not having these records is so frustrating, my time is obviously better spent on BBO where I have the ability to review and replay all boards for every pair, right at my finger tips. I know my time back at live games is going to be short lived before I'm too frustrated with simply playing cards and give up.

 

I will try to make it to your games more often and happily sort boards in exchange for handrecords. :)

 

PS: Where else can I play and get hand records?

[helene_t]

Silly question: are these card fees per player or per pair?

[jillybean]

Silly question: are these card fees per player or per pair?

$32 per table, Im really not a scrooge.

[helene_t]

Wow, that's expensive, but OK over here we usually have playing directors.

[jillybean]

Wow, that's expensive, but OK over here we usually have playing directors.

Some of ours do that too, no-one seems to mind.

[Fluffy]

we pay 6-10€ (Depending on being memeber of the local club) per person

[jillybean]

we pay 6-10€ (Depending on being memeber of the local club) per person

 

$8 is the ACBL member rate, non members $9($10?), students $4

[Cascade]

Although the question you asked was how to persuade clubs to produce hand records, I'd like to suggest that another alternative, that might actually improve your game equally well, would be to work on your memory. Try writing the auctions down on your scorecard & then after the game go over the hands and see whether you can recreate the hands and the play. I know some people who started this sort of process by writing their own hands down on the scoresheet. I find the auction easier to write down and usually enough to jog my memory.

 

One of the most important things all of us can do to improve is to do a better job of visualizing all 4 hands during the bidding and play. In fact, one expert I know suggested that the reason men are usually better than women (at the top level) in bridge is because they are better able to visualize things (males usually do better on spatial relation type tests for instance). I know that it takes me a serious effort to form a picture of the entire hand and that when I do so I play better.

 

I remember one session I played with my former husband, before hand records existed, where I happened to leave on a trip immediately after the game. When I got home, he commented that he'd gone through the scores and had recreated all of the hands relatively easily. I know another expert who routinely goes through his scores and not only recreates the hands but writes up what happened and what he thinks he and his partner could have done to improve. I'm sure there are many reasons why both of these players are world champions, but the fact that they pay enough attention to each hand to be able to recreate the hands and what happened later is surely one reason.

Do you mean including all of the spot cards?

In one case (Lew, who really has an incredible memory for bridge hands - I remember a time when he was playing with someone with whom he'd only played a few times several years earlier and some auction came up and after the hand he said "the last time we had this auction you had ... (quoting the exact hand from the previous time)."), yes, he'd include all the spots. In the other case, Kit, no - in fact, I was discussing this with him and he vehemently denied that he could reconstruct the hands, until I said I didn't mean every spot card. :)

I do think that is impressive.

 

My mind certainly doesn't work like that. It would have some obvious advantages in the play where I have to work hard to remember spot cards. Perhaps I could train myself to remember more details.

 

On the other hand I think there are some advantages to being able to forget or at least file away many of the details of a hand. I frequently have no recollection of the hand I played two hands ago in my short term memory. Often it happens for example that my partner asks me at the end of a round in pairs what we did on the first board of the round or at the previous table and my mind is completely blank.

 

At a recent tournament I lost a spot card in spades and consequently misdefended. I was in with the opportunity to cash a trick. I had seen declarer pitch two spades which left one spade remaining which I had not seen. I tried to cash a spade and partner showed out and declarer ruffed. I had no idea whether I had missed my partner's discard or whether declarer had pitched three spades. Because the details were going to fade from my memory while I concentrated on the next board I could just say to myself "I will have to check the hand record later" and happily went on to the next board.

 

The details of a hand will come back to me when I get the right trigger which might be "When you had AKJ fifth..." or sometimes many more details are required. But this doesn't include details of all of the spot cards.

[xcurt]

Although the question you asked was how to persuade clubs to produce hand records, I'd like to suggest that another alternative, that might actually improve your game equally well, would be to work on your memory. Try writing the auctions down on your scorecard & then after the game go over the hands and see whether you can recreate the hands and the play. I know some people who started this sort of process by writing their own hands down on the scoresheet. I find the auction easier to write down and usually enough to jog my memory.

 

One of the most important things all of us can do to improve is to do a better job of visualizing all 4 hands during the bidding and play. In fact, one expert I know suggested that the reason men are usually better than women (at the top level) in bridge is because they are better able to visualize things (males usually do better on spatial relation type tests for instance). I know that it takes me a serious effort to form a picture of the entire hand and that when I do so I play better.

 

I remember one session I played with my former husband, before hand records existed, where I happened to leave on a trip immediately after the game. When I got home, he commented that he'd gone through the scores and had recreated all of the hands relatively easily. I know another expert who routinely goes through his scores and not only recreates the hands but writes up what happened and what he thinks he and his partner could have done to improve. I'm sure there are many reasons why both of these players are world champions, but the fact that they pay enough attention to each hand to be able to recreate the hands and what happened later is surely one reason.

Do you mean including all of the spot cards?

In one case (Lew, who really has an incredible memory for bridge hands - I remember a time when he was playing with someone with whom he'd only played a few times several years earlier and some auction came up and after the hand he said "the last time we had this auction you had ... (quoting the exact hand from the previous time)."), yes, he'd include all the spots. In the other case, Kit, no - in fact, I was discussing this with him and he vehemently denied that he could reconstruct the hands, until I said I didn't mean every spot card. :)

Back when I lived in SF I played a 32 board GNT match against Kit and Sally Woolsey. Kit had a kibitzer, maybe someone from his day job at the option exchange. Before we shuffled up and dealt Kit took out a pack and started turning over cards and told the kib something like "If you can tell me all 52 cards in order, you are ready to play this game" or something like that.

 

Anyone who is familiar with de Groot's work with chess players knows this is just insane for 99% of us, and more proof that "Kit Woolsey" is actually a bridge playing robot.

[skjaeran]

Wow, that's expensive, but OK over here we usually have playing directors.

Wow, that's cheap, I'd say! :)

 

At my club we've paid NOK 70 pr player for a couple of years, which is something like € 8.5. Other clubs playing at the same site charge a little more (some) and a little less (one). We haven't discussed what to do in the next season starting in a months time, but I guess we'll increase the fee to NOK 80.

 

Edit: We play team series, duplicated boards, Bridgemates, results including complete hand records and butler scoring on the internet. Playing directors.

[TMorris]

In the UK around North London the places I play at always have pre-duplicated hands from a duplimate machine and have the records up on the internet at the same time as the scores are posted. I'd be disappointed with anything less.

 

Fees vary a lot - with a non-playing director at a club that is privately owned aroun £9 a session inlcuding tea and coffee. With a playing director at a members owned club £3 a session including tea coffee and biscuits (and complaints if the biscuits aren't up to scratch)

[jillybean]

$8 here includes tea, coffee and great food. At one game it is mandatory to skip breakfast. People come early to eat and whats left is eaten during and after the game :)

[JanM]

My mind certainly doesn't work like that.  It would have some obvious advantages in the play where I have to work hard to remember spot cards.  Perhaps I could train myself to remember more details.

 

On the other hand I think there are some advantages to being able to forget or at least file away many of the details of a hand.  I frequently have no recollection of the hand I played two hands ago in my short term memory.  Often it happens for example that my partner asks me at the end of a round in pairs what we did on the first board of the round or at the previous table and my mind is completely blank.

I definitely agree that it's important that your mind not be cluttered with previous hands. I think that the reason great players can remember a hand (with the proper trigger of course - that might be going through the hands in the order they were played, might be the bidding, might be the opponent, might be a situation) is that during the hand they really are storing all of that information (spots played to each trick) and then even though they "cleared" their memory for the next hand, it's there, in storage somewhere, to be recalled. Someone (I've forgotten who) once suggested that a good way to get "into" a hand at the beginning was to make sure to repeat the spots played to the first trick - focus really hard on making sure those cards are stored properly in your memory and then you can often stay on the track of remembering future cards. That helps me (not that I am in either Kit or Lew's class when it comes to remembering hands).

 

It's also interesting that the context of hands can make a difference. I think I've probably told this story before, but when computer dealt hands were first being used, there was some sort of bug in the random number generator ACBL was using, so the same set of hands happened to be dealt for two tournaments about 5 or 6 months apart. Lew happened to play in both of them. I've always wished he'd write an article about it, but by now I suppose he never will. In the first event, he was playing with me in a Sectional mixed pairs. In the second event, he was playing with Evan Bailey in a Regional pair game. His pair was E/W in both events, but he sat in the opposite seats. The hand on which he realized that he'd played the set of boards before was one in which both hands were 4333 with the same 4 card major. Our bidding methods at the time allowed both pairs to uncover that fact and play 3NT. There were the same number of tricks in NT and the major, so it was a good board for our methods. Except that I was playing the hand the first time - I had xxx opposite AJx in clubs and forgot to lead a club toward the AJx in case the KQ were onside. They were, so we got a bad board instead of a good one. The second time the board came up, Lew was playing the hand and of course led a club towards his hand and made the extra club trick when the KQ were onside. I don't know the odds of this happening on two hands and both times in clubs, but of course Lew did and then he started thinking about the earlier hands and pretty soon he was able to go up to the director and convince him that the hands were the same as they had been a few months earlier. But until he happened to be in the same contract with the same "problem" for declarer, he hadn't noticed that the hands were the same.

 

Another time that we played a set of boards that were created wrong was similar. This time, the dealing program had somehow rotated the suits - the spades from the first set of hands were hearts, the hearts were diamonds, diamonds clubs, clubs spades (or maybe the other way around). These two sets of hands occurred within days of each other. But the first set occurred in a matchpoint event and the second one in a team game. Chip noticed that the hands were the same when he had the identical problem about how to play a suit with the second set of hands. Once he started to think about it, he was able to realize what had happened. I'm sure I'd never have realized.

 

And another time (I've had instances of the same boards popping up in different events a lot, haven't I?), when the same hands were dealt in the Summer NABC Women's KO and the Fall Women's BAM, my partner noticed after about 5 rounds of play, when she had the identical close decision about whether to invite game opposite a weak 2 bid. Up until then, the problems had been sufficiently different because of the IMPs vs BAM contexts that neither of us had noticed.

[NickRW]

How important do you think hand records are to the players?

Depends on the player, or on the result they get in the game: few with bad scores want one.

Ye gods! It is the sessions where you do badly that the hand records are the most valuable. A session where you did well - ok - so you walked on water - often there is little to actually learn from that. A session where you did badly is much more instructive.

 

No preference where I get the hand record from - don't care if it is printed or on the net.

 

Nick

[jillybean]

How is this for service.

 

I played in McBruces game tonight and when I got home there was a PBN file with all boards waiting in my email. In addition, the complete results and hand records posted on the net.

 

I’ll be back at your games as often as I can – thanks!

You have my vote for #1 and most responsive TD :)

 

 

Now all Ive got to do is fix my bridge game.....

[JoAnneM]

We are a non-profit game, charge $4 per game, and do not charge extra for special games - we absorb the extra cost. We use a playing director so do not have hand records. Even when we have a stac game the hand records rarely are taken by more than about 30% of the players.

 

We make enough money to provide coffee and cookies, pay our expenses, including a small director stipend, insurance, and a big Christmas party every year which includes free catered lunch. (Rent is $1.5 per person)

 

Our problem now is that the Senior Center is offering free non-ACBL bridge on one of our game days and several of our C players have abandoned us because we "charge too much".

 

If we started using hand records we would have to have a non-playing director, which would drop half a table from our game and would require one of us to sit there very bored for 3 1/2 hours twice a week. Of course I could be reading my new Kindle.

 

I just can't see the point. We do post the results and travelers online.

[jillybean]

I just can't see the point.   We do post the results and travelers online.

I lwant to improve, I dont remember the hands so without the handrecords it is impossible for me to review any of the play.

 

Just a few minutes ago I was loading last night hands to a teaching table, recreating the auctions, replaying the hands. This allows me to see where I messed up, where I could have made an overtrick. Thanks Bruce, I think this is a powerful tool.

 

If you are already running your games for a minimal fee you probably dont want to stop playing and provide hand records for players, I doubt anyone would expect you to either. OTOH if you are charging full price for a game, want to provide the best possible experience for your players this is something you can and I think should be offering.

Post it, dont print it $0 supply cost.

 

I'll always chose an $8 game with records over a $4 game without, but thats just me.

[y66]

Although the question you asked was how to persuade clubs to produce hand records, I'd like to suggest that another alternative, that might actually improve your game equally well, would be to work on your memory. Try writing the auctions down on your scorecard & then after the game go over the hands and see whether you can recreate the hands and the play. I know some people who started this sort of process by writing their own hands down on the scoresheet. I find the auction easier to write down and usually enough to jog my memory.

 

One of the most important things all of us can do to improve is to do a better job of visualizing all 4 hands during the bidding and play. In fact, one expert I know suggested that the reason men are usually better than women (at the top level) in bridge is because they are better able to visualize things (males usually do better on spatial relation type tests for instance). I know that it takes me a serious effort to form a picture of the entire hand and that when I do so I play better.

 

I remember one session I played with my former husband, before hand records existed, where I happened to leave on a trip immediately after the game. When I got home, he commented that he'd gone through the scores and had recreated all of the hands relatively easily. I know another expert who routinely goes through his scores and not only recreates the hands but writes up what happened and what he thinks he and his partner could have done to improve. I'm sure there are many reasons why both of these players are world champions, but the fact that they pay enough attention to each hand to be able to recreate the hands and what happened later is surely one reason.

I really appreciate posts like these from experienced players. Will work on getting more of this stuff into my bridge routine.

[McBruce]

One other benefit of either using hand records with players doing the preduplication, or a program like mine that allows the TD to enter the hands dealt by players: last night we had a disputed claim which was finally resolved, and then the players put the cards back into the board: 17 in one hand, 12 in another, 13 and 10 in the remaining slots.

 

As Craig Ferguson says, "I know!"

 

Hand records give you a second way of restoring the deal, or checking later to see if it was fouled at some point.

[Cascade]

One other benefit of either using hand records with players doing the preduplication, or a program like mine that allows the TD to enter the hands dealt by players: last night we had a disputed claim which was finally resolved, and then the players put the cards back into the board: 17 in one hand, 12 in another, 13 and 10 in the remaining slots.

 

As Craig Ferguson says, "I know!"

 

Hand records give you a second way of restoring the deal, or checking later to see if it was fouled at some point.

That is why it is normal in some places to write the hand on the traveller.

[awm]

I'll always chose an $8 game with records over a $4 game without, but thats just me.

I think that you are in a distinct minority here. If more people felt the same way, they could inform the club manager and probably get hand records (a $4/session price hike would easily cover the expense for this).

 

Honestly I find that much of what goes on in the local clubs is pretty random and non-sensical, and that trying to review the hands and think about "what went wrong" is mostly a waste of time when the opponents and field results are how they are. Regionals (and even sectionals although those are often little better than club game fields) normally have hand records.

[Mbodell]

If we started using hand records we would have to have a non-playing director, which would drop half a table from our game and would require one of us to sit there very bored for 3 1/2 hours twice a week.

One does not follow from the other. Before we had a dealing machine here directors would prepare their hands and then sometimes play (we'd have directors play only if needed to fill a movement or avoid having someone sit out). You can get dealing instructions where the dealer doesn't look at the cards (but takes a suited and sorted deck and deals based on arrows). Or you can have directors switch and prepare each other's hands. Or you can have directors deal and just trust them not to remember their hands too well (I don't know about you, but where we are even when directors play they are not eligible for MP).

 

Obviously you know your players best and may be doing the best thing for them. But it isn't the case that hand records automatically means a non-playing director.

[jillybean]

Honestly I find that much of what goes on in the local clubs is pretty random and non-sensical, and that trying to review the hands and think about "what went wrong" is mostly a waste of time when the opponents and field results are how they are. Regionals (and even sectionals although those are often little better than club game fields) normally have hand records.

POP

:(

[helene_t]

Honestly I find that much of what goes on in the local clubs is pretty random and non-sensical, and that trying to review the hands and think about "what went wrong" is mostly a waste of time when the opponents and field results are how they are.

Huh? You don't have to be an expert to have fruitful discussions with p about what you could have done better.