Poll about evaluating ego

[Phil]

Bridge is a game of mistakes, and the better you get the more mistakes you see in your play IMO.

Nice nugget of truth for a Monday morning.

[Fluffy]

I can play better than most people think (Except perhaps my father). But I so often suck so muchand play worse for being tired/focusless.

[billw55]

It seems that at my club, the players stronger than me tend to evaluate me more or less accurately, but the players weaker than me think I am better than I really am, sometimes much better.

 

I think this is because I play farily rarely and the weaker players tend to remember my good results more than my poor ones. I think if played regularly, they would see enough average/bad results to understand.

 

Whereas the strong players see my errors while playing against me, and don't need to check the scores to judge me.

[Jlall]

If you answer you usually play better than others think you do, does that show too much ego about your play ignoring what others think of it? And if you say you usually play worse than others think you do, does that show too much ego about your reputation thinking that your bridge is well thought of? A tricky question to answer evaluating ego.

No, if you are a rational person you should be in the best position to evaluate how well you play. Everyone else evaluates how well you play based on either a very small sample size of hands, or an outdated sample size of hands, or based on what they have read/heard/hype, or how big of a game you talk.

 

If you always played against the same opps or with the same partner and those people were as good or better than you, then their evaluation would might be more accurate than yours. But even then there are hands you play right where you know you thought about it wrongly and got lucky or something, and only you know that.

[helene_t]

I think that is quite theoretical, Justin.

 

In practice people think that they did the right thing and just got unlucky. They really think so. It's not like they lie when they say it.

 

Probably there are some people with very low self esteem who have the opposite bias, and probably top players are less likely to fool themselves in the post mortem analysis that lesser players are. It would surprise me if top players in general were unbiased, though. Of course I am not in the position to tell you about the psychology of top players (lol), just my humble opinion.

 

But even then there are hands you play right where you know you thought about it wrongly and got lucky or something, and only you know that.

Yeah, during the Tolani Grand Prix, Mohit congratulated me for defeating his contract by a clever false card (sacrificed and honour so it looked like a stiff). So now he probably thinks I am a decent player. What actually happened was that I was just playing the highest from a doubleton as I usually do (standard count) without giving it a thought. Those kind of things happen all the time.

[TimG]

In practice people think that they did the right thing and just got unlucky. They really think so. It's not like they lie when they say it.

I think lots of players chalk things up to luck the errors theydon't recognize. The better a player is, the more likely he will be able to recognize the errors.

 

Poor players think they are better than they are because the don't recognize the errors they are making.

 

Good players are worse than poor players think they are, again because poor players don't recognize the mistakes.

 

Great players are probably about as good as other great players think they are and probably also have a generally accurate self-assessment of their own abilities. Whether they admit this accurate self-assessment to others in a different story.

[gwnn]

for example look at this thread. apparently it came as a result of an accident, but it is in fact a much more interesting and difficult question than the intended one.

[mikeh]

I think I play about as well (and as badly) as other experts, with and against whom I play, think I do.

 

I don't play a lot these days, and when I do, my usual partner is generally viewed, by the average player, as the best player in the area, so I suspect that the average player thinks I am lucky to play with him rather than the other way around :o

 

It is true that the expert sees far more of his or her mistakes than the non-expert, and I think that the average player simply can't distinguish the differences between various real experts...and tends to judge based on existing reputation and masterpoint holdings. But experts generally don't care about how many masterpoints someone has.

[Codo]

Sorry, I doubt that experts are less human then lesser players, so I belive that they make the same mistakes in evaluation of their own strength as others.

 

And this is true in most sports where you cannot messure the real strength.

[ggwhiz]

Thinking about my local club scene, it occurs to me that BBO players that claim to be experts and are delussional probably appear in real life in the same percentage. Never mind the World Class phonies.

 

Several of ours fool nobody except the rookies and up to 1/2 of the intermediates but similar to a study I read about a couple of years ago, 100% of stupid people with inflated egos truly believe they are smart.

 

Troll through the BBO memberships and kibitz the top (self) ranked ones and I'm convinced you could add very accurate stats to the above study as to healthy self-esteem to "are you trying to kid me or yourself?".