Study Versus Play

[gurgistan]

I have been playing bridge for 18 months in all.

 

I read a Jeremy Flint book on Acol several times as my first encounter with bridge was live in the UK. Well, I went online and learnt Standard American. I then switched to 2/1 in July.

 

I am on my fourth reading of Watson's The Play Of The Hand.

 

I play everyday but study maybe 1 hour for every 10 hours that I play.

 

What should the ratio between study and play be?

 

Any and all advice appreciated.

[JLOGIC]

Study the hands that you play, aka post mortem. This is way more valuable especially early on than reading books. Reading books is also good, but you need to get lessons out of the mistakes your'e making while you play, and see what you're doing wrong in real time.

 

If you were playing + post morteming 10 hours per hour that you studied a book, I'd say thats fine.

 

Especially, work on your play. Are you clueless on many hands about which suit to attack first, whether or not to draw trump, what your general plan should be etc? Don't worry, so is everyone. Get into good habits for how you are thinking about the play. You really need to understand the play to bid well etc. What's the best way to appreciate your 4th trump and stiff? Be a good card player and utilize those assets accurately.

 

The truth is I feel like almost all players when they look at a dummy have a lot of thoughts that go on in their head. They need to do this, they need to do that. They read this, they read that. They don't really understand which are the most pressing issues, and what the overall game plan should be, let alone how to time it all correctly etc.

 

So at the very least go over every hand you declared after the session and see what your plan was. Did you count how many winners and losers you had? Did you make a plan on how to get rid of those losers? Did you count their shape, have any picture of their hand? Did you know when to draw trumps? etc etc.

 

Your improvement should be very fast if you do this, much faster than any other route you can take.

 

The real value in playing a lot of hands is not just gaining experience without thinking about those hands again, that would be a very slow way to improve. But if you go over your hands, it's so valuable.

[Stephen Tu]

Study the hands that you play, aka post mortem. This is way more valuable especially early on than reading books. Reading books is also good, but you need to get lessons out of the mistakes your'e making while you play, and see what you're doing wrong in real time.

 

Hmm, I guess people learn differently. For me, reading was way more valuable, and more efficient. Without the knowledge from the books, how do you even realize you made a mistake? You guessed a two-way finesse right, found the Q. Yay, made the contract, no problem right? No good player around to point out that you were supposed to strip + endplay for a 100% line rather than the 50%. At least for some of us who didn't have good players around to post-mortem with/teach us, who had to learn on our own, books gave us the info to compare our play against. (I certainly agree with the idea of careful review of your hands, but without a base of knowledge, how do you know what to look for?)

 

 

Instead of reading Watson for the fourth time, try different authors. Root, Kantar, Mollo/Gardner, Hayden Truscott all have good play of the hand books. Different examples and different writing styles can help a concept sink in. Do all the quiz problems, make an effort to solve them, try not to flip to the answer until you are really stuck.

[gurgistan]

Study the hands that you play, aka post mortem. This is way more valuable especially early on than reading books. Reading books is also good, but you need to get lessons out of the mistakes your'e making while you play, and see what you're doing wrong in real time.

 

 

Instead of reading Watson for the fourth time, try different authors. Root, Kantar, Mollo/Gardner, Hayden Truscott all have good play of the hand books. Different examples and different writing styles can help a concept sink in. Do all the quiz problems, make an effort to solve them, try not to flip to the answer until you are really stuck.

This is an approach have used for other games.

 

One book 20 times or 20 books once.

 

For bridge, I have opted for the one book 20 times route.

[hanp]

Stephen Tu is right that as a beginner, a post-mortem is especially valuable if you can go over the hands with a player that is much better than you are.

[pooltuna]

Study the hands that you play, aka post mortem. This is way more valuable especially early on than reading books. Reading books is also good, but you need to get lessons out of the mistakes your'e making while you play, and see what you're doing wrong in real time.

 

 

Instead of reading Watson for the fourth time, try different authors. Root, Kantar, Mollo/Gardner, Hayden Truscott all have good play of the hand books. Different examples and different writing styles can help a concept sink in. Do all the quiz problems, make an effort to solve them, try not to flip to the answer until you are really stuck.

This is an approach have used for other games.

 

One book 20 times or 20 books once.

 

For bridge, I have opted for the one book 20 times route.

If you treat every hand in Watson like it is a problem and try to solve it before you read the solution, reading it once should have been enough. Now switch to declarer problems where you need to make inferences from bidding or leads. Mike Lawrence wrote one of these a long while back. Also probably need to start the Kelsey/Mollo defensive problem books. Defensive problems generally require a reasonable knowledge of declarer play as you often need to understand declarer's objective before you can thwart it. ARCH is a good acronym for both declarer and defensive play except in defense th H is "how can I beat this contract" (obviously MPs impacts this")

[P_Marlowe]

Try to form a partnership, Bridge is a partnership game.

 

If you learn a system from the book, that is great, but did your

p also read this book, and did he understood it similarily to you, or

does he interpret certain things differently.

 

This is also true for defence.

 

And of course, one needs to learn to be a good partner.

 

The process forming a partnership req. a lot of talks between both

players, you can do this in the post mortem.

 

Having said this, if you want to play the game seriously, try to play

in "serious" events, and this most likely means face to face bridge.

 

With kind regards

Marlowe

[mikeh]

I am with Stephen: all the studying of your hands won't help unless you or someone you are talking to actually knows enough to recognize mistakes. Without this knowledge base, most players will tend to allow the actual hands to impact their analysis: they will focus on and try to learn what worked on the hand rather than what the best play was.

 

One of the most frustrating aspects of the game, and perhaps the one element that makes is so popular, is that bad plays will often lead to better results (or even more often, the same results) as good plays. Of course, good plays eventually win out, but when studying only the small sample of hands one plays oneself, this won't be immediately apparent.

 

I'd try looking for books about drawing inferences: Jannersten wrote a book on this a long time ago, and Lawrence had one on Reading the Opponents' Cards.....then there are all of the Kelsey books, and some of Reese's...Master Play was an early read for me. And of course the materials available on BBO.

 

Watson's book was and remains a classic, but I'd caution against sticking only to it.

 

As for the ratio of study to play: one hour in the bar after a game, with real, not wannabe, experts would be worth far more than an entire session followed by trying to post-mortem the hands by oneself....at least that would be true for me.

 

And then.....if you want to advance beyond, say, 'advanced', the only way to do that is to play with an expert...and to talk to the expert. There may be people out there who could become expert without this, but I've never met any.

[junyi_zhu]

I have been playing bridge for 18 months in all.

 

I read a Jeremy Flint book on Acol several times as my first encounter with bridge was live in the UK. Well, I went online and learnt Standard American. I then switched to 2/1 in July.

 

I am on my fourth reading of Watson's The Play Of The Hand.

 

I play everyday but study maybe 1 hour for every 10 hours that I play.

 

What should the ratio between study and play be?

 

Any and all advice appreciated.

The good part of reading is that the books tell you to do this or do that. The bad part of reading is that you just don't make mistakes if you follow what the books tell you. Then you miss a big chunk of this game. This game is a game of mistakes. Some good players are good just because they have made way more mistakes than everybody else. So they started to understand the mistakes and they write a book, telling others to avoid mistakes. Still, you have to make all kinds of the mistakes to understand them and understand why the book says "do this and don't do that". In my teaching experience, I found that my student can do well if I tell her to do this and not to do that. However, she doesn't really know how painful it is if she doesn't do the right thing. In that sense, she missed the important education of this game. One has to make mistakes and those mistakes can be really painful, so that they can understand why one has to do the right thing. In that sense, that's why there are so many great players emerging from rubber bridge, because losing money is painful.

[NickRW]

Case for the Defence is a good, but old book by Victor Mollo where the vast majority of the problems are solvable by intermediate players who've read a bit of theory and have some experience under their belt. Quiz format. That format, if you do it honestly and don't just flip the page to read the answer, solves the problem of post mortem without expert advice on hand.

 

Dunno if some modern publisher still has that book in print - they should do.

 

Sometimes the B/I forum gets a decent play problem posted - they're good to try too.

 

Nick

[zenko]

Playing is not time efficient way to learn card play technique because truly instructive hands simply do not come often enough, and when they come you often do not notice it unless you do very diligent post-mortem sessions. So at the beginning I think you should listen to Zia's advice and focus more on reading books (but avoid advanced systems books since that's not really useful, at lest not at this point). Playing comes more in play later when you are good enough to start forming ambitious partnerships.

 

Also regarding partners for start it is smart to be as promiscuous as possible, especially when it comes to playing with better partners, you can learn a thing or two form each of them, and also that way you will learn what is kind of "normal" bridge style/system in your neck of woods which is very important. Regardless what system you are playing it is crucial that you also have a very good understanding what your opponents bids typically mean, as well as to asses what will "the field" do with your cards.

[Stephen Tu]

One book 20 times or 20 books once.

 

For bridge, I have opted for the one book 20 times route.

I think you'd find the latter approach better than the one you opted for. (Maybe more like 5 books 3x each rather than 1 book 15x). One book may just bring up a theme skipped or glossed over by another book. Or maybe explain it better, in a way that sinks in for you. And in any case it's very useful to see the same theme in *different problems*, so the pattern gets learned not just the one specific hand. If you see the exact same problem for the 3rd time, (unless it's been like 10 years since you last read it), the answer has been somewhat memorized, it's not as useful as recognizing the same pattern in a different hand.

 

Public/university libraries are rather useful if you don't want to buy a ton of books.

[rogerclee]

Playing is not time efficient way to learn card play technique  because truly instructive hands simply do not come often enough, and when they come you often do not notice it unless you do very diligent post-mortem sessions. 

I don't agree. I really think there is just a disconnect between what a lot of books present as bidding/declarer/defense problems and the kind of problems real bridge players face at the table.

 

These days if you buy a book on bidding, you will probably actually be buying a book on system. The reason is simple, the demand is high for books promising an easy way to improve your bridge (such as just remember a few rules or conventional bids), and it is very risky/difficult to write about issues of bidding judgment, particularly if you aren't one of the 100 best players in the world, which almost no current bridge author is.

 

If you buy a book on declarer play, often what you are getting are book themes that are exciting to see at first but don't actually come up that often. Declarer play is also more than just technique, a lot of it is card reading/table reading/trying to be tricky and inducing errors, and many bridge problems you face at the table are very difficult to analyze because there is no clear line and many possible ones that seem close. These areas of the game are not very well discussed, for the same reason as above--it's much harder to write an in depth book at analyzing percentages in bridge than it is to just show someone how to make 4S on a KJx opp ATx endplay. Also I want to emphasize that at anything but a world class level, being a good declarer means just almost never making a mistake on an easy hand. This is easier said than done, most people who are considered bridge experts make tremendous (!) numbers of simple technical errors, especially at the table as opposed to when given a problem. In the end, without playing lots of random hands, messing up the easy hands will always be a problem.

 

You could say a similar thing about defense, since in reality becoming a good defender is to a huge extent just being able to count out hands/listen to the bidding and try to figure out early on what the opponents have and to think, in a specific way, what exactly you are playing for every time you play a card. At a lower level it is just the ability to really focus and remember every card that is played and what its significance is in terms of signaling and the overall hand. Becoming a good partnership defender is also important in terms of being able to signal accurately when partner needs it, and non-expert players are often surprised to learn how many bridge problems can be solved by just being careful about your attitude/count/suit preference signals. This is something that takes a lot of time though, and also just involves playing a ton of hands. Again, this is not something you are going to get from reading a bridge book, it's just something you get from going out there and playing/analyzing thousands of hands for yourself.

 

So I guess I would just go with the thread and recommend that even though a familiarity with basic technique is necessary (from bridge books), it's really grinding out the hands that will make you a real player.

[babalu1997]

i buy books, lots of them, and i read them

 

sometimes i dont understand them and put them away,months, or maybe even years later, i return to them and they start to make sense

 

there will be authors who make you understand better, i like mollo, i am non native english speaker, just like him, i understand him better

 

i have had regular partners, and have tried the postmortem thing, they work, for a while

 

but i have good memory, and the books get in the way, partners do not understand, i suddenly discover what was causing a certain kind of loss, partner does not follow, partnership breaks, i ususally find better partners

 

sometimes i realize why some partners stopped playing with me, i was not playing at their level, sometimes they return and now want to play with me, but i never do play with them again. if i have in fact started to play better that they want to play with me, then i need to find a better partner

 

some of my favourite partners are still those from my days of the refugee club, been years and they still have not learned splinters, but they dont call me idiots and neither remove my penalty doubles, i enjoy the game.

 

i am now in study phase, i just study more than i play.

[bucky]

This is an approach have used for other games.

 

One book 20 times or 20 books once.

 

For bridge, I have opted for the one book 20 times route.

There are two parts that are involved in mastering card play. One part is to KNOW the techniques, the other part is to APPLY them. Reading books will help on the first part, which is like a prerequisite. But knowledge is not very useful if you don't put it to work. Closely studying your hands will get the second part progress. If you can avoid making the same mistake twice, you will become top player in no time.

 

One thing I did was to take notes in actual mistakes made by me or by my opponents. I find that reading these notes 20 times is more effective than reading one book 20 times, given the limited time I have.

[jillybean]

As for the ratio of study to play: one hour in the bar after a game, with real, not wannabe, experts would be worth far more than an entire session followed by trying to post-mortem the hands by oneself....at least that would be true for me.

Does this still happen?

 

My game has improved 10 fold after finding a partner who is considerably better than me and willing to review hands after the game. I only see pub discussions between experts at tournaments. OTOH perhaps there aren’t enough experts playing club games to warrant an after game discussion.

[bucky]

I am with Stephen: all the studying of your hands won't help unless you or someone you are talking to actually knows enough to recognize mistakes. Without this knowledge base, most players will tend to allow the actual hands to impact their analysis: they will focus on and try to learn what worked on the hand rather than what the best play was.

It may not always be easy for beginners to find real experts to help them analyze the hands. But I think BBO forum can be a great resource for this purpose.

[4CardsMan]

The best book on play if you can find it is Goren on Play and Defense. Goren advocates a clear way of thinking about play that is unequalled by any other writer. Learn everything in it, then go out and play. When you feel that you have misplayed or misdefended, go back to the book and compare what you did with the book's general recommendations. After that, get All Fifty-Two Cards by Marshall Miles.

There is no book available that teaches how to think about bidding, and the range of opinion is so wide that you can't really learn much by asking other players. Whatever bidding system you play should handle all the common situations well.

I would recommend strongly that you stay away from systems that lean heavily on preemption such as Bergen until you have mastered all the common constructive situations. For example, exactly what does a standard single raise encompass? What strength range? Which distributions? When you can answer that kind of question about every common bidding sequence and acquire a level of easy competence, you will be well on your way.

[JLOGIC]

Obv I didn't mean review hands by yourself if you're a complete novice. Talk to people better than you. Stephen Tu I'm sorry if you weren't able to find anyone who would help you, but it is not very hard. Join the BIL and get a mentor. Go to the club and be friendly. There are a million avenues to finding good players who will talk about bridge with you and will go over hands with you.

 

Watsons play of the hand is great, but it can only teach you certain techniques, knowing when to apply what technique and what plan to take on a hand that you declared and are pretty clueless about is not something you will learn quickly through just studying books.

[eyhung]

I agree with Stephen. I think what JLOGIC and rogerclee is saying is more valuable for players aspiring to be expert or world-class, which is the stage of the learning process they are currently in. But having recently taught beginners, and intermediates, I think reading a lot of good books is far more efficient than just playing. A book can focus one's thoughts on a particular area (e.g., Law of Total Tricks/competitive bidding; preempting; safety plays; trump control; inferences) and drill that area so that the student can learn the appropriate principle and then figure out how to apply it when it comes up at the table. A beginner who just plays may take years to identify the concept of bidding more with more total trumps (see the LOLs at the club for an example). Obviously some play is essential, but I think a beginner who has read the right books is likely to become better faster, than a beginner who tries to learn just from playing.

[bidule4]

Obv I didn't mean review hands by yourself if you're a complete novice. Talk to people better than you.

"Talk to people better than you" is not a good idea.

 

People better than a beginner, calling themself experts, are usually

quite useless, they will teach you wrong things.

 

Better read good books, classics like Kelsey are the best.