How do you structure your post mortem

[Cthulhu D]

Partner and I do roughly this:

 

* Mark any boards we find interesting during the play on our score sheet

* Step through every board that feels like it is worth discussing (e.g. we let through an overtrick). Boards that are normal that were not interesting that could not be made/set are ignored.

 

We then attempt to resolve any issues or atleast understand what went wrong. If we change our agreements someone is delegated to change the notes. If we are unable to resolve the issue post session we take it to email

 

* Bounce ideas around at the pub or via email.

 

What does everyone else do? I note one thing we do is rarely look at where we did well.

[phoenix214]

For me it depends mostly on the partner. With the current one we dont do post-mortems. Usually just talk straight after the hand what was the problem. Afterwards if I feel like i want to go over the hands, then I go over everyhand(both those where we did good and bad, and send back to partner any notes where I missed some of her mistakes).

 

If partner is willing to go over the hands, then usually go to someones place or over skype and just go over them all, and look what were the mistakes, who could have done better.

And it should be correct to go over all of the hands because of the simple reason that even if you did something good, there might have always been a better played(learned it from chess). Only when you feel that you have reached par on the board, the board is worth skipping i.e. bad score but since opps didnt do much mistakes.

[Phil]

I have a few clients that I play speedballs with. After we play we go through all 12 boards I give them a call. Some hands are routine and don't warrant discussion but invariably there's 3-4 hands that are generally interesting or have something to learn from. Fortunately the relationships I have are pretty open so I'll readily admit hands I screwed up on. This fosters an open environment and makes it so no one gets defensive.

 

The entire discussion lasts about 20 minutes.

[Mbodell]

When I play with partners online, at the end of the session, my partners and I go through all the hands and talk (over skype) about anything interesting or unexpected during the bidding or play and also look at did we do anything different than much of the field (good or bad). At least most of the time this is what we do (sometimes one of us needs to run and we don't do the post-mortem but 80+% of the time we do).

 

When I play F2F partner and I both tend to note boards that something interesting happened. And then after the game, assuming we are post morteming, we go through any marked hands. Sometimes we also check scores and also go over any low scoring boards. If it is at a F2F 2 session event (sectional, national) then it is reasonably common for us to go to a meal in between sessions, often with other players, and post mortem all of the boards of the first set. The second set typically gets the smaller/shorter post mortem.

 

I'll sometimes solo postmortem too which includes looking at all the hands, the matchpoint results and looking for any trends or patterns (did we score particularly well or badly when I'm declarer? dummy? on lead? defender not on lead? Did we score particularly well or badly on partscore? game? slam? Hands where we sacrificed? How would we matchpoint against double dummy par? if we lost to double dummy par is it for a real reason (we made a mistake or took a bad line) or a bad reason (DD par is taking anti-percentage lines that work)?). If partner made a mistake on some board, try and look hard and see if I could have done something better and is the mistake really more my fault for putting them in that spot of giving them less information or bad information.

 

And then if there is something interesting or something I'm not sure of in any of the above, check with more people either in person, or online.

[Trinidad]

I typically do the post-mortems by myself. I want to check what I missed, what I can improve, what I misunderstood. The agreements with my current partner are relatively simple, so there are few misunderstandings. When I find that we did have a misunderstanding, I will send him a good humored email to sort it out. We work things out pretty fast, since we are both open about our own mistakes, very compatible in general, and willing to meet each other.

 

My wife is my favorite partner. We rarely get to play together, but when we do, the post-mortems are at a quiet moment at home. They are mainly to gloat over everything that went right to make the rare experience of playing together even more fun.

 

Rik

[kuhchung]

I start by blaming partner

[blackshoe]

I start by blaming partner

I generally start by looking at the boards in numerical order, and if we got a bad score, try to figure out what went wrong. If it was my fault, I generally see what I did wrong, say so, and move on. My longest standing regular partnership recently broke up because, said partner "you always blame me for everything!" Then she burst into tears and left the game, leaving me to play a six club contract when she passed six clubs holding four diamonds to the ace and a void in clubs, in an auction in which we'd previously agreed diamonds as trumps. I made 5.

[ggwhiz]

I start by blaming partner

 

When I started playing with my Carole she had endured many casual partners that crapped on her from a dizzy height and she was in super self defense mode. Our post mortems soon became me apologizing for everything and soon enough my apologies got "Well maybe I could have..." out of her and we are happily roughing and sluffing 12 years on.