The Italian work ethic

Speaking of the world champions, as the Italians were the year they beat us in the NOT final, here is a story that isn’t going in the updated History of Australian Bridge.

We lost the first set and in my opinion should have swapped, just normal after losing. But a certain person on our team, whom I will only call Phil M. in order that he isn’t identified, refused to come out of the closed room. So, we lost our choice and lost another set. At that point I had a cunning plan for how to get our choice back.

One of the Italians in the Open room had played throughout with his hand up a girl’ leg. It seems to be physically attached. Honestly. He played one-handed. It seemed obvious to me that there was no way he’d go into the Closed room as that would involve having to amputate his right arm. I suggested, therefore, once more, that we should swap seats and this time Phil was bullied into agreeing. My partner and I went into the Closed room…and the two players who’d been beating our brains in the Open room followed us. It turned out my RHO could remove his arm from the girl’s leg if he wanted to. Damn. Only now we’d irritated him too. Double damn.

Interesting, though, to see just how professional those Italians are. They were playing a team they might have expected to beat easily, they were up a fair margin and yet still they did the right thing, no matter how inconvenienced they were by it.

When shouldn’t you think at bridge?

This was written in the early 2000s. I discovered it the other day, lacking a title, lacking a date, lacking an ending. It looked thought-provoking to say the least as I read through it and raises some interesting issues. Well, I hope you agree. Look forward to your comments!

When SHOULDN’T you think at bridge?

Naturally an event producing such a poor performance as the National Playoffs did for my partnership calls for some self-analysis. Being aware of the basis sport psychology principle ‘don’t think at the meet’, I wanted to try to put that into practice. The last time I think I played as best as I am able to was in the semi-final of the 2001 NOT. My feeling is that I did not think at all, and yet was about double-dummy perfect. Interestingly I now realise in retrospect that it was impossible to achieve that state against the then world champions in the final. I don’t think this was so much because of their complex methods as because they explained everything. This consequently involved much concentration on (largely) irrelevant information. And that in turn totally prevented play in the unconscious state which is ideal in competition. In the Playoff this was not a consideration because everybody was playing normal – or at least familiar! – methods.

Within the general description ‘sports’ there are at least 2 distinct types: athletic where one has no opponent and where there are no surprises. One merely has to repeat the same thing one has been practising day in, day out. And sports with opponents, whether one on one, or team on team. These are sports of continual surprise, with the player relying on their instincts for the most part. The flow of the game means there are time constraints generally preventing other non-instinctual responses. The odd exception makes us realise that this is for the best. We have no doubt all observed, in Aussie Rules in Australia, other games elsewhere, that the player who has the ball and doubt about what to do with it often does not only the inferior thing in the end, but even the catastrophic, such as kicking straight to an opponent. Or the really considered goal kick that goes completely west.

Bridge has got to be different from both of these. In the first place it doesn’t have any time constraints (ignoring the ethical aspect of some situations). The physical sportsman generally has no choice but to react. Not so of the bridge player. In the second place, well, it’s a thinking game. The critical abilities I think will turn a player into a good player are these: (1) determining when to think and (2) making best use of that.

Making best use of thought is a proposition not to be sneezed at. Most people come up with worse answers when they think. A partner I had early in my career was the most dangerous imaginable. If she ‘just pulled cards’ she was quite good. But she insisted, from time to time, on thinking and you could write the consequence in the out column before she’d done a thing. In Australia Peter Gill strikes me as a good example of one who comes up with something better by thinking on a consistent basis. But the player I’d most strive to emulate is Tim Seres. He never thinks until it is appropriate to. Often he sets about a hand by playing cards until he gets to a position where he has the information to decide what to do. That’s his critical point.

Determining when to think is inevitably also fraught with difficulties and dangers. On the one hand we are cruising along on auto, our decisions are being made by instinct, which means the collected experience of our bridge career, and then – wham, bam something happens which we should think about. Take the hand looked at elsewhere: |H xxxxx and C Ax. On lead against slam in a 4-4 heart fit, clubs weak jump overcalled by partner. This was a hand on which to think. But how should that process be initiated. We are doing things on auto, how do we switch from auto? How do we recognise the moment?

I don’t know if sports psychology provides an answer to this, being concerned with physical sports. I turned for some advice, as I often do, to chess players. The collective experience of chess, which has in effect been professionalised far longer than any of the physical sports, has pre-empted both sports psychology and brain theory in various ways which are important to us.

I presented my problem thus to two chess players:

A question, but I’m not sure how to put it. Something like this. How do you balance instinct versus thought at chess? In bridge it is true that it is sometimes bad to think. Is that so ever at chess, and if not, can you tell me what makes chess different?

I’m trying to find out, if it is generally right to obey one’s instincts, how does one not do that when it is right not to? Is the thought process like this? (1) Instinct, recognised (2) think (3) go back to instinct – generally? When correct? But if this is the process, doesn’t (2) corrupt one? Isn’t that half the point of obeying (1) and not going to (2) is that by doing (2) you can no longer tell if (1) was right?

Is any of this making sense to you? The basis of the theory, by the way, is that if you don’t respond by instinct to a situation, the problem is switched over to a part of the brain that treats it as a new problem. That is obviously largely going to be wrong in much of bridge: eg the opponents open 4S – absolutely wrong to think what to do. Just do.

To relate it to a concrete example, I held Ax in partner’s suit and xxxxx in the opponents’ slam trump suit recently. Not even thinking about it I lead the ace and, too late, shifted to a trump. Trumps were 4-4, which I knew, so it was most likely that the way to beat it was by beginning with a trump, expecting to get back in with the ace in order to draw another round. Instead my trumps were crossruffed to death. I guess instinctively I was following two good rules: one, lead pard’s suit and two, cash aces against slams. But in this case the right thing to do was to think and then figure to lead a trump. How should I have done this, how should I have realised this was the time to think? By the process where one always does? Or is there some other way?

And the responses I received:

First, meet Jonathan Mestel. He is one of the few players in the world to be grandmaster of both across the board chess and problem chess. He has played Olympiads for England in both. He is an academic mathematician in England and, as for many chess players, bridge is a busman’s holiday for him.

Mestel:

I’m not sure I’ve anything deep to say here. Perhaps "think if something unexpected has happened" would be sensible. You don’t often hold xxxxx and an ace against a slam, so perhaps some sort of alarm bell should ring?

I think a trump is more likely to gain, but obviously it could be wrong, you’d feel silly if after some discards your ace was ruffed out, or some such.

Of course this isn’t a great example for your question – "think when there’s a problem you haven’t noticed" is hardly helpful advice! Obviously, not letting emotions cloud your judgement is a moral too.

Going back to chess, I think the Great players have a gut feel for when the critical point in a game is; when it is vital to play the best move; and they tend to concentrate their thought on these occasions….

Now meet Chris Depasquale. A Fide Master, He’s been one of the best players in Australia for many years. Ok, he’s my brother. But he’s also a profound thinker and, like Jonathan, an occasional bridge player.

Depas:

In chess it has long been considered axiomatic that "the hand is more  reliable than the brain". That is, in a huge proportion of occasions, the move you reach for to play instantly with no thought is the right move 95% of the time. This is, of course, only true if you have sufficient experience and understanding that your instincts are reliable. These guys Kasparov and Kramnik recently played a 5-minute match, and the quality was awesome. With two hours on the clock they might have each played 2-3 move/game differently – in other words they were in line with the 98%  instinct percentage.

How many times do you hear, "I had my longest think for the entire game here and made an error"? The guy is only thinking long because the issues to be resolved are not in his databank of knowledge and experience, and he is trying to work it out. If he was thoroughly familiar with the (type of) position he would not need to think long.

Instinctive moves in chess, however, do not necessarily relate to speed. For instance, in an Email Olympiad game recently my instinct told me that a pawn sacrifice I wanted to play was correct. Fritz, however, assured me it was a blunder, and that I would be losing. I followed my instinct, played the pawn sacrifice, and can demonstrate it to be winning for me in all variations if the sacrifice was accepted (which it was). The crucial point to all the variations was beyond the calculating ability of Fritz. My instinct here, however, was not about speed – it took me two days to convince myself to play the sacrifice, but it was only instinct, not calculating that led me to consider it in the first place.

Similarly instinct told me a certain position given in ECO as clear advantage White should not be so. So I sat down to work out how to refute the Encyclopaedia and did so. Only instinct works here – you would waste a life just trying to refute every assessment in ECO.

In bridge, where I have far less knowledge and experience, I am more likely to work out the right way by calculation than instinct. I can sit down and work out the only lead to break up the potential squeeze, but I am sure that, in such a situation, many other more experienced and knowledgable players would know which suit to lead by instinct, rather than calculating the possibilities.

Don’t know about your lead to slam; you may have oversimplified where your instinctive lead came from. Your instinct might have told you that where you have a making ace and an unexpected trump trick (with 5 vs 4-4) that, to get a good score, you need to take it 2 down. Or your instinct might tell you that your best chance to defeat the slam is to force declarer to take a key decision before he becomes aware of the trump break, so you need to see the dummy. [Maybe you erred at trick 2 by not finding the only lead to force a decision from which declarer could not recover if trumps were 5-0, and maybe he would have decided wrong, because if trumps had been 5-0 you might have led one at trick 1 or 2.] Are you absolutely satisfied that Trump x is superior to A lead over the range of possible distributions?

Playing for the drop when missing K x x x x is the only way to make some hands, but that doesn’t make it a superior play overall. Maybe your instinct was correct but the patient died…

I think the process for the chess player is like this:

1. instinct tells him which move "feels right";

2. (a) if time permits he calculates variations

2. (b) if no time, moves instinctively

3. If calculations verify instinct move is made

4. If calculations conflict with instinct difficulties arise, generally resulting in much time taken, and possible errors when move finally chosen.

If instinct was incorrect this is probably because the player lacks sufficient understanding of that (type of) position.

Of course, numerous other complications can come into the actual move chosen. The instinctive move might be objectively best but very drawish, and a draw is as bad as a loss in the tournament/match situation. The opponent’s clock situation might be a factor also, but your puzzle seems to assume that you are always trying to play the objectively best move.

Probably in bridge it is rare that you can absolutely calculate the objectively best move to maximise tricks but play a different move anyway.

Belated thanks to Jonathan and Chris!

In my vain attempts to describe what I love to do best in the world, the closest I’ve ever got is to say ‘to lose myself in what I am doing’, to become one with it, to cease to exist, to become nothing but part of the thing one is doing. As a consequence I have always been drawn to activities that involve sustained concentration. I’d rather read a novel than a short story. The playing of music comes to mind, and needless to say a concerto rather than a small piece. But nothing more than chess.

Reading a little in the area of sport psychology lately has made me realise that what I’ve been talking about is the ideal of competitive sports. It’s the state one wishes to be in while competing. In their jargon it is referred to as ‘the Zone’.

Some sport has no stop-start about it at all. It is one fluid from go to wo, whether that be discus or the 5000 metres run. Team sports always (?) have stop start as part of their constitution, and so do many one-on-one activities to a greater or lesser extent. Eg tennis. Chess has ‘no’ stop-start. It is pure, sustained activity from the beginning, excepting in highly irregular circumstances where a referee might be involved. Naturally, over the course of, say, 5 hours, one will not spend every moment at the table. There will be ‘pit’ stops, and for some cigarette breaks. But one may continue in the same state while undertaking these activities, so they are no breaks in the same sense a change of end would be for a tennis player.

Bridge is really different again. Rubber bridge is the closest one can come to the perfect state because there is very little stop start. But tournament bridge has a major stop-start aspect to it. Nor is this only so between boards, where it is not uncommon even to have to wait for minutes for a new board to be available. There will be chit-chat, analysis between partners and between opponents at such times. More dramatically than this, however, the actual course of the hand itself, particularly, but not necessarily only, during the auction, is accompanied by much communication with the opponent. Most of this will be extraneous to what one needs to know. Ie, it will be informing the opponents of something you already know, or attempting to inform them of something you don’t really know. Much the same, if it comes to that, applies to information they wish to impart to you.

We’ve all been here before. Behind screens, the auction proceeds:

1C 1H

1S 2C

2S 2H

2S 3C

3D 3S

4C 4S

4NT 5D

6S All Pass.

The opponents are positively eager to impart all they know. You get the following explanations:

(1) 15+m, any; spades could have a longer suit 9+

(2) relay; diamonds, either suit could be longer

(3) relay; the spades are longer

(4) relay; 5242

(5) relay asking for controls. There are some inferences here because he could have asked for…blah blah blah; a number of queen based controls

(6) relay setting denial cuebidding; shows this and this, denies that or could have

(7) more of (6); shows and denies or could have

Welcome to dumbsville, you too have failed the IQ test. You have just spent 5 minutes being bombarded with a heap of meaningless rubbish. And it has cost your opponents absolutely nothing to provide this information. They know it automatically. It can only be good for them and bad for you to have you bamboozled by it.

There is the other approach to being informed about this hand:

Wait until the end and then get the highlights. Find out dummy’s shape and controls, where they are, by all means. It may tell you something about declarer’s hand. I am willing to ask the opponent and trust them to tell me if there is anything I’m really going to need to know. Have a policy of not doubling artificial bids. That will help this approach.

What makes me so certain that this approach is generally right was the experience of playing against the Italians in the final of the 2001 NOT. It felt like every hand my brain was assaulted by this information volunteered by the opponents. Most of it, in retrospect, I’m sure was information I didn’t need to know. So, virtually every time they bid, that bid showed either these, or none of these, or 5-4 of those, or one suited in the other. Or, or, or. So it went on. Did I need this information? Would I have been better off left to my own devices? Now, I‘m not exactly trying to say ‘I would have beaten the world champions if.’ I am saying that the playing field wasn’t even and this was to my great disadvantage.

Thoughts on the World Championship book

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages.

A couple of years ago at the Shanghai Bermuda Bowl, Brian Senior invited me to write as much of the Round Robin section for the Open and Women’s as I desired. What a nice invitation!

It set me on a path of thinking, before I went, about the nature and function of the World Championship books. Once upon a time they were the most exciting repository of information available to the bridge world. Every card and bid of the WC final, dispassionate, merely telling the tale, not embellishing it in any way. One was able to come to one’s one conclusion about what had happened.

Is there still a role for the WC book to be like this? Now, when we have on the Internet every bid and play recorded. Now, too, when we have lavish Daily Bulletins, again fixed on the Internet for posterity.

It seemed to me, that the part of the book I was writing was best off avoiding what was already going to be available online. Therefore the first thing I did was watch no matches that were going to be Vu-graphed. I also wanted to avoid writing up hands which were already reported in the Daily Bulletins. In other words to make this value for money by giving the reader new material, or, if you like, to record for posterity things that otherwise would be left unknown.

In line with this idea, I decided to follow some teams which I thought would have the potential to do really well, but wouldn’t be considered especially exciting vu-graph material.

Ireland because they’d had that great result of 2nd in the European recently. Could they keep it up?
Argentina because any team with Lambardi on it has to be a chance. Honestly, if Pablo was playing with three tinned fish I’d still be expecting him to get up.
Indonesia because they are so frustratingly close to pulling off the big one, but does anybody really expect them to? And they are my friends and neighbours.
Australia because I’m completely parochial.

Okay. Now you sit, you watch, you collect data which will tell a story. Its story.

One of the things that happened in this tournament was that Ireland and Australia both had dreadful starts. So after a few rounds I sat down to watch these two teams play each other and I guess I was already expecting what the story would be. Ireland finally gets its act together by trouncing Australia and then steadily moves up the ranks to take its rightful place, whilst Australia languishes sadly at the bottom of the field.

But the data, of course, is what’s telling the story. What happened in fact was that Australia emerged easy victors and it was Ireland that was never in the hunt. Australia had a splendid qualifying, staying in the top few throughout. Meanwhile, Indonesia was never convincing and Pablo struggled.

The data was telling a story and the story that was developing seems to be looking at the hardest question in sport to answer: why do teams lose? A harder question, even, it seems to me to answer than why do they win?

Argentina, Indonesia, Ireland are all teams that might easily do well and yet why was this the two weeks when things were tough for them, when their luck was never in?

I didn’t do a good job, in the end, of presenting this story. Partly this was because the copy that went into the WC book was, due to some sort of communication failure, not the copy that should have been there. It was incomplete and badly proofread.

Still, the fact is that it is a hard topic to write about. Yet I hope it was also a fascinating one which is rarely if ever preserved, since it is so much easier to write about the winner.

If anybody reading this has ideas on what the WC book should look like these days, opinions more than welcome!

Matchpoint Pairs

One of the utterly miserable things that has happened in bridge in Australia over the last – I’m guessing – twenty years or so is the near total destruction of matchpoint pairs.

When I first moved to Melbourne there were two fabulous events at State level: both the Open pairs and Mixed Pairs were 3 week qualifying, 3 week final, the latter being barometered. Good stuff! There were also lots of Congress pairs events.

As the ANC has downgraded the pairs aspect of its schedule, there has been a natural tendency for the same thing to happen at State level – though it is true here in Melbourne there has been a reaction against that and the events are now as they were. Still, there are virtually no matchpoint congress events. Swiss Pairs rules. What a terrible idea. Matchpoint pairs is such a skilful game, whilst Swiss Pairs is a tedious lottery at least at that local club level.

As far as I can tell, though, that is just the reason why matchpoint pairs is being avoided. It is a relentless test of skill and who wants that? At the bums on seats level, not many, by the look of things.

I’m going to put in a plea for anybody reading this to reconsider the virtues of Matchpoint pairs. I used to hate it because I didn’t know what I was doing until I discovered I was going to be playing the World Mixed Pairs with Tim Seres. That made me figure I’d better get my game in order. A little group of us studied the form of the game via literature on it, I tried SO hard to understand how it worked. And it paid off. Tim and I qualified 14th (I think!) out of 400+ pairs for the final, though once there we did not have a happy time of it. Meanwhile my pairs scores, instead of lurching between the mid-forties and the mid-sixties, became consistent.

Soon after I did move to Melbourne, I had a game with one of the juniors here one Monday night. ‘What did you think of my game?’ he asked eagerly afterwards. Oh dear. It was the first time time I’d scored less than 50% in Australia for more than a year. ‘You played like a junior’ I said, hedging. Honestly, I was a bit shocked. I didn’t know what to say.

The fact is now, however, that any matchpoint skills I learnt in that period have well and truly gone out the window for lack of practice. And unfortunately that makes me disinclined to play in the only good matchpoint pairs we have left: Surfers. I know that sounds pathetic, sorry!

Bridge and the environment

I’ve been involved in online discussions lately about the desperate plight of the planet and how/whether it might be possible to save it.

It strikes me that of the many easy steps that could be taken, one is to end physical events which can take place virtually, bridge being an obvious example. Chess and conferences (eg academic) are other terribly obvious candidates of absolutely unnecessary travel with all that entails environmentally.

There is a human tendency to think ‘if nobody else is doing anything much, why should I?’ There is also a tendency to think, ‘hey, I’ve given up plastic bags, I have to do MORE?’ Yet it seems to me if everybody just started doing what they could, all sorts of small things – eg for us, giving up chess and bridge tournaments – would all start adding up.

Well, what do you all think about this? Opinions keenly awaited!

Bridge, heart, caring.

I was reading an interview with supergrandmaster Alex Morozevich in which reference was made to a particular game he recently lost.

Rohrer: In Biel you played – and eventually lost – a sensational game against Vachier-Lagrave, which included some incredible positions. After the game, were you just completely disappointed or did you feel rewarded for having played such a great game?
Morozevich: Every defeat is a small lesson; You can take it from a philosophical point of view. During the game, I was in an all-in mood. After the game, though, I did not feel good, and I didn’t have the impression that it had been a great game – lots of sparks and desire, but very poor calculations. In general I never give an additional meaning to a game. Following the defeat against Vachier-Lagrave I lost interest in my last two rounds, but after a lucky win against Ivanchuk, suddenly in round 10, I had the chance to win the tournament. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to beat Caruana. So after the last game I felt sorry for those people who wished I would win. I’ve received hundreds of SMS, e-mails with thanks and consolation from all over the world.

It made me wonder if there is anybody in the world in bridge who would inspire such feeling, or is it that because bridge itself is a more trivial game – a hand cannot possibly inspire the emotion that a game of chess does – this reflects upon the players as well.

If there is a player in bridge who might be compared with Morozevich is it Zia? And if so, does this next question and reply pertain to him also:

Rohrer:You are widely thought of as a creative, unconventional and unpredictable player …
Morozevich: Unpredictablility and unconventionality add up to an old image which dates back almost 15 years. And for that time, my experiments were okay. Compared to then, I play a totally different game today. Unpredictable? They link this to my results, though I have been among the top players for many years now. I am quite a universal player with a classical approach. True, I play a little bit more aggressively than other players, try to win with both colours. But nowadays I play normal openings. And in these, I found new ideas at a very early stage. I am one of the few who always tries to invent something new, and one of the main fashion leaders in chess at the present time.

Is this Zia? Is the Zia that has finally won a world championship the same Zia as twenty years ago or has he grown and matured as a player whilst still keeping to the sense of Morozevich’s attitude to the game? There must be people reading this blog who’ve followed Zia for a long time. What do you think?

Forever anonymous

A hand tomorrow. For now I wish to observe, if you go to the Nanjing chess tournament site and scroll down to the bottom of the page, that you will see reference to the Chess & Cards Administration Center of General Administration of Sport of China.

Interesting, is it not? I rather think that bridge got a foothold in China well before chess did, but still. There it is, seated somewhere between poker and gin. One of the great tragedies for bridge is that it was given such a mundane, anonymous name. If I tell people I play chess, I do not have to add ‘you know, the board game’. If I tell them that I play bridge not only do I have to add ‘you know, the card game’ but I know that it is quite likely they don’t know, even then.

What a pity we couldn’t stick to whist as a name. Unique, a history to it, though not quite as grand as chess’s.

Does this all depress anybody else reading this?

Pain

I’m not sure how many of you can answer the question I put forward today as you have to have had a particular relationship to bridge which few do. But still.

GM Ljubojevic once said ‘I have won many games that have not made me happy, and when I lose, I am also not happy. My friends ask “so when are you happy?” That’s the way chess is, you are happy only rarely, the rest is grief.’

And this, from GM Nigel Davies: ‘Several years ago at Wijk aan Zee, I asked GM Hulak why (his compatriot) Boris Ivkov seemed so bored. He looked at me in a rather concerned way and explained: “Chess is a very boring game and Ivkov has been a professional for thirty years. Now he has no choice but to continue and he hates it”‘

Do these comments fit into bridge? If not why not?

My first thought was that perhaps they don’t. Chess, after all, is about a monumental struggle on a game by game basis where you put so much in that it can’t but give back much hurt. Whereas bridge is about many little struggles, none of which matter on their own, any one or more of which can be brushed aside….

But then I went to the theatre last week and saw Ronnie Burkett’s new show, Billy Twinkle, which is autobiographical. The scene set is one where Billy, who is a puppeteer, is deeply unhappy and at a point he admits the inadmissible: he even hates puppets. The horror of this statement is not lost on the audience. Everybody could understand, even though almost nobody would have been in any sort of similar position. We all knew, though, that it was his life he really hated, not his puppets.

That made me think more about bridge and remember a professional player at a club I used to go to in London. He was a bitter, bitter man who saw bridge as something the very purpose of which was no more or less than to torture him. At some point, however, he was lucky enough to find somebody who fell in love with him and that changed his life. It followed that it changed for the better his relationship to bridge. His unhappiness in bridge was merely a manifestation of his unhappiness in life.

At the same time I think that there are people of whom we could say the opposite. It is genuinely the game they hate and when they free themselves of their attachment to it, their lives improve as a consequence.

I hope this is a worthy topic to while away some time on the weekend.

See you Monday.

Is this statement true?

I will get back to psychology next week, I’d like to ask more questions and get some answers out of you!

Meanwhile, I read this statement in an academic paper published in the early 1990s about bridge-playing computers:

Human players seem to reason about single suits first,then combine the plans to form a plan for the entire hand.

That doesn’t sound anything like how I set about playing the hand, but what about everybody else? Thoughts please.

On caring about the result.

When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets -
He is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting -
And the need to win
Drains him of his power.

Chuang Tzu

See you on Monday.