Defensive hands. What was your focus ?

The king of diamond was lead and partner discouraged. What is your continuation ?
I found this hand interesting because 2 experts chose a continuation which was a "big play" and switch to the club 9. Where was their focus at the time, I don t know, but I suspect that their choice of switch was influenced more by a desire to win than the information available to them. External wide focus on the auction, alternating with internal narrow focus to assess declarer's hand. Declarer has shown spades, his partner has shown hearts, declarere therefore also has clubs and diamonds. That leaves partner with hearts. Partner will know what to do on a heart switch and the club king entry will remain in your hand. You should always punish poor bidding.

What were your focus during the bidding. Possibly on the current state of the match, maybe on the room temperature, or possibly how you had a bad week last week. Or, despite the lack of high cards in your hand, did you focus on the bidding, switching between external and internal focus to assess the possible hands types for partner and for the opposition. Partner has any points that is not in the opponents hands . He has an opening hand. Yet he did not take one bid over 1C. Easy lead club ?

I included this hand more as an illustration of how the focus can be influenced by emotions. I was given this as a problem and my choice was a diamond lead. My choice was governed by only one factor. A previous experience where my partner made a bad double, more out of frustration for being taken out of a making contract. Fear made me lead a diamond. In fact, trusting the double, I think in retrospect that the spade lead is pretty much automatic. Partner has spades and he has points. Dummy is likely short on one of our suits. Trust partner and lead a spade

Seach for excellence

Before tackling specifics like the ways to identify and improve focus styles, I thought I had better review my improvement plan. Bridge is fascinating because it involves some many different aspects of performance.

Here are the components of what I think would be a good performance improvement plan.

Bridge Performance Training

Mental skills

Confidence
Focus - maintaining intensity
Focus - use appropriate styles
Focus – regaining
Intuition – appropriate use

Endurance
Unforced errors – reduction of ...
Pre-game preparation – maximize potential for entering “The zone”

.

Knowledge

Probabilities – knowledge of card combinations
Probabilities - Statisticallly winning bridge actions (bidding)
Bidding system – appropriateness and correct usage
Knowledge of opposition strength and weaknesses
Predictability of actions by opponents based on study of international experts games

.

Technical skills
Spatial skills (thinking in patterns)
Logic – use of ( all the card play techniques we love)
Inferrential skills (*)
Memory
…
.
Training versus practice

Acquisition of technical skills (technical/mental)
Acquisition of knowledge

Acquisition of mental skills

Targetted practice of application of skills and knowledge
Exercises/drills
Hands Analysis (own)
Hands analysis (experts)
Targetted practice of mental skills

Here in OZ, there seems to be a fashionable trend that playing online is not a road to bridge improvement. At best, I think this is misguided. Thanks to the internet, you are not restricted to playing with people from your geographical area.The internet gives us access to resources that cannot be obtained in our little island. Playing against strong opposition from various countries is something we lack much here.

(*) A dog story

Dog-logic: inferential reasoning in a two-way choice task and its restricted use
Experiments were designed to test whether adult pet dogs are able to show inferential reasoning when searching for their toy in a series of two-way choice tasks. The experimenter placed a toy under one of two identical containers and then provided some information by manipulating the covers: either both containers were lifted or just the empty or baited one. There were other trials when the experimenter not only revealed the corresponding container but manipulated also the other one without showing its content. In the second experiment the same conditions were used except that the content of the containers was revealed by strings without any human manipulation. Results of the two studies show that dogs are able to use inferential reasoning by exclusion (i.e. they can find the hidden toy if they have seen where the toy was missing). However, dogs were able to solve the reasoning task only when they could not rely on social-communicative cues (directional gesture and gaze cues) or could not use any other simple discriminative stimuli (movement of a container) for making decisions. This suggests that dogs are often prevented from showing reasoning abilities by pre-existing biases for social or movement cues. Results of the third experiment also support the primary importance of social cueing because in another object-choice task, individuals preferred to choose the ‘socially marked’ container (touching, gaze alternation) to the remotely moved one when they had no visual information about the location of the toy.

Defensive problems for a change

Was busy doing some work on focus pocus theory, when some hands jumped at me as illustration of the concepts. Well, they were given to me as problems that is!

Three defensive hands that the experts will get right no doubt, through the appropriate use of focus. Here is your chance to get them right too.

Exhibit A

You lead the diamond K and partner discourages and the King holds

Your play?

Exhibit B

You are on lead. Choose it

Exhibit C:

You are on lead. Choose it.

Yardstick, Focus, and Balance

I have been so busy that blogging was slow for a while. I also found that doing so much thinking about performance enhancing techniques was taking my mind off bridge when I was playing. So for a while, I was just doing my own “getting better at bridge”. So looking at various aspects of the zone, here are a couple of things that worked for me.

Clear achievable goal:

"This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men”-- Captain J. A. Hadfield

For quite a while, I was very concerned about being accepted as a bridge player. Having not started as a youth and being a woman means you have no status. You practically don't exist in the world of bridge. Iit bothers me so very much , such that for a while, my only goal was recognition that I am in fact full fledged (brain and all) player. I found this was very much getting in the way of playing well at the bridge table, especially playing the last matches of an event. Having let go of that goal, I can now focus on what I can change, so my goal is clear: Become an oustanding player in my own eyes only. It is also achievable and it gives me that very important sens of control (Zone) as it does not depend on anyone else (neither partner, nor would-be-not partners, nor teammates, nor opponents).... More later on how I measure this..

Focus:

"Chess demands total concentration and a love for the game." -- Bobby Fischer
Bobby Fisher quotes link, compliments of Sartaj

Regaining concentration after an unsettling incident: Here is something that seem to work for me. One of the techniques I researched was using a word as mantra for relaxing your mind after something takes your composure away. I tried using various words related to bridge and others, like stop or cards.. but did not find them very effective.

Not long ago, I found that taking a MEANINGLESS word which I liked the sound of was exactly what I needed. I can now relax by repeating that word 3 or 4 times at most. It seems to enable me to think about NOTHING for a few seconds. Then I can redirect. My word does not mean anything, but it does roll of my tongue and my mind in a rounded kind of way, very nicely.

Balance between ability level and challenge:

As I don't get that many opportunities to play, I started playing with a robot. My aim was to practice:

• declarer play
• card reading
• focus styles

The robot gives me the time to study hands in more depth (robots don’t become impatient). It also give me difficult hands to play because I rarely end up in the contract I should be in. Something to do with robot style bidding which is not my forte. Becoming an outstanding player would mean I can hold my own in a world championship, so I have to work on these technical skills where I find myself lacking in: focus style, visualising hand patterns more clearly, knowing card combinations in advance, some areas of bidding where I am still unsure. The good thing is that bridge technical skills are actually not that complex. Well calculating probabilities is more difficult than making coffee, but fortunately the number of hands where complex probabilities really matters are not that frequent.

The only topic relevant to this blog is the focus style. So I expect to cover more of this in the future.

More on the "Zone"

You cannot make yourself enter the "zone" Best you can do is set the scene. This includes hard work, both technical and mental training, pre and post-game routines, and passion (for the game)

The following are not my words. Rather they are the words of a psychologist by the name of Csíkszentmihályi (pronounce it “chicks send me high” :)). I include the link toa public lecture he made in Sydney a few years back.

http://austega.com/education/articles/flow.htm

He identifies the following nine components as accompanying an experience of flow:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action and awareness merging.

If you only have room for ONE Goal

In a previous post about quieting the mind, I talked about the captain ship and its crew. When the captain is focussed on captain's matters, the crew gets the job done. Likewise, your captain's mind must be on the cards and only on the cards.

SO

If you cannot be much bothered to keep track of your own performance (after all, it is only a game!), then only keep track of ONE thing.

But do it every every time, whether you are playing a practice match, playing a friendly match or playing the real McCoy.

Your performance goal = 80% (or whatever number above 50 you want to start at)

1. Stop thinking about past and the future and become immersed in the now.
2. Stop predicting (going into the future in your mind)
3. Focus 100% on the cards.

And after every game, give yourself a score of 1 to 3.

1. why did you get up this morning
2. next time will be better
3. you were in the zone
   

When you get to a hundred, add it all up and divide by 3 and you get your achievement. Then start another set.

PS: If you always get 100%, you may need a reality check

Was it L-U-C-K ?

I have been watching the Spingold with much interest. A lot of interesting hands with a lot of opportunities to do the right things.

One hand in particular in the semi final seemed to illustrate the concept of luck as Luck Under Current Knowledge

All the other 3 tables all played in the 4H. At one table, East opened 1S, competed to 3S and defended 4H by North making 10. The two other tables were in 4H by South (after a 3S bid by East) and made their 12 tricks.

Clearly you could say that EW was very unlucky on this hand at this particular table.

But my question is:

If it was plain old luck, when did this bad/good luck start

Did E open a windown of opportunity and brought bad luck with the 3S bid and did NS capitalise on it by bidding a "lucky slam"

At the other table, was the 1S bid made by East a bit of L-U-C-K?

Any opinions?