A game of focuses

Mistakes and focuses

While there is a degree of complexity in the game of bridge, there are many who would say other games, such as Chess for example, are infinitely more complex than my favourite card game. And I dare say there are plenty of mistakes made throughout a game of chess.

Here what Kasparov had to say about mistakes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2KKfOGaR_w

But I suspect that there are not many other competitive endeavour where a team of the highest standard can lose a match (even if by 1 Imp) against a team of a much technical skills, be it in mind games or sports. Or we see examples of “stunning” errors in bridge world championships. The people who participates in these events are presumably among the best. They may not be perfect but they really know their stuff. You don’t expect obvious errors from them.

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The reason for me delving in this is personal of course. I found that the few times where I have played in tough events, there was always a match where I ”lost” it. And I made “stunning” errors.
After the fact, I could always ponder on the whys, analyse, increase my self-awareness and resolve to “try harder” next time. But trying harder at the bridge table does not really work. When you try hard, your focus is internal, where it must not be.
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Looking for answers, I came across a lot of material in the field of sports psychology and research on excellence in performance. Of course, there will be many aspect to this and it would take much more than one blog to try to digest it all. But I found one thing that made me tick and seemed so particularly relevant to the game of bridge.

Some very useful and interesting research by a sports psychologist by the name of Nideffer (and many others like him) in the area of attention and concentration. My next post will try to regurgitate the theory, try applying it to the world of bridge and examine the postulate:

Bridge is a game of errors because it is a game of focuses