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.