No two ways about it

When you look at all the aspects that need to be right to win a major tournament, you realise that there is not 2 ways about it:

A winning team needs a coach. A winning team needs a captain.

While the roles can overlapp, they are distinct requirements.

The coach focuses on the development of the players skills and performance. Clearly bridge knowledge is important, but more important is the understanding how one goes about achieving best performance, both technical skills and performance skills. The coach knows the players, their strenght and weaknesses. The coach also knows the strength and weaknesses of the opposing players.

The captain is in charge of the team on the big day. The captain ensure that the team gets there in good time, ensure optimal conditions, decides on the sitting strategy, observse performance on the day, decides who goes in, who gets to sit out, who plays whom. The captain goes to the appeal, and mabe most important of them all, the captain has/shows a winning attitude and keeps the spirit up throughout.

In both bases, bridge knowledge is necessary. But while knowledge that is required, it does not require the same expertise as what the players themselve needs (appeals aside maybe).

Next post will then be the jobs for each of these mythical people.

Quest for the "zone"

As bridge is a game where the learning never stops, it is important to understand the various stages of learning in our quest for self-improvement.
There are 4 stages through the learning process and understanding how we move though it and how our performance will very accordingly is important if we are not to be discouraged when we get a setback.

Another aspect is to look at all the factors that we need to get right. No wonder it is a tough game :

• Comfort Zone
• Emotional Control
• Expectations , that can lead to fear of failure
• Focus – both intensity, duration and style
• Mental Preparation
• Motivation
• Perfectionism
• Self-Confidence , lack or excess of it
• Self-Esteem
• Stress Reduction
• Psychology of Recovery
• Team Dynamics
• Game Strategies
• Goal Setting
• Mental Imagery
  
  Now start making your own list.

Arousal - too much or too little

As discussed in previous posts, our arousal (excitement) level has a direct impact on our performance. Performance does increase as arousal increases up to a certain point, then it begins to decrease somewhat dramatically.
http://ababe-in-the-woods-of-bridge.blogspot.com/2009/04/dealing-with-arousal.html
If arousal levels are too low, motivation and desire may not be optimal to support a quality performance effort. On the other hand, higher than optimal arousal levels for a particular skill may cause us to become too anxious and begin to worry too much about the results rather than focus on the required task. As anxiety increase, mental flexibility becomes hindered.
Successful execution of a complex task also demands unconscious and automatic thoughts about action.

The level of arousal required depending on
• Our own personality
• The task performed.

For example, in baseball, a batter requires lower levels of arousal to perform the skills necessary to execute on hitting the pitch. They should have very low anxiety levels when they step into the batter’s box.
On the other hand, a basketball player on offense will need a higher level of arousal, as the situation requires them to be more active, yet they still must be able to run the desired offense effectively.

What about bridge
In the same fashion in bridge,I expect that the play of a hand would require a fairly a low level of arousal. Now is not the time to develop high level of aggressivity
On the other hand, today’s competitive bidding means that a higher degree of arousal will be required as the competition to ‘win’ the bidding war will be high. In defense, the mix will be more subtle and the player with incorrect level of arousal may not find the right mix of defense. You would expect a player with level of arousal too high will find too many aggressive defense while a player with a level of arousal which is too low will too many passive defenses.

In this aspect as in everything, one step at a time, practice makes perfect.

High performance teams – Does it apply to bridge partnership and teams?

The essence of focus.
Teams that feel directed toward achieving a clear and commun goal are happier and more energized, filled with a sense of purpose.
The basis of trust.
Teams tap into a natural instinct to form clans. People come together , vow to protect each other, engage in altruistic behavior with one another.
the "cheater meter."
If team members feel that the others do not appreciate the team's efforts, or that team members aren't pulling equal weight, their "cheater meters" will go off , they no longer trust one another and start losing focus on the goal
Low Focus and Low Trust (Lose/Lose)
• Fear
• Confusion
• Self-interest
• High turnover
• Failure
High Focus and Low Trust (Win/Lose)
• Focused on self, tasks
• Lots of early
accomplishments
• Longer-term disloyalty
• Turnover
High Trust and Low Focus (Lose/Win)
• Few conflicts
• "We are family"
• Lack of coordination
• Resigned to failure
High Trust and High Focus (Win/Win)
• Collaborating
• Self-directing
• Mission driven
• Loyal
• High success

So looking for the ingredient to achieve succesful teams :
• Don't gloss over performance, but talk about it.
• Hold each other accountable for each other performance.
• When someone under-performs, tells them immediately in direct, honest terms.
• Adopt a common goal or set of goals and commit to achieving them.
• Define goals simple enough to be easily grasped, specific enough to be actionable.
• Ask tough questions of one another and challenge each others assumptions. Probe an argument until all are satisfied.
• Admit your mistakes, weaknesses, concerns without fear of reprisal.

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.