[Siegmund]

PhantomSac, posting in another thread, made the following comment, that might be a bit surprising to some of the rest of us:

"People like me... "fringe top pros" if you will who are outskilled by people like Helgemo/Meck and outcheated by other people."


It got me wondering what is a 'fringe top pro' and how much of a skill difference exists among the top pros.


For small-time 'pros' who make their living teaching and playing the odd regional event vs. playing in the Spingold, sure, we know that the national level pros have an edge on us, and sometimes we even can eludicate where that edge is. (I know that even on my best days I don't always cash my tricks in the right order for a double or compound squeeze, and I know I have some other blind spots in choosing the best line among several. I don't feel like I am consistently outbid by the players I see in the magazines.) But I don't see technical differences very often among the Spingold finalists very often -- not at all like it was 50 or more years ago. If someone asked me a question like "who plays better, Hampson or Passell or Cheek?" I would just sort of shrug. ARE there "big" differences even at that level?


This was actually one of the more interesting parts of Brogeland's and Woolsey's recent posts -- describing some plays they believed a true top expert would always find, but a garden variety sorta-expert would not. I hope we will see more of that when Woolsey's "survey" comes out.


If Justin is willing to comment here, I'd love to hear from him. Likewise anyone else who rubs shoulders with the top rung often.

[PhantomSac]

If you put 4 me's against 4 meckwells and we had a 1000 board team game I would never win or almost never win. If you put 4 mes against 4 meckwells and we played a 7 board swiss match I think I would win like 45 % of the time there was a decisive result.

That probably doesnt shed any light on your question lol, but it's hard for me to answer. In all sports/mind games the top few are much better than the next group. How often would Nadal beat like #20 in the world, probably almost always? How often would Magnus Carlsen lose to #20 in the world in chess, probably rarely.

To try and answer there are usually tiers of players. I am not in the top tier (which is quite small but they are definitely quite a bit better than the next tier). I think I am in the much larger second tier (sorry I am not trying to sound arrogant or w/e, should not rate myself it is a bad look but you asked so trying to give my honest opinion) which is much better than the much much larger third tier.

Just my opinion and obviously I am biased but Meck, Helgemo, Levin, Hampson etc are much better players than me. It is not really about differences in technical skill, it is how often you play badly or make a mistake, ie consistency. I think Meck is a good example, he is probably worse technically as a card player than someone like RHM or Frances Hinden who post here. But playing bridge is not like posting on a forum, there is a time limit, there is pressure, there are other factors, etc etc. Meck just makes very few mistakes, and almost no hand where RHM would know the math or whatever to gain a few percent ever comes up, they are very rare hands and you aren't giving up much on those.

So yeah I don't think its like well Meck knows this play and I don't. I think it's like, over a 120 board match, meck will have fewer brain lapses than me or times where you just miss something (we are all human) that you would never miss if given a hand on paper.

Look at the general results. The top teams even when they don't win go deep very very often. I have some good results and can beat anyone on a good day but it is not even close compared to say Nickell, Monaco, Lavazza, etc how they are almost always going deep and doing well. Over 60 or 120 board matches, it is very hard to luck into a long string of wins. The top few teams have an inordinate amount of deep finishes and wins. Meck has like 55 national wins. That is incredible. A lot of other people who you think of as very successful are not even close to that.

I'm not trying to call anyone out but you can go to the ACBL website and look up national wins and seconds. Look up people who I would obviously consider tier 1 compared to other people who are not but are considered very good, top players. The results speak for themselves, it is really a huge difference over a long match.

I think my new team is very good. But that is largely because of how good I think greco-hampson are (def tier 1) and how good our client pair is (diamond-platnick won the blue ribbons, we basically always have a much better client pair than the other team which is a big advantage). I hope I can pull my weight and improve, because if my partnership is a tier 1 level we should definitely have results like the other very best teams. We will see! I do not think I'm there yet and think the best players in the world are much better than me but I think I can get there. That is kind of what I meant by "fringe top pro." Ofc if everyone starts cheating then bridge is a joke and it doesnt even matter if I get there.

If that answer didn't answer your question well then feel free to ask for more. I am not going to talk about anyone else though for obv reasons (unless I say they are tier 1 haha).

[PhantomSac]

Also, one very underrated concept is always making the toughest play.

This is hard to quantify since if you just look at deep finesse or w/e, plays are green or red. But when I think of Helgemo and Meck for instance, I feel that whatever I'm rooting for them to not play they seem to play like always. Sometimes it's like ok if they don't play this I can claim but if they play this it's a little tricky the entries are messed up, I have to think or guess or blah blah. I *can* still make it but it requires work now. These guys are always doing that, making you earn it and making you work for it It is natural that if you do this all the time, your opponents make some mistakes, because they were given an opportunity to do so. I would say I get far more cardplay hands wrong against tier 1 players than against say a club player. That does not make me better against club players, it is a direct result of my opponents always making the toughest play, but in analysis it is always that declarer messed up or should have gotten this right etc. The defenders never get the credit for consistently tough plays causing declarer to go wrong sometimes, but it is an inevitability.

This will not go under "technical difference" but there is definitely a phrase that people use to describe a player, "soft" or "tough" (even about very good players). The tier 1 guys are all tough.

[awm]

How much of the top players success do you think is team and partnership related?

Taking Meck as an example, he has a very long-term successful partnership with Rodwell; having played a million boards together they will virtually always be on the same page in bidding and defense, have great confidence in each other, etc. For decades he's also had one of the top sponsors and a great second pro pair as well.

This has gotta pay off at least somewhat compared to "near-top" pros like yourself -- obviously Meckwell has been together longer than you've been around, but even in the past few years you've been on a bunch of different teams and in different partnerships, and some of those teams are just not as good as your current team. Meck's a great player of course, but I feel like the long track record and reputation, plus the super long-time partnership has gotta pay off for him somewhat too.

[PhantomSac]

 awm, on 2015-August-30, 21:02, said:

How much of the top players success do you think is team and partnership related?

Taking Meck as an example, he has a very long-term successful partnership with Rodwell; having played a million boards together they will virtually always be on the same page in bidding and defense, have great confidence in each other, etc. For decades he's also had one of the top sponsors and a great second pro pair as well.

This has gotta pay off at least somewhat compared to "near-top" pros like yourself -- obviously Meckwell has been together longer than you've been around, but even in the past few years you've been on a bunch of different teams and in different partnerships, and some of those teams are just not as good as your current team. Meck's a great player of course, but I feel like the long track record and reputation, plus the super long-time partnership has gotta pay off for him somewhat too.

For sure, bridge is a partnership game, and having a long partnership where youre on the same page and have lots of agreements is extremely important. That being said most of my boards are played at regionals, especially against Meck or Rodwell who I have probably played more against than I have against anyone else. I have played against Meck and Jim Hawkes, Meck and Compton, etc etc many times and my opinion of Meck in those times is that he is still much better than me.

Also, I have changed partnerships a lot at nationals but I would say I have played maybe 100 tournaments with Kevin Bathurst. So lets say 350 boards a week times 100, so 35,000 boards of live bridge with him. That is a lot of bridge. We also room together frequently, lived together for a few years, etc, obviously nothing like the amount meckwell have played but that is still a lot of experience with someone. And my opinion is that the top pairs are better than us.

But def having a long time partner helps and I'm sure Meck is better with Well than he is with anyone else because of their partnership. And yeah they have had very good teammates but there is a reason for that, it is a cyclical thing. You are right though I am now playing with my long time partner at nationals and on a very good team, if we play well and crush I might reconsider my viewpoint and think I am tier 1. But my read is 100 % from playing with and against these guys and knowing my own game, more than just well they are way more successful than me.

[Siegmund]

Great replies so far. (And I am not surprised your answer is that it's more about giving more hard decisions to the opps, and guessing right more often in close cases, than it is actual technical differences.)

A rule of thumb that has been around for years is that the very best players are 1 imp a board better than A players, who are 1 imp better than decent Bs who are 1 imp better than decent Cs. (It falls apart at the very bottom where there is almost no limit to how bad you can be.) There is an accompanying rule of thumb that the final margin of an n-board team match is about Normal(margin*length, 6*sqrt(length)) -- a 45% chance in a 7-board match, by that rule, amounts to 0.28 imps per board, and predicts a 41% chance for you in a 24-board KO match and a 35% chance in a 64-board Spingold segment -- which maybe isn't so far from what happens when a team like yours hits a top seed.
When filling out the fantasy brackets there are a lot of late-round matchups that feel like almost blind matches. I guess I was imagining there would be a dozen or more teams a bit closer matched. . (0.1 imps a board makes a 64-board match a 55-45 proposition.) Sounds like you have a big edge in the fantasy brackets if you know the players well enough to know which of those "ties" are really 60-40 shots!

Is there much that an almost-top player can do, besides "keep playing a lot against good opposition", to narrow that gap at the very top?

Sure makes it clear why learning how to pass a discreet signal is so tempting. Getting one key close decision right per session would be enough to tip the odds and make someone a winner. Fortunately it seems that cheaters always get greedy, and want to maximize their short term profits.

[GreenMan]

 PhantomSac, on 2015-August-30, 20:36, said:

It is not really about differences in technical skill, it is how often you play badly or make a mistake, ie consistency. I think Meck is a good example, he is probably worse technically as a card player than someone like RHM or Frances Hinden who post here. But playing bridge is not like posting on a forum, there is a time limit, there is pressure, there are other factors, etc etc. Meck just makes very few mistakes, and almost no hand where RHM would know the math or whatever to gain a few percent ever comes up, they are very rare hands and you aren't giving up much on those.

Also with Meckstroth, he seems to have a quality that even other top pros don't have, or don't have as much: He sees ways to wring impossible results out of the cards. It's not all that unusual to see a declarer on vugraph make a seemingly hopeless game, but Meckstroth seems to do it more often, even allowing for the fact that Meckwell bid so many 22-point games. I remember watching him play 10xx opposite AQxx for three tricks by leading the 10 from dummy and RHO with Jxx didn't cover. That would never have occurred to me in a million years.

This ties into the later observation about creating problems for the opps; that's a big part of it. But he seems to find more ways to create problems. Maybe the other tier 1 pros do it as often and I just don't notice as much.

[billw55]

 PhantomSac, on 2015-August-30, 20:36, said:

... because if my partnership is a tier 1 level we should definitely have results like the other very best teams. We will see! I do not think I'm there yet and think the best players in the world are much better than me but I think I can get there. That is kind of what I meant by "fringe top pro." Ofc if everyone starts cheating then bridge is a joke and it doesnt even matter if I get there.

Didn't you play in a BB final? Making that first tier must be really hard

Also Diamond hired you. You say that Hampson-Greco are definitely tier 1. I doubt he is planning to hire pairs of widely disparate strength. What would you say about Moss-Gitelman? It seems that Diamond, at least, considers you top tier.

Well, like you said, we'll see.

[sakuragi]

Great post.
I would think that it doesnt only apply to top pro. It matters to general average players like myself too.
winning is much more than those technical/on paper stuffs.
see bob hamman advice in my signature.
I also remember that zia mention in his book "Bridge my way" - "Dont think about intra fininese. think about indigestion". it follows the same line.
whenever i see people mentioning "i missed abc squeeze", "i executed xyz coup", etc. I always watch out. they just havent got that.

[jogs]

It's published somewhere. What's the standard deviation for results for one board?
Both, dealer vul, opponent's vul, and none.

64 board match. The better team is 1 imp per board stronger.

I think the weaker team has about a 5 to 7% chance for a upset. In the last 20 years there has been quite a few upsets of top teams in the first round.

[mgoetze]

Thought about this thread while playing a hand today:

---

Opening lead ♣Q. Now obviously if everyone's playing double dummy it doesn't matter one bit whether you win this in dummy or in hand. However, winning in hand at least has the possibility of creating a tiny bit of doubt in RHO's mind whether it is correct to return another club after winning the ♠A, whereas winning in dummy makes it absolutely clear that it is safe to return a club.

Since even I spotted this after some thought, it's likely to be instantly obvious to someone like Justin, but if you imagine this a couple of levels higher it might be the sort of "making it difficult" play that sets guys like Meck apart.

[Zelandakh]

 billw55, on 2015-August-31, 07:19, said:

Didn't you play in a BB final? Making that first tier must be really hard

I think Justin naturally underestimates himself. That is a common trait amongst those driven to success and I suspect he will not consider himself "top tier" until he is (very) regularly winning international titles and has a few world championships. The "making it difficult" part is definitely important at all levels. I know when I am playing at my best, this is one of the key differences in my game and, at club level, pays enormous dividends. My guess is that you gain much less against expert class opposition but combine a few of these small edges together and suddenly you have a significant, and perhaps decisive, advantage.

[phil_20686]

I am a much weaker player than Justin, but having played an open Europeans, I learned that the number one thing about really good players is that they bring their A game all of the time.

I hadn't really realised how much of a difference that makes. They never let you relax, and they never let you off the hook. Sixteen boards against a top pair is more exhausting than 48 boards against typical UK tournament players.

Let me try to give an example: when I think about the game I have in my mind a kind of dictionary of plays, and they are loosely associated with hand types, and I try to understand declarers hand from the play, and so decide how I should play. The example of not covering Txx with Jxx was a typical example of this, very few tournament players would find this line, so you aren't expecting it and you do the wrong thing. If declarers hand was KQ9x then covering the T removes the guess.

I had another hand that I defended against Bakshi, it sticks in my mind as being almost the first example of this. He was playing in a thin 3N, but one where he would almost certainly be able to establish 9 tricks eventually, and he had Axx (dummy) opposite Txx, so his opening gambit at trick two was to play a low spade to the T and J. Since the spade layout was KJx opposite Q9xx, it was basically impossible for us to play on spades now unless we thought he had made this psychological play. We also placed the honours wrongly and went looking for partner to have non-spade honours for tricks, which only helped declarer.

These are not the most sophisticated examples, but top players find ways to pressure you in what look DD like completely innocuous situations, and this makes every hand very draining, and so you have more lapses in concentration, and look terrible on vugraph. If you have not experienced it, its hard to credit, but they are just pressuring you with decisions until you make mistakes, and they want every over trick, and every under trick. As a unit Scotland were bleeding at least ten imps a match just in under and over tricks, even in matches where it felt like we were getting the big moments right.

[kuhchung]

They talked about "the toughest play" in chess fairly recently.

"Our new World Champion, Magnus Carlsen, is obviously the player of 2013, but we needed the word ‘nettlesomeness’ to capture the quintessence of his strength, which lies in his capacity to induce errors by relentlessly playing moves that are not only good, but bothersome."

Edit: oh man 2013 where does the time go

[mike777]

 PhantomSac, on 2015-August-30, 21:12, said:

For sure, bridge is a partnership game, and having a long partnership where youre on the same page and have lots of agreements is extremely important. That being said most of my boards are played at regionals, especially against Meck or Rodwell who I have probably played more against than I have against anyone else. I have played against Meck and Jim Hawkes, Meck and Compton, etc etc many times and my opinion of Meck in those times is that he is still much better than me.

Also, I have changed partnerships a lot at nationals but I would say I have played maybe 100 tournaments with Kevin Bathurst. So lets say 350 boards a week times 100, so 35,000 boards of live bridge with him. That is a lot of bridge. We also room together frequently, lived together for a few years, etc, obviously nothing like the amount meckwell have played but that is still a lot of experience with someone. And my opinion is that the top pairs are better than us.

But def having a long time partner helps and I'm sure Meck is better with Well than he is with anyone else because of their partnership. And yeah they have had very good teammates but there is a reason for that, it is a cyclical thing. You are right though I am now playing with my long time partner at nationals and on a very good team, if we play well and crush I might reconsider my viewpoint and think I am tier 1. But my read is 100 % from playing with and against these guys and knowing my own game, more than just well they are way more successful than me.

What surprised me the most in the post is that you room with Bathhurst rather than have a single room when playing pro.

[billw55]

Hijack: what is the correct way to pronounce Bathurst? Is it "Bath-urst" or "Bat-hurst" ?

[blackshoe]

"Smith".

[Zelandakh]

It is a very old English name originating from Sussex and ought to be Bat-hurst (from Bada + hyrst) unless someone Americanised it along the way.

[Aardv]

 Zelandakh, on 2015-September-04, 07:07, said:

It is a very old English name originating from Sussex and ought to be Bat-hurst (from Bada + hyrst) unless someone Americanised it along the way.

Debrett's has "Bath-urst" with a short 'a'. Not that Kevin B need pronounce his name the same way as his namesake the Earl.

[PhantomSac]

 mike777, on 2015-September-03, 19:58, said:

What surprised me the most in the post is that you room with Bathhurst rather than have a single room when playing pro.

At nationals/world championships/trials etc I room alone always but at regional I usually room with someone. Part of it is an age thing I think, all the young guys do this and very few of the older ones do. This kind of goes with most people in their 20s live with roommates (or their wife lol), even older for people in a place like nyc.

I would guess I save about 10k a year by having a roommate at regionals and I also have fun hanging out with my friends and talking bridge and drinking heh. But I am becoming a lighter sleeper as I get older and am considering always rooming alone next year, so it's interesting that you said that.

Of course as a teenager I would room off site to save money and we would have 4 to a room and have people on the floor crashing sometimes. Things and priorities change as you get older I guess