[dake50]

I envy someone who has had schooling (eg.Pavlicek) for fundamentals of this game. I get mine by study reading expert books. My fear is missing/fragmenting some topic which a paid teacher has taught because he is paid to be complete.

Who would I be if taught by Reese,Kelsey,Kokish,Romanet,DallasAces,etc.? That's the technical play, defense side of bridge.

More to recent, what of bidding theory has arisen from today's massive computational power? Who's publishing the leading edge of that?
Or information theory to bidding?
Or game theory payoff matrices?
Or double dummy analysis that is what players actually do. [I tire of 'magic' DD leads that kill this hand, but are long-run 0-6% wild shot; or never failing KJ guess] Why no demand DD lead from DD found lead tables? Rant free now.

[Rossoneri]

So, to what extent is a coach useful?

[helene_t]

mikeh, on Mar 3 2008, 10:00 PM, said:

All you can do is to play, play and play in the toughest fields around. And try to identify auctions where you either got a bad result or should have got a bad result... the latter are the most dangerous, because you may have got a top or a huge swing because the opps screwed up.

The human animal has an instinct for finding patterns where there are none. That is understandable: we evolved earlier than computers and books did, so we are optimized to making the best of scarce data.

Yet for todays bridge theorists, lots of data are available. There is no reason to form our opinion about the accuracy of the LOTT or whether or not to Stayman with 4333 based on our own experience. I think such questions are better addressed by statistical analysis of data from real-life bridge, or by single-dummy simulations.

I suppose playing in the toughest fields is useful (I wouldn't know, have never tried, but it sounds plausible) for a number of reasons, and maybe it's the way to identify patterns that are very specific to your own partnership, such as the effects of the fine nuances of your overcall style.

Quote

It is human nature to 'learn' that the action you got away with was 'good', because it won.

Yes, but what can you do. If you try to discount all the cases in which a particular strategy failed but "should" have succeeded (or vice versa), you create selection bias. In non-blinded clinical trials it is standard to evaluate a therapy on the basis of the total number of events, say if a patient dies in a car crash it is treated in the same way as if he died from side-effects of the medication or from the disease it was supposed to cure. Since the alternative is that the pathologist who establishes the cause of death and who believes in the therapy gets tempted to say that the death was not related to the treatment or the disease.

I am nowhere near becoming a bridge expert myself. So the fact that I am very much aware of my own tendency to select data that support my own pet strategies may be irrelevant. But I suspect wanna-be experts are humans, too.

[Codo]

Rossoneri, on Mar 4 2008, 07:46 PM, said:

So, to what extent is a coach useful?

1. He may see weakness in your bridge you never got to know from someone else.
2. He shows you miracles you never had seen on your own. (Other bidding systems/signalling methods/squeezes/etc.
3. He may explain you WHY a bidding structure/game plan/signal is good or bad and not just that it is good or bad.
4. When you know that a coach is looking at your hands you MAY play more serious and with more counting and thinking.
5. He reminds you to count count count.
...

The best players in any sports do have coaches. So if coaches are a big improvement for them, they should be good for us too.

It is all a matter of time and money.

[han]

helene_t, on Mar 4 2008, 06:14 AM, said:

mikeh, on Mar 3 2008, 10:00 PM, said:

All you can do is to play, play and play in the toughest fields around. And try to identify auctions where you either got a bad result or should have got a bad result... the latter are the most dangerous, because you may have got a top or a huge swing because the opps screwed up.

The human animal has an instinct for finding patterns where there are none. That is understandable: we evolved earlier than computers and books did, so we are optimized to making the best of scarce data.

Yet for todays bridge theorists, lots of data are available. There is no reason to form our opinion about the accuracy of the LOTT or whether or not to Stayman with 4333 based on our own experience. I think such questions are better addressed by statistical analysis of data from real-life bridge, or by single-dummy simulations.

I suppose playing in the toughest fields is useful (I wouldn't know, have never tried, but it sounds plausible) for a number of reasons, and maybe it's the way to identify patterns that are very specific to your own partnership, such as the effects of the fine nuances of your overcall style.

Quote

It is human nature to 'learn' that the action you got away with was 'good', because it won.

Yes, but what can you do. If you try to discount all the cases in which a particular strategy failed but "should" have succeeded (or vice versa), you create selection bias. In non-blinded clinical trials it is standard to evaluate a therapy on the basis of the total number of events, say if a patient dies in a car crash it is treated in the same way as if he died from side-effects of the medication or from the disease it was supposed to cure. Since the alternative is that the pathologist who establishes the cause of death and who believes in the therapy gets tempted to say that the death was not related to the treatment or the disease.

I am nowhere near becoming a bridge expert myself. So the fact that I am very much aware of my own tendency to select data that support my own pet strategies may be irrelevant. But I suspect wanna-be experts are humans, too.

This is a very interesting post but in my opinion it has little to do with becoming a good bridge player. The importance of playing lots of bridge isn't to see which strategies work best (although it does help in that respect too), it is mostly to train yourself to the alertness and fast logical thinking that are necessary for winning in bridge.

Also, you will see lots and lots of auctions, many of which you will not have discussed very precisely in advance. You will learn which problems arise most often and how you can deal with these problems. You will see what inferences you can draw from how your opponents play and bid (and behave).

Strategies are overrated. Even partnership nuances should not be high on the list of a non-expert bridge player. Most important are your personal skills and you won't strengthen those by statistical analysis.

[rbforster]

You guys make it all sound so hard -

Edit your profile -> Your skill level -> Expert

Viola! I can even be paid to coach you on how to become World Class .

[pclayton]

helene_t, on Mar 4 2008, 03:14 AM, said:

The human animal has an instinct for finding patterns where there are none.

I saw a map of The Netherlands in my bagel this morning.

[y66]

Who does not remember the scene where Han's namesake's pal Luke meets Yoda, the ultimate coach?

I often think I could cut the time it'll take me to improve from intermediate to competent (not shooting for expert) in half if I could find a good bridge coach. Not because I'm lazy and undisciplined (which I am) but for all the reasons codo gives and more, esp. constant redirection of energy into what matters most now -- for me. Am getting a lot of this kind of direction from my new partner, from a very sensible local pro, from a bridge friend and from thoughtful posts from experts on this forum, including many of the posts on this thread.

Still, I wish Bob Rotella and Pia Nilsson (golf gurus) would also write about bridge.

[TimG]

I think the most amazing thing about this poll is that there are 23 experts here to vote. There must be a lot of experts lurking but never posting... :-)

[awm]

There's no substitute for playing a lot of hands. Often the division between advanced and expert (or expert and world-class) is more about consistency and avoiding mistakes that are obvious to any good player after the hand is over. If advanced players did as well at the table as they typically do on hands they are given as problems, they would be experts! The issue is that "problem hands" are usually considered much more carefully, fatigue is less of an issue, and so forth.

I suspect that many people underrate the value of the following: playing with a strong partner, having at least one partnership where you discuss a lot of bidding sequences, solving "moderate" single dummy problems under a time constraint, discussing the right bid on a hand with good players.

I agree that the following can be valuable, but I think they are not the best way to improve and that a lot of people overrate them: solving double-dummy problems, playing frequently with pickup partners, solving "hard" single-dummy problems that take a long time, reading books that are mostly "telling stories" about great plays or players.

The following can actually be detrimental to playing good bridge: spending a lot of time "making up" an interesting bidding system, trying to find a way to blame partner for any bad results, spending a lot of time playing with very weak partners.

In principle it should be possible to use tools like GIB and Bridge Browser to "solve" some of the points upon which experts frequently disagree. Perhaps this will help the bridge players of the future, but so far it seems that we don't really know how to use these tools effectively (for example, I don't think that using bridge browser data where most people are pickup partnerships playing some bastardized version of "standard" or "2/1" is the right way to evaluate the effectiveness of non-standard systems or conventions).

[cherdano]

I don't think there is any bridge-related activity that is detrimental to your bridge skills.* If you play completely drunk from 2am-5am with random pickups in MBC, and spend the time after you wake up until you start getting drunk again by finding a new improved meaning for 2N 4H 4S 5C 6C, then you are using your time extremely inefficiently towards your goal of improving at bridge, but it won't hurt your bridge either.



*(Working too hard on math is.)

[jdonn]

cherdano, on Mar 4 2008, 01:59 PM, said:

I don't think there is any bridge-related activity that is detrimental to your bridge skills

I found one exception. Playing a bridge computer game that allows you to easily sneak a look at the opponents' hands is bad for my bridge, it always made a noticeable difference even for a short period of time.

[Codo]

jdonn, on Mar 5 2008, 04:32 AM, said:

cherdano, on Mar 4 2008, 01:59 PM, said:

I don't think there is any bridge-related activity that is detrimental to your bridge skills

I found one exception. Playing a bridge computer game that allows you to easily sneak a look at the opponents' hands is bad for my bridge, it always made a noticeable difference even for a short period of time.

And there is another: Many people become worse if they play too much with very weak opponents. You will win even being lazy and without visulizing the opps hand.

[Fluffy]

I know of 2 players whose skill went down after playing a lot of goulash, your criterium gets affected when you end up used of bad breaks.

There are some brain proccess that are 'analogic' (This looks better) and some others that are 'digital' (This is better because in the case of....) your digital skills won't go down, but the others, who are based on experience, will.

[akhare]

#1: Books, books and more books (along with play with *good* players to back it up course). My wife keeps trying to purge my 100+ library from time to time, but with little success (the number may be an hyberbole, but you get the idea).

#2: By annointing myself as such on BBO

I will let you decided which of the two methods works better ...