[DJNeill]

Tilt-avoidance is a learned thing for most. I used to cause and be prone to tilt until a few years ago when I just learned to ignore everything and treat every hand differently. You have to trick yourself - I admit I am ignoring partner but it is for the good of our game.

Way I overcame - play with random OKB people. They will do their best to annoy you, if their software was not bad enough. If you want to practice self-control with the worst-skilled partner, play random on BBO and challenge yourself to give it your all on every one. Remember in all this never to say anything negative or expect anything positive from partner.

I promise you will get better!

Thanks,
Dan

[kfay]

Tired and low blood sugar.

I don't go on tilt. Generally have good focus.

Most of my mistakes are just exacerbated by the above because in general they come from my suckiness.

[Fluffy]

I have learnt from the years to ignore dad yelling at me for playing badly. This was extended to the point that I ignore him at home also when he yells at me for doing/not doing something. But arguing with opponents/director sadly is a different thing and disconcentrates me.

BTW: When I say I play badly after something I don't mean I have bad results due to it, I am realicing I am having no f** clue of what is going on at the table, to the point of being unable to count when very very tired.

[Phil]

I hate to argue with JLall, because he's usually right and I'm usually wrong. But a few more thoughts:

1. I would accept we all have natural variance, however, at the tails the variance rates to become smaller on both ends. A 1 is going to suck regardless, but will sometimes make the right play. Meckstroth is going to play like a god, but occasionally will have a bad session for whatever reason. A 'middling' player, especially an emotional player may very well have a wide range depending on a lot of factors.

2. Whats important to me, isn't so much that we have variance, but not only doing what we can to play at our peak, but also to minimize the occurrences of those bad sets. Take your 7.5 player. Usually, the distributions for this person are in a 7.0 - 8.0 range. On a 'bad' day, he might slip to a 6.5, but on a good day, he can rise to a 9.0.

It seems to me that this same player, by simply controlling the mental and physical aspects can move the distributions to the right, although without some serious study I would say that a 9.0 is the best he's going to play on any day. As a result, his ranking may move up a few tenths, simply through better preparation.

Some hands will always be tougher for some that others. And now matter how perfect our preparation is, and how effective our approach is, there are going to be bad days.

I used to have this site bookmarked. Glad to see she updated it.

[shintaro]

One main reason appears to be missing "Airless and warm stuffy atmosphere in the playing area"






Another is when looking at partner who is akin to a Skyscraper where you can see the lights being turned off 1 floor at a time

[gwnn]

I play my worst when old ladies poke me at the end of each round to demand boards.

[Jlall]

I think for a lot of people, they make most of their mistakes playing too fast.

Maybe I am projecting though I always think of mistakes at least in cardplay in 2 categories:

1) They were too hard or complicated for your level of play, so you couldn't reasonably be expected to get it right (this could mean anything depending on where you're at in your bridge life).

2) They were not too hard, and you said after the hand "Obv I should have played a spade, here is why."

#2 mistakes should be eliminated, and we must assume that the person just didn't think it through long enough before making their error, since they were capable of getting it right. This could be just a lack of concentration or w/e, but generally it means you played too fast and didn't think the position through long enough.

One simple way to try to avoid this happening is asking yourself before you play any card "why am I playing this card?" If you have no reason, think through it a little bit more.

[Jlall]

Phil, on Apr 12 2010, 01:56 PM, said:

I hate to argue with JLall, because he's usually right and I'm usually wrong.

Heh, I don't think we actually disagree on this subject. I was simply offering more reasons and often the biggest reason that people don't perform well.

Obviously I believe you can do things to increase how well you play on average and also decrease your variance, such as sleeping/excersizing/whatever floats your boat.

I do think that if someone slept 6 hours instead of their normal 8 and had a bad session, it's more likely due to natural variance than the missing 2 hours of sleep, and they're likely to attribute too much blame to the missing 2 hours of sleep. That being said, it's clearly better to get 8 hours of sleep than 6 if thats what you need.

Obv if you take some extreme and you got 0 hours of sleep or someone close to you died or something there is no chance you're gonna play well though.

[awm]

One thing to be careful of is "resulting" hands a bit too much.

It's often the case that when I have a tough decision to make, there are conflicting pieces of information suggesting that different actions might be successful. For example, when taking a two way guess for a queen I might figure that one opponent has more vacant spaces, whereas the other opponent showed more values in the auction, and now I have "reasons" to take either decision.

With this in mind, it's often easy to make a decision, get it wrong, and then say "oh, I should've done the opposite because X." But it's not really the case that I didn't play slowly enough or think clearly enough to realize about X... it's that there was another reason Y to do the opposite. Perhaps I misevaluated the relative weights of X vs. Y... or perhaps I did nothing wrong and was just unlucky.

There certainly are unlucky sessions, where it seems like every guess is wrong, almost every decision is wrong, and even the "good" decisions are not swinging any scores our way. But it's also the case that sometimes we just don't show up ready to play, and make an unusual number of uncharacteristic mistakes on "easy" (for our level) things. It's important to avoid the latter situation (at least for serious events) to the degree possible, while accepting that "bad luck" is just part of the game.

[jjbrr]

Jlall, on Apr 12 2010, 01:49 PM, said:

Phil, on Apr 12 2010, 01:56 PM, said:

I hate to argue with JLall, because he's usually right and I'm usually wrong.

Heh, I don't think we actually disagree on this subject. I was simply offering more reasons and often the biggest reason that people don't perform well.

Obviously I believe you can do things to increase how well you play on average and also decrease your variance, such as sleeping/excersizing/whatever floats your boat.

I do think that if someone slept 6 hours instead of their normal 8 and had a bad session, it's more likely due to natural variance than the missing 2 hours of sleep, and they're likely to attribute too much blame to the missing 2 hours of sleep. That being said, it's clearly better to get 8 hours of sleep than 6 if thats what you need.

Obv if you take some extreme and you got 0 hours of sleep or someone close to you died or something there is no chance you're gonna play well though.

Ya I think everyone who cites "tired" as a reason is more or less saying the same thing just in different ways.

I would never attribute a bad session to 6 hours of sleep; I would attribute 10 days of 6 hours of sleep with 3 sessions per day as a reason for being exhausted at the end. My play is noticeably and undeniably worse in this case, and it is not just a case of greater variance but that the mean decreases a few points on the 1-10 scale.

[Fluffy]

Jlall, on Apr 12 2010, 07:44 PM, said:

I think for a lot of people, they make most of their mistakes playing too fast.

Maybe I am projecting though I always think of mistakes at least in cardplay in 2 categories:

1) They were too hard or complicated for your level of play, so you couldn't reasonably be expected to get it right (this could mean anything depending on where you're at in your bridge life).

2) They were not too hard, and you said after the hand "Obv I should have played a spade, here is why."

#2 mistakes should be eliminated, and we must assume that the person just didn't think it through long enough before making their error, since they were capable of getting it right. This could be just a lack of concentration or w/e, but generally it means you played too fast and didn't think the position through long enough.

One simple way to try to avoid this happening is asking yourself before you play any card "why am I playing this card?" If you have no reason, think through it a little bit more.

I remember you aceepted 10 players to send you some hands where you would point the many mistakes they make on simple hands.

How many mistakes did you find people make on average?

[Jlall]

Fluffy, on Apr 12 2010, 04:00 PM, said:

Jlall, on Apr 12 2010, 07:44 PM, said:

I think for a lot of people, they make most of their mistakes playing too fast.

Maybe I am projecting though I always think of mistakes at least in cardplay in 2 categories:

1) They were too hard or complicated for your level of play, so you couldn't reasonably be expected to get it right (this could mean anything depending on where you're at in your bridge life).

2) They were not too hard, and you said after the hand "Obv I should have played a spade, here is why."

#2 mistakes should be eliminated, and we must assume that the person just didn't think it through long enough before making their error, since they were capable of getting it right. This could be just a lack of concentration or w/e, but generally it means you played too fast and didn't think the position through long enough.

One simple way to try to avoid this happening is asking yourself before you play any card "why am I playing this card?" If you have no reason, think through it a little bit more.

I remember you aceepted 10 players to send you some hands where you would point the many mistakes they make on simple hands.

How many mistakes did you find people make on average?

Bleh still havent done them all, thanks for reminding me Depends on what you define as a mistake, if you include small signalling things then a lot, if you are just talking about the general concept on the hand and what suit to go after in what order or what to discard, it is still quite a bit, moreso for declarer play because there are more decisions.

Obviously it depends on the level of the player.

[Fluffy]

a lot... quite a bit... I suspected that hehe, but wanted to know if a lot was 5 mistakes per hand or just 3, well, 5 mistakes average with only 13 cards its almost impossible I belieive, but just in case .

But I guess you won't make the numbers untill you are finished, so go do some homework cos I want the stats

[Rodney26]

One thing not listed that I have an incredibly hard time with is playing the dummy as a defender or when declarer plays the dummy. It totally throws off my defensive stride for whatever reason; I can't recall ever making a good play while dummy is away.

I also think I play a bit worse when I have a good kibitzer (which not surprisingly is rare); novice kibitzers are fine.

The number one reason is exhaustion, especially for the second session. I can't eat, drink, not exercise, or talk about bridge in between sessions if I want to play well in the second half of a two session event. I learned a while ago to avoid intermediary post-mortems as much as possible. I honestly think I'd be better suited to play 52 consecutive boards.

[Rossoneri]

When I mentioned fatigue, it was more to do with the fact that I think I'm still not used to having to focus at such a high intensity for 3 consecutive days. This seems rather odd, considering that I'm still in university, but to put it into perspective: I've rarely played in 3 day or longer tournaments (with a pretty strong field at that).

I find Justin's statement pretty interesting. I have observed on several occasions myself that even after a slight lack of sleep, I've played a pretty good set of 24 boards the following day, whereas I've had really bad days even with enough sleep. Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure if there's any good way to test this out rigorously, but it most certainly is food for thought as one of my friends used to say that each hour of sleep is worth 5(?) imps.

[peachy]

On tilt because of myself. On tilt because I "have to" engage in endless niceties or to listen to - even "forced" to respond to - extraneous small talk that has nothing to do with anything other than make the round late, reduce break time, distract me from the matter on hand. Then I get stressed and impatient, because I am unable to ignore it, ie. I let it get to me and let it drag me out of the mental state I want to be in when playing in an event that I want to do well = calm, competent, observant, and mostly silent. Phew, if I bothered to spend a little time, I would probably edit this into one or two lines... but never mind, this is my problem. Earplugs next time?

[Apollo81]

Lack of sleep is by far the biggest one for me.

[nige1]

Thinking about my mistakes on previous boards.

[gwnn]

How come nobody mentioned cleavage? I "have a friend" who has sometimes been influenced by opps' or caddies' choice of clothing...

[matmat]

gwnn, on Apr 12 2010, 09:13 PM, said:

How come nobody mentioned cleavage?

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LOL