AL78, on 2022-July-13, 05:55, said:
I have been trying to do this myself after years of regression with limited success. My thoughts are to note down any boards where you were declaring or defending, where you feel you had to guess from a choice of plays, you chose wrong and got punished. Did you get punished because you were unlucky, or because you missed some information which would have guided you to the correct line? I was planning to pay more attention to these situations in my own game as I think I am not using all the information available when a critical decision has to be made in at least some cases. Another thing to consider is whether you are reaching good contracts in the bidding. If you are missing cold games and slams, or being battered in the partscore contests, that will not help your results.
The problem is at MPs, there are several factors which can damage your scorecard, and a few of those you can do nothing about. If the opponents punt a 40% game against you which is cold on the lie of the cards and no-one else bids it, you are getting a bottom like it or not. If your opponent makes an insane bid which works perfectly you are getting a bad score. If your partner butchers the play or defence you are getting a bad score. If you are up against opponents playing a different system to the field and they rightside 3NT and make one extra trick as a result, you are getting a bad score. If you are playing in a field with a high standard deviation in variance, and you get the technical hand against the strongest pair in the room, you will have to bust a gut to get even an average minus. It is not easy to tease out your contributions to the poor scores from all these other factors, and you have to remember that these random fluctuations can also act in your favour, so just because you get a good score doesn't necessarily mean you and your partner played the hand better than the others.
While youre quite right about how one can get a bad score simply through having the opps be lucky or by having a difficult hand played by or against the best pair in the room, these factors even out and generally do so over as short a span as two sessions.
As I mentioned in responding to your post about how to improve defensively, I dont think that studying the hands one has played, whether with good, bad or indifferent results, is the best way to improve
One huge problem is that if one lacks the skill necessary to have done better (on those hands where the poor result was ones fault) then one may well be incapable of seeing, even with hindsight, where one went wrong.
Also, even if one identifies the error, one may not be able to correctly identify the correct bid or play, tending to look instead at what would have worked, which could even be a worse mistake than was made.
The flip side is that imo most novice/beginner/intermediate players have trouble differentiating between good results where they made errors but got lucky (or as so often happens their errors were offset by opposition errors) and good results where they actually played correctly.
The harsh reality is that most players below advanced make a staggering number of errors in any one session. Ive kibitzed more than a few boards played between non-experts and its not uncommon to see five or six mistakes on any given board with the side that makes the last mistake getting a bad board.
Thats why, imo, reading is the most important way to improve. Preferably reading a book that poses problems after each chapter
if one cant solve all of the problems, re-read that chapter.
This is true for every aspect of the game. Of course, at the table one is subject to the vagaries of partner. However, if one improves beyond the level of current partners, one can usually find better players to play with, or one might try encouraging ones partner to do the same homework.
Another alternative is to hire an expert
preferably a real expert
.to mentor. For example, the mentor could discuss what methods one uses (to afford a context) and then go over a sessions results board by board, bid by bid, play by play. Having bbo makes that easy, with no need for the expert to spend time watching.
That way, if one has hired a real expert, one would learn where the result, good bad or indifferent, was caused in whole or in part by ones bidding or play, and how one might have done things differently and, most importantly, why.
Thats likely beyond what most are prepared to do since, unless one is very fortunate, one is unlikely to find a real expert willing to do this on a volunteer basis.
Short of that, my advice is to read, read and read
.and maybe consider a subscription to something like The Bridge World.
Also, posting hands here can help, but one has to learn whose analysis to trust. Everyone has an opinion but not all opinions are equal.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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