From my limited experience in tournament bridge, it seems that the most important quality of a good player is the ability to remain concentrated and avoid careless mistakes.
At first, the ability seems natural to some and is impossible for others (me) to achieve. It has been frustrating learning how to do more complicated endplay techniques and squeezes only to fumble on simple hands because I forgot to count my tricks or messed up my entries. Perhaps I don't have the lucid mind necessary to become a great player. Nevertheless, I am determined to do everything I can to overcome the frequency of these mistakes.
A lot of my bridge study involves working on esoteric problems, such as a compound squeeze. I'm sure that someone could win a national championship without knowing anything about a compound squeeze. They don't appear frequently enough to matter in tournament play. That said, working on these hard problems improves one's bridge problem-solving ability. The book problems are usually way harder than the actual hands seen at the table. So hopefully overtraining the muscle to the point where the hard hands are easy will make it so that the easy hands are so easy that the chance of careless error will drop dramatically.
With that said, there is specific training I should do to get better at easy hands and problems. It involves learning thinking-patterns that remove as much mental load as possible. For example, the one place every intermediate player knows where to save thinking energy is with hand shapes. No one counts to 13, they just know 6-3-3-1, 5-3-3-2, 4-3-3-3, etc. Another calculation-saving technique is the "rule of 11" with regards to 4th best leads.
There are other places where I can save calculations. For example, let's say I'm defending against a 3NT contract where declarer opened with 1NT (15-17) and I'm trying to figure out how many HCP my partner could have. I could start by saying to myself "okay, 40 HCP in the deck, declarer has 151, so there are 25 points left." But 40-15 is always 25, so just knowing to start with 25 instead of doing that one step is a tiny mental load off my back. Ok, so I say to myself "There's 25 out of 40 remaining, i have 7, so there's 18 left, and dummy has 10, so partner has 8 HCP." This is simple enough, but it's mentally easier for me to add and dummy and my points first and then do one subtraction at the end. So 25 - (7 + 10) = 8 This method has one addition and one subtraction, and the 25 starting point is memorized. It also is good to remember partner could always have up to 2 fewer points than the calculated amount.
Here are some other scenarios where I can save time calculating:
1. Against 3rd/5th leads. If someone leads 3rd best, we have the rule of 12, and if the lead is determined to be 5th best we use the rule of 10.
2. When counting HCP I can remember all the combinators of honors as various values , ie AQJ = 7, not 4+2+1, AKQJ = 10, etc.
I'll try to actively think of different areas where I can "cache" calculations for future hands I also would like to figure out better ways to organize my thoughts when thinking about entries and possible adverse distributions, like in this hand.
- I assume the smallest of their range. [↩]