Back from Hamilton
I just returned from a week at the 22nd national NZ Bridge congress, and am predictably tired. Trying to get to sleep day after day after three hours of intense concentration finishing about 11:30 pm is no easy task, so I usually didn't drop off until 2:00 am or so, and was often up by about 7:00 am (stupid body clock.)
My results weren't great, partly because I was playing in unfamiliar partnerships, having left my decision to play until the last minute. The other reason of course is that I haven't been taking bridge seriously for a number of years now, and am more than a little rusty. I did get a few articles published in the bulletin (see links at the site above) including a couple of rather dodgy poems. And they were kind enough to give me a couple of bottles of decent wine for my contributions. So, that was nice.
But what was even nicer was rediscovering the sheer joy that bridge can provide. A large part of that comes in the endless post mortems with your friends and peers, analyzing hands from the bidding through the play of each card and trying to learn and profit from that learning (profit of course, purely in the abstract sense -- we're not talking about real money here.) This is something that doesn't really happen much in poker, for a couple of reasons. The glaringly obvious one is that you don't play the same hands as others (though I see that an attempt has been made to introduce duplicate poker) so they can't offer fully informed comment on your play, nor do you necessarily want to share your thought processes and techniques.
And then there are purely sublime moments that occur at bridge, which I at least have never experienced the like of in poker. The closest I can come to it in poker is the feeling that comes after you've carefully misrepresented a monster and dragged someone into an all in pot, massively behind. Times when you profit not from the mistakes of your opponents (which is also in bridge where the large part of your profit must come from) but from your own skillful play. And in bridge it can be a matter of pure skill -- of spotting an opportunity because of the combination of the 26 cards you can see and the 26 that you can't and exploiting it. Or, of using the ideas and features of your own bidding system to arrive at a good contract that won't be found elsewhere.
On Saturday morning there were three such hands in a 26 board session. I'm still not entirely down from the high that they produced. That may be a juvenile and inappropriate reaction but it's taught me something: I'm a bridge player, not a poker player.
I'll probably keep playing a bit of poker. If nothing else it's a method of relaxing and enjoying ones self for an hour, with the possibility of a bit of profit on the side. When I do, I'll probably blog a bit about it here, but updates will be even more irregular than they have been until now.
I might start a bridge blog too ... or maybe not ...
My results weren't great, partly because I was playing in unfamiliar partnerships, having left my decision to play until the last minute. The other reason of course is that I haven't been taking bridge seriously for a number of years now, and am more than a little rusty. I did get a few articles published in the bulletin (see links at the site above) including a couple of rather dodgy poems. And they were kind enough to give me a couple of bottles of decent wine for my contributions. So, that was nice.
But what was even nicer was rediscovering the sheer joy that bridge can provide. A large part of that comes in the endless post mortems with your friends and peers, analyzing hands from the bidding through the play of each card and trying to learn and profit from that learning (profit of course, purely in the abstract sense -- we're not talking about real money here.) This is something that doesn't really happen much in poker, for a couple of reasons. The glaringly obvious one is that you don't play the same hands as others (though I see that an attempt has been made to introduce duplicate poker) so they can't offer fully informed comment on your play, nor do you necessarily want to share your thought processes and techniques.
And then there are purely sublime moments that occur at bridge, which I at least have never experienced the like of in poker. The closest I can come to it in poker is the feeling that comes after you've carefully misrepresented a monster and dragged someone into an all in pot, massively behind. Times when you profit not from the mistakes of your opponents (which is also in bridge where the large part of your profit must come from) but from your own skillful play. And in bridge it can be a matter of pure skill -- of spotting an opportunity because of the combination of the 26 cards you can see and the 26 that you can't and exploiting it. Or, of using the ideas and features of your own bidding system to arrive at a good contract that won't be found elsewhere.
On Saturday morning there were three such hands in a 26 board session. I'm still not entirely down from the high that they produced. That may be a juvenile and inappropriate reaction but it's taught me something: I'm a bridge player, not a poker player.
I'll probably keep playing a bit of poker. If nothing else it's a method of relaxing and enjoying ones self for an hour, with the possibility of a bit of profit on the side. When I do, I'll probably blog a bit about it here, but updates will be even more irregular than they have been until now.
I might start a bridge blog too ... or maybe not ...
Labels: bridge, random observations
posted by Michael Albert at 12:47 pm
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