Semi-Achievement

As I sit here writing this I can hear the riotous cheers and congratulations being heaped upon the U-21 team from England, who just completed a 44.5-IMP 4th-quarter comeback against the Dutch in their semifinal match to earn a shot at a gold medal tomorrow. Peering over the balcony I can see the usual contingent of tears amongst the team and admiring onlookers. What is there to say? When you win, it feels incredible. When you lose… it doesn’t. I remember when I won the Collegiates, but there are many other important losses that I remember as well. That’s sport: you can’t always win.

In the weeks before this tournament began I wasn’t sure how our team would perform. There were ups and downs in our results, although Jason and I had been improving. However, as the round robin wore on it became clear that our team was amongst the best and I genuinely felt that we would beat Israel today to earn a berth in the gold-medal match tomorrow. When you put your heart into something the way I have with bridge over the past few years, you wonder when it’s going to be your time to come out on top. As it turns out, this year wasn’t my year. It’s the last chance I’ll have to win a Junior World Championship, but I know that there is still plenty of time down the road to win an Open World Championship if I keep playing this game. And, hey, in the meantime there’s a bronze medal to be won tomorrow.

I’d like to say that I played well today and that Israel beat us soundly anyway. But the fact is that I could have played much better. After 3 quarters our team was down 80. After a lot of thought, we decided to concede rather than play the 4th quarter. There are several reasons for this:

1.   We hadn’t managed to beat Israel by any number of IMPs over the last 4 sets of boards we’d played against them.  Calculating the probability that we’d be able to muster 80 IMPs in 14 hands isn’t an exact science, but it’s easy to tell that the chances of that result were remote.  
2. Bridge is a tiring game.  Playing another 14 hands against strong players wouldn’t put us in the best possible position for our bronze-medal matchup with China tomorrow.  If you look at it as a simple expected-personal value (PV) problem you might say

p(Bronze|Withdrawl)*PV(Bronze) >  
[(1-p(win))*p(Bronze|!Withdrawl)*PV(Bronze)+
(p(win)*p(gold)*PV(Gold))+(p(win)*p(silver) *PV(Silver)]  

Where p(win) << 1

An outside factor is that in the other semifinal match China had already conceded to France.  Is it sporting to force a team to play what will (most of the time) be a pointless set that will only tire them out before an extremely important match the next day?  The general consensus on this front is no.

Here is an important hand from the match:

This is a hand where strong fundamentals will lead you to the correct line.  The heart suit itself is one of the most basic suit combinations in bridge.  The correct way to play the suit for one loser is to cash the Ace and then lead towards dummy when nothing special happens.  You’ll come to 3 losers 17% of the time when South holds KJx or KJxx of hearts.  This is outweighed by the 19% chance that you’ll lose to KJx or KJ in the North hand if you try to finesse twice towards hand (leading the 10 first).  Any good bridge player knows that, in the long run, you’re a winner if you follow the percentages.  For some reason being on Vugraph and under the bright lights of the live video feed I forgot this and decided to run the Queen of hearts (which actually has a 24% likelihood of failure when you find you can’t recover against KJxx with North).  Happily this wasn’t my undoing, and I found myself in the comfortable position where I could claim as long as clubs weren’t 4-0 (roughly a 10% chance). 

Well, guess what?  They were.  But wait!  I can still recover the position if South is the player who holds 4 clubs.  With the 3-1 heart split this is slightly more likely than the scenario where North holds all four clubs but is still ~5%.  So I’m 95% to make at this point if I just play the Club Ace and then finesse twice towards hand.  Sadly… when you’re under stress you often overlook the little details.  So I claimed 12 tricks only to find that the defense forced me (by right) to play the king of clubs first, eventually losing a trick in both of the rounded suits.  So, where a strong technician would take 13 tricks on this hand, I was left with 11 and a 17-IMP loss when slam made in the other room.

But wait, there’s more! A hand like this can have the effect of really shaking your mental fortitude.  As I pulled the cards out for the next board you could say that, emotionally, I felt like a battered fighter knocked out cold on the mat.  One of the most difficult aspects of bridge is keeping your thoughts collected, both when under pressure and after disasters such as this one.  Entire matches have swung on much less when a player is effectively removed from the match because they couldn’t recover mentally from a prior mistake.  Needless to say, a champion is made of sterner stuff.

So, to put it bluntly, I didn’t play well enough today to earn a shot at a gold medal.  And I let my team down on this hand especially, amongst others.  Maybe one day I’ll have another shot at gold but, for now, I need to recover and be ready to go again tomorrow.