AJB Sweep of District 7 NAP Flight C

For the second straight year, teenagers from the Atlanta area won 1st and 2nd on the flight C district 7 NAP. In fact, this year they took 3rd as well. Congratulations to this year's winners who will represent GA, SC, NC, and eastern TN at the spring NABC in Louisville: 1st Saachi Hingorani and Aashna Choudhary; 2nd Angie Green and Mili Raina, who I was going to play with in B but there's a conflict w/ B and C at the nationals; 3rd Ricoh Das, who I also play with/teach, and Murphy Green.

Atlanta Junior Bridge is clearly doing some good things that will hopefully lead to more success in youth and junior international success in the coming years. I just hope getting beaten by kids doesn't discourage the older players who are new to bridge or duplicate bridge from continuing to learn the game. And I hope that they don't get used to winning every - it gets a harder to win in flight B, and much harder in flight A. The winners have been unable to tell me a favorite hand from the tournament for me to write about but see some of my previous and upcoming posts for a few of my interesting struggles with the same hands in flight A. The results and hand records can be found here.

U21 USBC

This past weekend I spent a lot of time watching on BBO Vugraph the Under 21 US Bridge Championships rather than the finals of the Open USBC. While the bridge for the most part was noticeably amateurish, I enjoyed it because I know almost everyone in it and want to see them play and mature and want to think that I had something to do with them getting to the 2030 USBC finals but then losing to me. ;)

The favorites - Adam Kaplan, Adam Grossack, John Marriott, Alex Hudson, Jourdain Patchett, and Jesse Stern - had no trouble winning. They are all rather established partnerships and quite experienced players and should do well in the world competition. The second place team, probably most people’s pick to be second, consisted of Zandy Rizzo, Murphy Green, Richard Jeng, and Andrew Jeng. Both teams will represent the USA in the U21 world championships in Philadelphia in October. The Rizzo team fell behind 40-0 in the USA2 final against Ricoh Das, William Dang, Mili Raina, and Angie Green but would up winning 169-90. All of the kids clearly have bright minds and a flare for the game and have potential to be very good. It is experience that was the main distinction between the top three teams. Each pair made their share of good plays but the top pairs were able to avoid bidding misunderstandings and didn’t suffer much from two very common problems of young players today.

The first common mistake is playing too fast. By junior standards, I am a slow player. By average bridge player standards, I play at lightning speed 95% of the time and then at a snail’s pace on an occasional difficult hand. There are some hands that do not require much thought but until you are sure of that, it is best to take some time and play deliberately. Even with the screens, the teams were sometimes finishing 16 board segments in an hour and a half, only about 5.5 minutes per board, while the open teams were only on board 11 or so. Time and time again, we noticed declarers playing too quickly, especially early in the hand, or defenders not pausing for a few seconds to think more about what’s going on. Then just a few seconds later they realize their mistake. Bridge players have big egos, and perhaps playing fast is just another (slightly delusional) way to show off one’s superiority to others but that’s another article. These mistakes happen at all levels – Friday, I saw Bob Hamman forget to pitch a quick loser away on an AK in dummy before leading trumps (missing the A of trumps).

The second major problem players in this phase of learning where people know enough to think about many possibilities but not enough to realize that most of the possibilities are so unlikely to actually happen is that they just bid too much, particularly without having a fit. By the same token, the same players that bid too much without a fit don’t bid enough with a fit. Having a fit with partner in a way, gives you a license to be more aggressive as there is some safety in going to higher levels – it means the opponents probably have a fit and can make more, and taking tricks, whether in NT or a suit, is just easier when you don’t have singletons opposite KJTxx. This is something that one must learn from experience. There are few life lessons that we can just accept from other people telling us – we have to go make the mistakes ourselves to learn. Learning when to quit bidding can be a hard lesson to learn. After going down in 3NT on misfitting hands several times, one slowly learns. Bidding NT is rarely a good way to “rescue” partner from a misfit. Pass and get out while it's still relatively inexpensive is usually best. Occasionally, you’ll get a favorable lie of the cards or have an unexpected club fit and it will work well, but more often than not, passing partner in 2S in a 6-0 fit is the best thing you can do. This is why I don’t like the idea of playing new suit non-forcing opposite partner’s weak two. There’s no reason to think partner will have better support for you than you have for him and you may only be getting yourself a level higher. Hands usually play better in the long suit of the weaker hand anyway. Plus, passing partner without a fit and making him suffer a hopeless contract has a side benefit of making him think twice, then three times, then not at all, about preempting on a T high suit or open 3C on a 5 bagger. There is a reason so few world class bridge players are young and it’s not because young people aren’t as smart or talented – we can’t learn from other people’s mistakes nearly as well as we learn from our own and it takes time to make mistakes (or, if you prefer, gain experience) and improve our neural network of card sense and bidding sanity.

I remember Richard Jeng finding a nice endplay in the last match to score an overtrick in 3S, I believe. Kaplan made a few impressive declarer plays – the play in a 4HX contract Saturday was pretty interesting. There were others, too, but those are two that stuck out in my mind the most. I could go back and write about specific hands but unless someone wants to pay me, I’m not quite that motivated to write about hands that don’t directly involve me, so I’ll leave that to the Bridge Bulletin and Bridge World writers for now. :)

Junior bridge in Atlanta

Every time I go to a tournament or even a club game in Atlanta now, I see teenagers playing. Lots of them. And I think to myself, why were there no people my age in this area playing when I was a teenager or a college student? I mean, Brian Levy played for awhile and was pretty good but college life took over his life apparently more than it did mine. And at Tech, Mike Rice was there for a year or two while I was and we tried to have a bridge group but it was just too hard to get enough interest. My last year at Tech, Richard Starr and I taught a class at the student center for free. I thought that might drum up some interest, but we had maybe 6 people show up and there was some talk of re-starting a GT bridge club but it never happened. I blame it on computers and tv and the multitude of other things young people can do now.

So, I continue to be impressed by the work Patty Tucker has done with Atlanta Junior Bridge in getting so many kids interested in playing. I guess it is unrealistic to expect many people to stick to it, given the number or people I personally talked to about learning bridge. She got hundreds of kids in summer camps and it seems like a good 10-15% of them actually are playing in tournaments now. I suppose those are good numbers. But simple reaching out to them is a big thing.

In Macon/Warner Robins, it is going to be a lot harder because of the much smaller base of people. If we expect that 10% of the people we teach will actually like it enough to continue, in WR, that's maybe 2 or 3 people. And it's hard for them to continue unless they have more peers.