Loading ...so what if you shank a few?
I am the luckiest bridge player I know. A dozen years after I saw my first bidding box, I can count among my dearest friends some of the game’s brightest stars. I kibitzed just about every board George played for the first five or six years we were together, met a lot of people and saw a lot of great bridge. I learned to sit quietly and with a straight face, which can sometimes be difficult to do watching George playing Standard Italian. The tournament they had to play the standard American 2 
: treatment (preemptive) and Alfredo permanently removed George’s 2 : card after the third round stands out as one of the tougher ones …
What kept me away from playing more than anything else was a pretty good sense of how steep the learning curve is and how impossible it sometimes feels that I’ll ever catch up. When everyone you know is a World Champion, even “competent” feels like a stretch. It took a long time to learn to stop intimidating myself, to see all that as useless clutter and to stop standing in my own way.
The better I get at keeping my mouth shut and listening, the more I learn.
Last week I played 114 hands on BridgeBase, plus another 50 or so deals in Partnership Bidding. At the end of several sessions I was feeling pretty incompetent. “Don’t worry about it,” Judi told me. “It’s practice. You go to the driving range and hit a bucket of balls. Once in a while you shank one. So what?”
I’ve studied those 114 hands several times. I mean really studied them. A few I dealt out on the kitchen table and played a couple of times. There were a bunch of slams we didn’t bid, a few suits I managed to block, some stoppers I’d have done better to hold. I saw what there was to see — good and bad — in the hands as I played them last week. Now I’m ready to move on.
The best, by far, is the image I have from Judi of the bad boards as shanked golf balls. It makes me laugh every time I remember her saying it, but it also completely changes the way I think about these online practices. Things like that remind me every single day how lucky I am — I’ve got a husband I adore; gorgeous, healthy children; fantastic friends and teammates and the opportunity to pursue my passions.
And it’s almost baseball season!
Leave a Comment