how to spot a bridge pro, part three
I’ll hit the highlights from parts 1 and 2, in case you’re just joining us: There are two sides to every story; in this one, which is about the world of professional bridge, the two central characters are the player and the sponsor. Bob Katz said “The definition of a pro is simple – someone who gets paid to play.” So by the same token, a sponsor is anyone who pays to play. This series offers a sponsor’s view of the transactions which define us. And them.
what’s in it for me?
The love of the game, a passion for competition, the excitement of winning, the beauty of a tricky hand well played, the prestige associated with always having the best. We sit down with expert partners to learn to play the game better and for the very same reasons we buy luxury autos and wear designer. Prada, Bentley, Meckstroth.
We know what’s in it for them: they get paid to play a game almost every one of them would play anyway. The eighteen or so sponsors who finished in the top twenty in Las Vegas last summer all figured they had a pretty good chance of winning the whole thing. What about the sponsors who finished out of the top twenty? What about the ones who’ve been hiring for years but never attend a major tournament? Or the ones who play hard every single time and rarely, if ever, win — what are they thinking?
In the equation I set up last time, [S(X) = P(Y)], easily translated “I agree to pay you (whatever we agreed I’ll pay you) to play (whatever we agreed you’ll play);” the stuff between the parentheses looks easy to define but can prove difficult to compute and sometimes the whole equation is impossible to balance. When it does balance, great things happen. When it doesn’t, things fall apart and people make changes.
A long time ago a friend of mine characterized the transaction between sponsor and pro like this: ‘You pretend I’m an expert, I’ll pretend we’re friends.’ My own relationships don’t go this way — nobody could pretend I’m an expert and my teammates have all been people with whom I was friendly before we teamed up, but I’ve certainly seen it play out my friend’s way.
Part of why my case is different: I wasn’t a player before I was a sponsor. I came to the table with CLIENT stamped across my forehead and immediately embarked upon a campaign to change the headline to STUDENT. I was still at it a year and a half ago: during one of the first conversations I ever had with Judi she said very kindly, looking to reassure me, “Don’t worry, I know how you play.”
Ah yes, I thought, but do you know what I want?
We lose more than we win and there’s no guarantee that hiring a professional partner or teammates will tip the odds in our favor, so what’s the deal? On some level, my husband will joke that I’m just one of those people who likes paying retail. I’m really looking for:
1. Partners I can count on. More than anything else, I hire for reliability. Friends and volunteers are great, but things come up and people change their minds, sometimes at the last minute. I want somebody who wants to play, who’s going to show up and be as interested in the game as I am. The same with teammates — I want to be around people who want to play, who think they should be in, who love the game and want to go over the hands at the end of the day.
2. Lessons I can trust. For good or ill, most people feel very comfortable voicing their ideas about any given hand or action at the table. Gratuitous advice generally being worth its price, I’m much happier knowing that the lessons I pay for are worth the paper with which I’ve paid them.
3. Civility, every step of the way. I play bridge because I’m highly competitive and I love to learn. I’m not interested in the frustrated blow-back I often get from volunteer partners. After a few practice sessions and a lot of nervous preparation, Judi and I sat down to play our first Women’s Pairs together last spring in Detroit. We led after the first session, but I flamed out in the evening and we were lucky to qualify. When it was over I could honestly say that though I’ve put up a number of 40% games over the years, I’ve never enjoyed one of them quite as much.
In an event like the Spingold, most recently contested by 106 teams, there can only be one winner; the rest of us go home a combined $1.5 million poorer (a conservative estimate). When we get home, chances are we’ll explain ourselves to our friends and neighbors for the millionth time. “Bridge player,” we’ll have to remind them when they introduce us as chess or poker hobbyists. In real life, George and I are known as those nutty bridge players who run around the world playing cards for no money.
They have no idea.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:15 am
Stacy – you have presented quite a nice set of essays why you and some others hire professional players. It is impossible to not admire your willingness to work hard at the game, combined with your passion, generosity, intelligence and quest for fun!
Despite Eric Rodwell’s attempt to make this statement seem false – everyone loses more than they win. Still, you have done much to heighten your odds of success – and it surely has paid off for you. Kudos!
January 14th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Stacy,
Your three rules for professionals should be required reading.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Stacy,
When playing an important competition with a team of six, how do you balance the priority of winning with your desire to play as much as you can?
At the recent final of the UK’s most prestigious event, the Gold Cup, I was chatting to one of the professionals on Janet de Botton’s winning team.
It provided some interesting (to me) insight into how the team worked. Janet was definitely the boss. If she wanted to play, then she played, and all the professionals fully supported her decision even though it might compromise the team’s chances of winning.
And indeed she played all 64 boards of the quarter-final. However her desire to make the final meant that she sat out the semifinal, and then played the minimum needed in the final (the rules to be declared a ‘winner’ specified a minimum number of sets aggregated over the final 3 matches).
But I was very impressed with the attitude of her professional team.
So you are in the quarter-final of the Spingold. Two sets or three?
January 14th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Regarding Paul’s comments:
It sounds like the conditions of contest required each player to play 1/2 the boards in the final 3 matches, maybe including 1/2 of the boards in the final.
The client chose to play the entire quarterfinal – possibly a situation where winning was likely – and then sat out the entire semi.
It does not sound like she did anything to “compromise” her team’s chances but rather made choices based upon achieving the best result.
And that brings us to the only part of Stacy’s comments that I take issue with.
Yes, I too like to play with best available (and hopefully congenial as well) partners and always like to have the best available teammates.
But I have never tried to put together a team where I was hoping to achieve something by my playing the minimum and thus increasing our chances. I have never been on a team where that was the case (not because I am so good but because one does not generally accidentally find themselves as the 5th or 6th wheel on a team of better players). Would I do that if somehow or other I was on a team of clearly better players? Probably so. But how does that come about?
——–
And that gets us to the crux of the matter. Are professional teams playing in top level competition (competing for national or international titles) put together so the client can simply have good partners and teammates or are they put together so that the client can have the best chance at victory and hopefully qualify for the title while putting the team at the least risk.?
If the latter (which I think is more often than not the case), then I think we are in a different realm. In pair games it is clearly a 50-50 proposition. But in team games it is often a case of the client getting their hands in and then hopefully having the match decided by the better players.
Is this wrong? No. Does it in some respect cheapen the accomplishment? Maybe. Some clients are very very good players who are capable of competing successfully on the highest levels but can afford to have the very best teammates. Others are people who are much lesser players hoping to ride coattails. I can think of one player in particular who won the national swiss in a fall regional but who was simply hopeless. He may have had the title but I suspect all who were familiar with him saw nothing in his accomplishment.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:54 am
Paul’s question hints at it, but Bob’s answer for sure assumes that the interests of “playing as much as you can” and “wanting to win the match” are competing.
It’s a bridge question, more or less, so you’ll get a bridge answer: it depends. I’m hoping George will make good on his threats to come into this conversation, since his is the perspective of the guy who’s played the quarter-final of the Spingold and faced these very decisions.
In general, you don’t bench an expert pair if the match isn’t absolutely beyond reach. If we’re down a million and there’s no way we can come back and I want to play, the horses let me play. If we’re up a million and a half, they’re almost as happy to send me in as to the bar to get a table in advance of the crowd.
But otherwise? It goes without saying that no matter how great the client or how horribly a pair of horses might be playing, the client doesn’t go back in after her half the boards are played.
I’d about exhausted my enthusiasm for the subject matter when I started trying to form a coherent reply. What I realize is that it’s not quite over. It’s never as easy as hire a team of great players and win yourself a championship.
I’ll be back soon with a look at how we line up.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Permit me a long comment. Some people will recognize the people in this story without the names being mentioned.
When I lived in Hartford in the late 90′s, I played sometimes with A, an extremely good player. We did not play in the premier events (i.e. the regional Flight A knockouts) but he would call me at times to play a regional swiss or bracketed KO.
I moved away and then moved back to Vermont, and decided I wanted to play more often with A. We were friends and had other common interests, I enjoyed his company, and I didn’t like to have to call around for partners and teammates. Finally, by paying him, I put him in the position where when I did something stupid, he was obligated to tell me what I did wrong and teach me about it, not just roll his eyes. (His best comment ever after I made a ridiculous lead in a national Swiss teams: “Now I know your problem – you’re a masochist.”)
Now for the good part of the story.
At the fall nationals, I played with A in the Blue Ribbon pairs, but he was on another team in the Reisinger. I was looking around for a team, and I approached B, a long-time acquaintance, someone who I had not played with but where we had mutual respect. He told me he’d “get back to me.” OK, look, we all jockey for the best partner/teammates in the national events.
Meanwhile, C, another pro, with a much weaker record than A in national events, approached me. He knew that in the past I had played with A in regionals, but seemed to be playing with him more than I had before. He asked me something like whether I was “taking lessons” from A, and I said yes. Well, the first thing he did was give me his business card. OK, that’s fine, why not?
But later on that day I got a call from B, that he was not going to play with me in the Reisinger. I forget the wording of the voice message, but I know that B was playing on a team with C.
I eventually played on a team with some friends in the North American Swiss and did not do very well. My friends failed to qualify for the second day of the Reisinger also. Over the weekend, I approached B and asked him to tell me candidly whether C had “blackballed” me from the team, and he said yes.
So tracing through the episode, C was at least somewhat agreeable to my playing on the team, until he found that I was paying A. When I played with A in my Hartford days, an unpaid arrangement, I was OK because I wasn’t paying him. But a few years later, when I was making more money, willing to spend a little more on bridge, and getting better due to somewhat consistently playing with A, I now had the word “client” tattooed on my forehead and was no longer acceptable on C’s team.
April 17th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Hi Hank,
I don’t know the players, but it’s a pretty familiar story. I’ve had something similar said to me outright on a number of occasions: “If anybody on the team is getting payed, I won’t play unless you pay me too.”
The solicitation by pro C cracked me up — I get that ALL the time; it’s why I mentioned that I’ve never actually hired any of those card-foisters.