Justin Lall

The Negative Effects of Professionalism on Bridge Pros September 6, 2011

NFL coaches are notorious for not going for it on 4th down enough, despite math clearly proving that they should be more aggressive in a lot of situations. How can these guys get paid fortunes to make in game decisions, and consistently make such poor ones?

The answer is simple, job security. If they defy conventional wisdom often in high variance situations, they will be blamed if they lose the game, but they will not get credit if they win the game. This logical inconsistency leads them to be rationally risk averse, because their main goal is not just to win games, but also to not get fired. Worse, if they do get fired for being considered too much of a maverick, they might never get hired again due to that very reputation.

The situation in bridge is less dire, as percentage plays are respected, and the math is often easily demonstrable. However, a large part of becoming a great bridge player, good enough to be hired to play on professional teams, is having excellent judgement about when situations to go against conventional wisdom or A priori odds.

Imagine you are a bridge pro, and you have reached a 3 card ending, dummy having AJ9 of a suit, and you having K87 in your hand. You need 3 tricks, and you know RHO started with 2 cards in this suit, and LHO started with 3 cards. You play the king, and lead up to dummy. RHO followed with the 6, and then your LHO fumbled for a second and followed with the ten. Your spidey senses are tingling.  Did RHO start with Q6, and now LHO is falsecarding with the ten? Or did RHO falsecard with 6x?

You see this situation all the time. Moderate caliber LHO’s always try to falsecard here. They are nervous you are going to guess the suit. Few RHO’s seem to play the 6 from 6x (yet when they have Tx or 9x they seem to often make this falsecard). Your experience and judgement strongly suggest playing the ace.

The problem here is that bridge players are not judged by imps won, they are judged only by imps lost. If you are right 75 % of the time, you have gained quite a bit over the percentage play of finessing (finessing is a 60/40 proposition A priori because LHO has 3 cards in the suit, and RHO has 2 cards in the suit), but you still risk facing the firing squad 25 % of the time. You still have defied conventional wisdom, and you can be sure your client and teammates will remember that 25 % much more often than the 75 % that you gain. On the other hand if you just finesse and lose to Qx, you tell your teammates that you took a normal percentage play and no one thinks anything of it again, win or lose. Just like no one thinks anything of the NFL coach who didn’t go for it on 4th and 3 in the first quarter on the opposing team’s 45 yard line.

The biggest problem is that you are not just thinking about a bridge problem anymore, that’s the easy part, you’re deciding if making this play is worth possibly getting fired, get a bad reputation, maybe never get hired again and be forced to get a 9-5 job that pays much less.

What about high risk, high return bidding strategies? The most obvious example is preempting. If you watch world championships, it is noticeable how much more conservative Americans are with preempting than almost all other countries. I submit that the risk aversion caused by professionalism is the cause of this. USA is the only country that has sponsored teams in the Bermuda Bowl. If you go for 1100 on an aggressive preempt not made at the other table, your teammates and clients will remember that. If you win a partscore battle or find a mildly profitable save because of it, no one will notice. If you win a game swing because you pushed the opponents too high or into the wrong game, those imps will probably be chalked up to the opponents playing badly and misjudging. Of course, they will more often misjudge when they are preempted, but that doesn’t matter.

Every pro dreads this comparison:

“-1100, sorry”
“Eleven Hundred? What happened there????”
“I opened 3C, it was a little aggressive, but that’s our style”
“Oh, they passed against me, lose 12.”

Trying to explain that this is a long term winning style that has high variance and inevitable numbers every now and then will often just agitate the client, who will wonder if they should have teammates that don’t have a style that goes for eleven hundred.

No problem, your teammates will help make your case for you, right?

Wrong. If your team has performed poorly, changes are probably going to be made. If your teammates don’t want to get fired, then it has to be you, and they know that. Professional bridge incentivizes  teammates to talk badly about each other, or at least remember the bad results the other pair had as evidence of why it’s not their own fault that they lost. There has to be some scapegoat, and it can’t be the client, or bad luck, so what else is left? And that 1100, or that hand you didn’t take a finesse, is certainly going to be excellent ammunition.

You could have easily avoided all of this trouble by just not making a marginal preempt. Nobody will realize the imps that you failed to win on some boards, because you did the normal thing. You will win the post-mortem, and your teammates will have no ammunition on you, and your client will have no reason to fire you. Looking at things from a job security point of view, this is extremely palatable.

All of this post-morteming, considering what your teammates will think, or whether your client will fire you, is just distracting you from making the action that will win the most often.

You might think that if your views often work, your success will speak for itself, and the occasional disasters will be forgiven. In an ideal world this would be true. In the real world, we suffer from a lack of hard statistics. How many matches down-the-middle pro wins compared to high-variance pro is impossible to tell. How often the latter’s views work out is impossible to tell. We do not have ESPN to give us statistics about things like that! Without statistics, we just have to go by perception, politics, and word of mouth. All of those things are driven by emotion more than anything else. Unfortunately, human nature is to remember the negative emotions associated with the big losses much more often than the positive emotions associated with the gains. That is true for pros and clients alike. We also always remember when someone does something atypical against us that does not work, and think less of the person, especially if our sample size against that person is small.

Why is conventional wisdom among even professional players to be so risk averse?  Being a full time bridge pro means playing a lot of matches on stacked professional teams against amateurs in regionals. Against competition like this, taking big risks is almost never right, as you will almost always win playing down the middle. But keeping this mentality in national events, or against other strong pro teams at regionals, will just lead you to not realize the edge that all of your experience and skill offers. The same skill that allowed you to win enough as an amateur to begin being hired as a professional, how ironic.