Posted 2011-March-07, 23:25
There are different ways to define "competitive" and I think it is tricky. Personally my goal is to play well (or as well as I can), but this is more a personal measure of success that is not necessarily reflected in the overall standings.
I believe that there are a lot of things a person can do outside of playing their best which will improve their chances of winning. Personally I tend not to do these things. Sometimes it has to do with enjoyment of playing, some with being a nice person, some with life priorities, etc. To give some examples:
(1) Finding good partners/teammates is often a key to doing well. I tend to prefer to play with friends, prefer to make commitments in advance (and keep them), and prefer not to pay people to play with me or on my team. All of these occasionally land me with weaker teams than I could (in principle) get if I solicited the best available players. However, while I like to personally play my best, my enjoyment is impacted more by having a team I like being around than necessarily placing the highest possible. Of course, it is true that many of my friends also care about playing as well as they can, but they may differ in experience/ability/time commitment to make that happen.
(2) Playing as many tournaments as possible is key to building a "reputation" in the game (which can help with the finding teammates thing) and also helps keep in top playing form. In my case bridge is not my primary job, and it's more important to me to deal with career-related issues than to attend a maximum number of tournaments. This interferes a lot with travel. I've also found that I don't really enjoy most regional tournaments and am not particularly willing to travel for them unless I really like the location or there are other extenuating circumstances. If I was really trying to "win major tournaments" I would be investing more time/money to attend them.
(3) There are some things one can do to try to optimize performance, including special diets, arriving early for tournaments to "get used" to the time zone, and so forth. I'm not really into these things and tend to be more trying to have a good time. Certainly playing lousy bridge or losing to lousy teams reduces my enjoyment... but there's only so much I'm willing to do to combat that.
(4) There are some things I view as rudeness, but a lot of top players evidently do not. There are stories for example in Bob Hamman or Alan Sontag's books about things that they do to "get into the heads" of their opponents (or that opponents tried to do to them). These stories are often humorous, but they aren't things I'd ever want to be involved with, and tend to make me think less of the players involved. While outright rudeness may be frowned on, there is nothing that says you have to be friendly, nothing that say you really have to practice active ethics above/beyond the minimum requirements. I think there is a space between "ethical" and "pleasant" which an awful lot of our top competitors inhabit. Maybe this is natural; one could say that I lack a certain "killer instinct" but honestly I don't find it worthwhile to behave in such ways.
Adam W. Meyerson
a.k.a. Appeal Without Merit