It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

– Jean-Luc Picard

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This is my first “mindset” article on bridge. Everything I’ve written has been fairly technical – cardplay techniques, bidding strategy with direct tie-ins to cardplay, hand evaluation with direct tie-ins to cardplay… btw, did you know that bridge is about taking tricks?

So this is the first sort of mindset philosophical article that I’m writing. Some of my students know that I randomly have seemingly drug-induced rambles about bridge. This is one of them.

The subject I’ve chosen for this article is the fact that bridge bids are either-or. Black and white. All or nothing. Either you bid 4H, or you didn’t. Either you bid 6S, or you didn’t.

For newer players, they fall into the mistake of “resulting.” That’s a uniquely bridge term that poker really could adopt from us. In poker, they call it Results-Oriented Thinking (to be fair, ROT is a good acronym.) This fallacy is a classic. Because I made 12 tricks, therefore I should have bid slam. Because 3NT fails, therefore I should have stayed out. Players will commonly see that double dummy says a hand makes a certain contract, therefore it should be bid. This happened in the EZ Bridge game I volunteer and run – DD announces that 3N makes, and yet everyone who bid it went down. What did they do wrong?

Why, nothing of course. They finessed into a kingleton and lost the contract. Of course they should finesse. It was the best play. It just didn’t work.

In bridge, and perhaps in life, we must learn to separate the decision from the result. Just because a decision led to a certain result, good or bad, doesn’t mean we can judge the decision as correct or incorrect post hoc. It may be a point of datum, it may inform future decisions, but believe it or not, the two events may also be complete non sequiturs.

Beyond resulting, I also like to consider this principle when polling players for bidding, or judging myself on close decisions. If you give people a hand and ask them what they bid, sometimes they may spit out an answer without any reasoning or justification. Ask them: how clear is it for them? Is it automatic? Is it close? If it’s close, how close? If it was nearly as close as a coin flip, then they could have chosen the other candidate on a different day!

This type of thinking also occurred when I was practicing slam bidding with Borky. Naturally, in bidding lots of close slam deals, we will get them wrong. Perhaps a lot of them wrong. I don’t know if Borky despaired… but I didn’t! You know what happened? A lot of the ones we got “wrong,” we were always on the cusp. One side of the partnership showed a strong invite to slam while stopping at the game level, and the other said they had a difficult decision whether to accept.

To me, this is great! These razor edge decisions are inherently difficult. You take one misstep, and you get cut. But we are walking that edge, and every time it’s close, even if we end up taking a decision that doesn’t work, we actively invited/held back on the deal. The final contract is binary, the decision to bid or not is binary, but the thought process and the fact that we invited/held back regardless of the outcome is a sign that we are doing something right.

In conclusion, try to be objective. Recognize that the result does not 100% justify the decision. Give yourself credit for considering an action that would have worked, even if you didn’t take it. Sometimes it really is a coin flip. Don’t despair, keep honing your judgment, speak to stronger players and ask not only for their bid but also their evaluation, and you’ll discover your own strengths and weaknesses.

What does all of this mean? I don’t know. My students are probably laughing at me now. I don’t do drugs, I swear.