Do you compete to win or just to play and have fun?

I was discussing winning, losing and competing with a student. She had some poor results in a practice session and was talking about giving up the game.

Do you compete to win or just to play and have fun? I can’t really imagine playing bridge only to have fun. I always want to win. Sometimes it is more important than others but competition brings that out in me.   And I am not happy when things go badly. And I don’t like it when my opponents do well by fluke. 

Here is an example of doing bad things and getting a good result. I held:

There was no opposition bidding

Partner opened 1♠. 

I bid a forcing notrump since we were playing 2/1 and showed limit raises by supporting the major on the second bid. Partner now jump shifted into hearts,a game force.

At this point  I bid 3♠  showing values since with a weaker hand I would just jump to game. When partner bid 4♠  I passed.

Looking at the North-South hands alone 6♠  is a great contract. We missed it because my student and I were not on the same wavelength during the auction. But if you look again you will see that a spade slam is defeated on a heart ruff although you can make slam in either notrump or hearts.

 

This mistake turned out to be a plus position for our side.  This was the first board we played. Believe it or not we didn’t get a minus score or lose imps in the remaining ten boards. True the hands did run our way but that was not the major reason that we won so many imps. As things started to go our way we have the momentum and after a while our opponents EXPECTED to fail.

This got me to thinking about competing. Competing at anything is so full of hopes, desires, fears, emotions. When I played at the world championships I couldn’t eat.. I had trouble sleeping. It didn’t even matter if I was doing well. I was afraid of failure.

Now that I play tennis I am afraid to play the first game or two with new people. I am nervous that I will ruin their game. I afraid I will keep double faulting (quite likely). But my expectations are low. And when something good happens then it makes up for all the double faults. We are generous to each other. Novice bridge can often be like that too but as people get stronger the support goes down.

Running at my level is a purer enterprise. I am a novice runner. When I run I am only competing with myself. I set goals and I try to achieve them. If I don’t I work to improve. I am not afraid. I have trained and I believe I can do what I set out to do.

Quite likely world class runners who go out to win races have the same anxiety that expert bridge players have. 

When we are learning we need to give ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, even stupid ones. If we become serious competitors we need to learn how to handle our anxieties because they will be there. It is hard to let your partner down or your team down even as a novice but it will be impossible to reach your potential if you don’t allow yourself to mess up, even badly.