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Dear Ed & Peter, A) Are the best players in the world able to tell where the every spot card was after the hand was played? (especially defence). Does it happen on all hands? The majority of them? Sometimes? Never? B) Are they able to tell what is the shape and where all the HCP (High Card Points) were after the hand was played on every deal? C) How does the thinking process work? Are they asking questions to themselves and work out everything, or do just they intuitively know who has what? I am interested about the thinking process and some guidelines of how good top players work in this respect (counting/reading hands). Please add any information you think may be interesting :) Thanks for the great site! I really enjoy it :) Greetings, Piotrek, Reply from Ed Hoogenkamp ('South'): Dear Piotrek, A) I think they only remember the relevant spot cards. But often they know almost all of them from remembering the tricks. 'He led the 6 and later played the 8 to show three...'etc. B) Almost without exception. Maybe not on hands that were claimed... :-) C) I speak for myself, but I understand my colleagues more or less think along the same lines. So basically there is a frame in your head of different distributions and location of HCP. A lot is already filled in based on the bidding. That frame fills up along the way. This is the best way I can describe it... Let's see what Peter has to add. Normally after the play he hardly remembers the name of his partner... Un saludo desde Barcelona Reply from Peter van der Linden ('North'): Dear Piotrek, Difficult to answer! (A) Very good players (not only world class players memorise 'all' the cards!) note the small cards and automatically note whether the opponents play their smallest spot cards. E.g. when the defenders play the two and five under declarer's ace, while he and dummy have the four and six as the two smallest cards, declarer will make a mental note: 'the three is missing.' At the next trick he will probably see the three come down and he notices whether it was (a) played by the opponent who originally played the two: he played two-three then so both opponents played low-high. But if (b) the three is played by the opponent who played the five first, that opponent has played high-low. That is the information he remembers during the rest of the deal, he may now 'erase' the information which exact cards the defenders played. 'Second-smallest, then smallest by East' is the thing to memorise. (But probably he can still reproduce the exact cards afterwards...). Suppose after those two rounds only one spot card in that suit is still out: there is no need then to figure out which card that is, the seven or eight - let alone memorise it, since that information is not relevant. (B) Agree with Ed. Experts can reproduce the distribution and all the HCP's, unless... it isn't worth knowing. An example: when in a team match the bidding is 1NT-3NT and after the lead declarer claims ten top tricks, there being no real chance for a tenth, I don't think he will bother to study the opponent's hands afterwards. After all, this is an uninteresting board; it will almost certainly not generate a swing. (C) In section (A) I have already tried to give an example of what an expert memorises. How he does it, is explained by Ed. Thinking in patterns is the concept. In my example I use a lot of words for a process that goes more or less automatically. 'The suit is 3-2, East second-smallest, then smallest.' En hils fra Orkanger PS: Talking about memory. Ed recently had this little conversation with an opponent at the bridge table. The latter told Ed he wanted to test his knowledge about great scientists. |