It's all in the mind

I'm not an outdoors guy. I don't play a lot of sports; mostly its the indoors kind of games I enjoy. My experience in competitive sports is limited to indoor games at the school or college level. Thus, I was totally unprepared for the experiences of high-level sporting competition when I headed to Bombay for the Junior Open Bridge Nationals this week. I mean, although as spectators and fans of various sports like cricket and tennis, we are familiar with the adrenaline level associated with high stakes sports, it is a totally different matter to be a participant.

The tournament turnout was disappointingly low; there were only 36 players from around the country. What a pity it is, for a national bridge tournament normally attracts several hundred (perhaps even a thousand) players, but for a junior tournament the participation is pathetic. Have the youth of today no interest in intellectual games? Well, chess is popular in our country. So there is something else wrong. One day I will do my part to fix this.

The first two events of play, the individual event and the pairs event, turned into a joke when it was realized that only half the field were decent players and the rest were novices, especially a contingent of six 10-12 year old kids from Salem who performed quite well considering their age and experience but did not belong in a national level tournament. It is not fun playing with or against such amateurs, and the scores were all over the place, screwing up the results as well. We thanked God when those events got over and it was time to start the main head-to-head Team of Four event.

The number of 36 players came down to just seven teams of 4-6 members. Of these, it was clear to all that the level of the top three teams was way ahead of the rest. My team consisted of five of my good friends, current and past students of IIT Madras. We lost by small margins to the top two teams (lets call them Aniket's team and the West Bengal team) in the leagues, but thrashed all other teams comfortably to reach the super leagues.

At this point we faced a moment of self-doubt. Are these two teams really more skilled than us? We've worked so hard, and still we are not good enough? But it was just for a moment. With admirable spirit my team (yes, my team - I acted as and felt like a team captain) came back strongly to win all the matches in the super-leagues. Then we sealed it by soundly beating the West Bengal team in the semifinals. I learned something at that time. We beat that team by handsome margins twice not because we were much better than them, but because we put pressure on them. They were human, you see. Once we beat them in the super league with solid play and took the lead in the semis, they got desperate and tried all sorts of stunts to win, and only succeeded in digging their own graves. We beat them in the mind, not in the sense that bridge is an intellectual game, but in the sense that our victory was as much through psychology as it was through skill.

Then came the finals. I wish my partner Guthi and I had gone straight in after the lunch break, but we sat out and let the other two pairs play the first of the three sessions. By the rules we were not allowed to stay and watch, so we had to sit outside and bite our nails, and we gradually grew tensed. When we went in to the second session a few points behind, we made mistakes out of sheer nervousness and lack of concentration that turned our faces red at the stupidity of it. And then, tiredness from four consecutive days of play also took its toll, and there were further mistakes through "autopilot" play without thinking things through. We lost, but in spite of so many errors the margin was not very large. Truly, we had won over the other team in the mind, and lost in the finals too in the mind. Aniket's team well deserved to win, for they proved themselves to be more professional players than us.

There will be a selection process in the summer for the Indian Junior Bridge team to be sent to the World Mind Games at Shanghai late this year, and I sincerely hope they will select a couple of players at least from my team (including me of course :P). Our team: Prashanth, Guthi, Ashok, Prajwal, Gaurav, Angad. The winners: Aniket, Anurag, Ayan, Soumya, Pravin.

Cheers,
Prashanth.

P.S. The long break was because of ill health, mild depression, and later, preparation for the tourney. But now I am supercharged and happy and it is good to be back!