John shares his experience of being hired to play bridge professionally for the first time. He talks about meeting and playing with a new partner and the challenges they faced. He also discusses the pressure and self-consciousness he felt as a bridge pro and how he overcame it to improve his performance and gain confidence.

Takeaways

Being hired to play bridge professionally is a significant milestone and a flattering compliment.

Meeting and playing with a new partner can be challenging, but it provides an opportunity to learn and grow.

Playing as a bridge pro comes with imposter syndrome and performance pressure.

Improving performance and gaining confidence requires perseverance and a positive mindset.

Transcript

Hi, my name's John McAllister and welcome to the Setting Trick podcast. This is another solo cast where I'm going to talk about a big milestone in my bridge playing career that occurred this past week where I got hired for the first time to play bridge professionally at a regional bridge tournament in Williamsburg, Virginia.

And so many of you who listen to this podcast will be quite familiar with the idea of hiring someone to play bridge in anything from a club game to a world championship. It happens all the time. And there are plenty of people who make an excellent living getting paid to play bridge as someone's partner. And it's also something that I've done quite frequently.

I have hired people to be my partner and teammates and a huge part of the success that I've had in Bridge has been because I've been able to hire these people. And I've also learned a lot from playing with them and talking about Bridge with them and also getting to play against the level of competition that you have when you have a really strong partner and teammates.

So at the recent Atlanta Fall NABC, I was playing downstairs in what I call one of the penalty basement Swiss's where you play when you've gotten knocked out of a national event.

This woman asked me for my contact information and she told me that she wanted to play like me, which was very flattering, obviously. And so she reached out a couple of weeks after that and asked me if I'd be willing to play with her. And so she lives in DC and I live in Charlottesville and we agreed to meet up at the regional tournament in Williamsburg. And that's might have been actually it's one of the first regionals I played in and I've been there many times over the years so that was … And and what we decided on was since this was my first time doing it and we'd not really played together, we agreed to play three days together just to kind of see how it went, giving both of us an out if we didn't like it. And we played three times on Bridge Base beforehand to get ready. We played her system.

And just as, you know, for me,as a bridge player, it's not something explicitly that I've wanted for a long time, but I think I really have, like I really did want to get hired and you know, that's just, it's just a big compliment. And one of the funny things about it was just in telling people here in town, I told a couple of people, like a day or two before, and they were obviously very excited for me. And two different people asked if it was gonna be broadcast anywhere. And that was amusing to me. We were playing pairs, so we played three days of pairs. It was not broadcast on vugraph or anything. And I told them that they might not wanna watch if it were, but ...

You know, it's great to have people be enthusiastic for me in that way. One of the questions that I get a lot as a bridge player, my enthusiasm for bridge is well known amongst my non-bridge playing friends is do you play for money? And normally the answer to that is no. And people, you know, think there's prize money, but, so this was the first time I could do that and now I have on the resume, you know, Bridge Pro.

At the tournament itself, we played, we started on Tuesday and I definitely had a fair amount of imposter syndrome.

I wanted to tell, I found myself wanting to tell people that I was getting hired to play, but at the same time I didn't really know if I should do that. But I just sort of felt self-conscious about, just self-conscious about the fact that I was playing with this woman and imagining, you know, projecting on to other people that they were imagining what the nature of our partnership was, even though that really wasn't any of their business and nobody even asked. But just playing on Tuesday that first day, it was different. It was just like wondering, did people think she was paying me to play with her or not? And obviously I really wanted to do well. And the first session I think we had like a 44% or 45%. And then the second session, I think we had like 46%. So we were well below average. And this woman had played in the Bermuda Regional previously. And she had gotten, I think she told me like 16 gold points, which I thought, wow, that's, you know.

And also it was her first time hiring somebody. So that was, you know, that was, it was unique for both of us, but I just remember like playing and thinking like, am I good enough to do this? And fortunately the second day we did a lot better. We had a 59% in the first session. And when I saw that 59%, I mean, I knew we'd done pretty well, but when I saw that 59 % on the score, like on the Bridgemate, I was just like, thank God, because, you know, I really felt like, I really, you know, I thought about like, should I give her her money back on the first day.

Also that first night, so something cool, my former psychiatrist has really gotten into Bridge and recently he's got like 35 master points. And I think he listens to this podcast semi-regularly. So Joe, thank you for listening. And we went out to dinner on Tuesday night with Joe and his partner and they had played in the Gold Rush pairs and they came like second or third I think. And so they were like pretty much on top of the world and I was completely down in the dumps about our first day performance and to her infinite credit, my partner totally did not have the attitude. She was like, you know, this is, we're just learning each other and she had a great attitude about it. So fortunately we came fourth in the event the second day, kind of came down from the 59, but that was so much better than the day before and it was funny like the dichotomy was kind of reversed because Joe and his partner didn't do that well the second day and now we're kind of strutting around a little bit.

And then on the third day, we really like kicked it into gear and in the first session we were at 62% and it just felt like inevitable that we were gonna win this pair event finally. And we did not. We completely crapped out in the second session on Thursday and only got, we got like 44%. We messed up several defenses where we could have, it just, and frankly, like I really lost. I really got emotional about it and did not put forth my best game, which is certainly not something that I'm proud of. Yeah.

Oh, the other thing I wanted to say is just like, like getting paid to play. Like, I think, um, you know, I, I had no idea that the emotions and the thoughts that I'd be having with it were going to come up like they were. And I think it's, uh, you know, I think it's a great opportunity for me to become a better bridge player because, you know, I really. Like there's something about like somebody putting their trust in me to play with them that, you know, I need to play my absolute best and, you know, little mistakes that I made cost us matchpoints. And I just want to say, I'm so thankful to my partner for giving me this opportunity and if this kind of content is something that you all enjoy, please let me know. Or not. Or something you don't enjoy, then please let me know about that too.

So I shared this with my client yesterday and the only thing that she asked that I change was to let you all know that she actually got 27 master points in Bermuda, not 16. We got like around 16 in Williamsburg. So maybe it was a bad allocation of dollars per master point.