Grant Peacock (GrantP) has recently made headlines in the bridge world with his impressive win at the NABC Robot Individual against more than 2000 players. We've had a chance to talk with Grant and he shares his experiences, insights, and passion for bridge.

Can you tell us how it feels to have won the NABC Robot Individual?

Not without sounding cliché. I was trying to win, but certainly thought I was a longshot given it was my first time playing this event. I am never good at estimating whether my boards score well, and I don't waste bridge energy trying to do that during the round. So, each day, when I finished with a high score, I was pretty surprised to find myself near the top.

Can you walk us through your preparation for the tournament? Did you have any specific strategies or routines?

I prepared by playing a lot of robot bridge, especially during the last six months or so. For this tournament, I took it seriously, setting aside plenty of time each day when I was not tired. I tried to play slowly and carefully and treat it with a national event level of effort. I warmed up by playing a few robot hands in something less important, until I felt like I was ready, and then I paused that and started the real tournament. I wouldn't play physical sports without warming up and stretching and this was no different.

Do you have any interesting boards from the events to share?

Yes, there are two strip-squeezes analyzed in the ACBL daily bulletin dated July 19, 2024.

Day 1, Board 8

Day 3, Board 20

How do you approach playing against robots compared to human opponents? Are there specific tactics you use?

Sure there are. Sometimes I study hands played by successful robot players and see what tricks I can learn. Another advantage of BBO over live bridge is that you can look up hands for any player. I do bid some hands differently than with a human, but I don't make outright psychs on most hands. Often, a hand has no obvious opportunity to overbid a bit or otherwise confuse the robots, so I just try to make the normal correct bids. In this tournament, I tried to be selective about making non-standard bids. If a hand looked like it was good for playing in a suit, I didn't misrepresent it just to get to notrump.

In the play, when I am attempting to get the robots to make a mistake, or trying to read the cards, I try to think about the algorithm and how the robots make decisions. BBO robots try to infer the hands based on the bidding, but they make no inferences from the choices made during the play, regardless of how obvious those inferences may seem to human players. That's why they often don't return partner's lead -- the fact that partner led a certain suit and therefore might like it continued is just not taken into account. So, I mainly just try to play correct bridge while looking for every opportunity to let the robots make robot-specific mistakes.

To anyone who says robot bridge is not bridge, I would say that's partially true...it's bridge with an added twist. It's bridge where you know quite a bit about the algorithm that the other players are using to make their decisions, with all its flaws. How best to exploit that is an interesting challenge, and there's always more to learn.

Can you share a bit about your background in bridge? How did you start playing, and what keeps you passionate about the game?

I started playing at age 17 at the local bridge club, but was still an intermediate level player at best when I started online at age 22. Online bridge enabled me to get enough practice to develop some skill. I was entirely self-motivated to learn the game through reading a ton of books as I didn't have anything in the way of guidance or networking or even a student bridge club at college.

By the time I was 24, I was playing pretty well, but had no masterpoints because I mostly played online. Once I got an opportunity to play professionally at the ACBL regional level, I started doing that regularly. At a tournament, someone involved with the junior team took notice of my playing, but I was just barely too old for the next junior tournament, which was U26. They had no U31 tournaments back then, or else things might have gone differently for me. Kids these days, once they get interested in the game, have a much better support system helping them to develop, I believe.

I played professionally for several years, but then took a break from it and did not come back to the game for a long time. I became an FPGA engineer and, with a full time job, felt that I didn't have the time and energy for bridge. I tried getting back into it a few times, but I found my own performance frustrating. I still loved bridge, but I couldn't do justice to it. I started playing again in earnest in January of 2023 and, this time around, I think I'm back for good.

One thing that's different nowadays is that robot bridge exists. I think robot bridge can make the game more accessible, especially to younger people and new players. It removes some of the barriers to entry that are making it so hard to grow the game. I love playing with humans, but when your friends are not available, the robots are always waiting for a game. Robots don't care if you only play three hands and then have to do something else for an hour before coming back. They promptly accept valid claims, but they're happy to sit there for ten minutes while you think about a difficult hand. I think that the sheer quantity of bridge practice that I've been able to get with robots in the last 18 months has really helped me quickly regain my original level of play and also improve.

What keeps me passionate about bridge is bridge. Some people are in it for the socializing or the masterpoints or the money, and, to a certain extent, so am I, but those are not enough. I'm in it for the squeezes and the falsecards and the preempts and the unique bidding systems and the competition.

It's such a beautiful, multi-faceted game. To be great at this game, you need to be able to visualize and solve game positions, sort of like in chess, but you also need to know some probability theory and have short term memory for the hand you're playing, as well as long term memory for your bidding methods, card combinations, and cardplay positions. You need psychological feel for what your opponents are doing or will do if you put them to the test. It requires you to make logical inferences from every action by other players, put probabilistic weights on those inferences when they are not absolute, and apply judgment and sometimes even game theory. And, most importantly, you need a solid partnership. And then you need to apply all those skills faster than your opponents so that your tempo doesn't give away information. What other game has a list like that? Bridge is impossible, it's intractable, and yet thousands of people are incredibly good at it.

Bridge now stands alone compared to chess, checkers, Go, poker, video games, Jeopardy, and probably others I don't know about. In each of those other games, humans were always the best players and were confident that software would never beat them, that their game required unique human capabilities, and then suddenly a machine was the best player by a mile. I believe bridge will join that list some day, but I like enjoying it while it is still ours. I think the fact that it's the last game standing says a lot.

Here's one more reason bridge is great. When you sit down to play a Sudoku board, they tell you the difficulty level up front. Even if they didn't, it would quickly become obvious whether it is 1 star or 5. When you become declarer in a bridge hand, dummy hits, and you are presented with a novel logic/probability puzzle, and you often have no idea what the difficulty level is going to be. If it's level 3, and you're being too clever and looking for level 5, you'll get it wrong. I find it a huge challenge to look for techniques at all the levels.

What do you enjoy most about participating in NABC events, and how does this win compare to your other achievements in bridge?

I love an opportunity to test myself against the best players. I have only played six or seven NABC events before, all in the distant past, and I picked up some fun stories but no notable results. This one is my biggest achievement in bridge.

Do you have any advice for aspiring bridge players who look up to you and want to achieve similar success?

I would advise intermediate players to focus more on cardplay and less on bidding and gadgets. There is no point in bidding accurately to a 50% game if it becomes a 20% game the way you play it. And if your bidding is a little rough, playing the hand well can rescue you, some of the time anyway. Playing the cards is where the IMPs and matchpoints are won and lost. BBO robot tournaments and robot challenges are a great way to practice, and Bridge Master on BBO is a great way to learn a lot of cardplay techniques. You need to learn to count shape and HCP and winners and losers, and then in order to apply that information, you need to know to look for endplays and squeezes and whatnot. I am often able to execute an interesting play if it's a position I'm familiar with, and very rarely able to if it's a position I don't have "in my toolbox." If you get better at visualizing the hands, you'll find that your bidding judgment has improved at the same time. Only when you're at that point do you need to worry about something like whether you play Drury and what variant.

Don't play Flannery though -- Flannery is just silly.

Another piece of advice I always have is to make the bid or play you think is right, as opposed to the one that you think is with the field. I've always thought that staying with the field is a poor justification for a bridge decision. When I play, I strive to find opportunities where I think the field is wrong, even just slightly, and I take the other path. It's a competitive endeavor, after all.

Outside of bridge, what are some of your interests or hobbies?

My other hobby is beach volleyball. It's also a partnership game and one where no matter what level you are at, you can always improve. As with bridge, there have been periods of my life when I played volleyball, and periods when I didn't, and I regret the times I didn't. Here's a picture of me playing volleyball in downtown Baltimore.

What are your future goals in bridge? Are there any upcoming tournaments you're particularly excited about?

My goals now are to keep improving my own skills and to work on my bidding system. I think that common system foundations like 2/1 and precision have plenty of room for improvement, and I enjoy trying to design better ones. I have one now that I think shows a lot of promise, and it's a lot of work to document it and get it going. Designing a whole system from the ground up is something that most players don't attempt, and most pairs who do try it don't get good results. I believe that even if you build a system on a better foundation than standard, it still takes an incredible amount of effort and practice to make it actually achieve superior results. But I enjoy that challenge, and I have a partner who does as well, and I really hope that it pays off some day.

Is there anyone you’d like to thank or acknowledge for supporting you in your bridge journey?

Yes. There's Bob Miller, who has been my partner for many years and played many different systems with me, including the current one. There's Mac Busby, with whom I won the large majority of my ACBL masterpoints. I'd also like to mention the late John Kepple. John used to do a lot of extra driving just to pick me up from my college dorm and take me to the bridge club to get a game in, and I don't think it was just because nobody else wanted to play precision with him.

Thank you Grant, for sharing your story and some really helpful tips. Congratulations on your well-deserved win!