Winning Is Off The Table

Four of us, beginners from our recent bridge class, are meeting Monday afternoons and playing contract bridge. At the outset we made a decision: we would not keep score. We would play both our offensive hands and defensive hands with all the skill we could muster, indeed, we would play competitively, but after the hand was over we would share our views of the bidding and the game. We would analyze together what we did right and what we did wrong, each of us offering our opinions.

We have so much fun! In a striking move, winning has been taken off the table.

When I mentioned this decision of ours to a long-time, very competitive bridge player, she was horrified. “You’re not keeping score? How deadly!” Another friend remarked, “It’s just a matter of time. You’ll all be in there trying to win the money!”

Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot about this and what I do know is that removing winning from the table can work magic in all kinds of interpersonal situations.

 Imagine, for example, if we could surrender winning an argument with our spouses.  By that I don’t mean walking away mad. Instead, what if we used an argument for the single purpose of discovering how each one truly feels about a subject? What if each one actually listened, making a sincere attempt to understand the other’s point of view? Wouldn’t that be amazing? Not to be wrung out by the urgent need to win, to be right? Let’s say that, instead, each spouse was committed to clarity and developing an expanded understanding of the other. What might that be like?

And, to carry this a bit further, as we do after we’ve played our bridge hands, that we--friend, spouse, partner--- might choose to reflect and explore together why we feel the way we do, said what we said, and the results of the discussion. Together, being the operative word here. What if spouses, friends, partners, also elected to take a look at how they said what they did, and how each was affected by the other’s choice of words and tone of voice? Wouldn’t that be amazing, to say nothing of fruitful, as well?

Karen Armstrong in her excellent book, Twelve Steps to A Compassionate Life, writes, “Our discourse tends to be aggressive.” Like the ancient Greeks, we “debate in order to win.” Plato, she says, “offered that no “’transcendent insight was possible unless questions and answers are exchanged in good faith and without malice.’”

“Questions and answers?” That implies that I actually ask you a question as to why you think the way you do, instead of busily preparing my own clever response while you are speaking. I can be so preoccupied with assembling my own viewpoint that I am barely listening to you. After all, I am out to win this argument, aren’t I?

Armstrong suggests that we learn something of “compassionate discourse,” which means that during our argument I seek not to defeat you, but to know you better, to understand more clearly what makes you tick, what your underlying values might be. Whether or not I share those values is unimportant. That I listen to your side with all the compassion I can manage, is. That does not mean I have to agree with you or believe what you believe, but it does mean that I respect your right to see the situation as you do and your right to hold the beliefs that you hold.

Winning is off the table when we seek truth. “Do we want to win the argument or seek the truth?” Armstrong writes. We begin that process by discovering “where people are, not where we think they ought to be.”

At our Monday bridge games I am learning more than how to play bridge. For the first time in my life I am playing a game where winning is not an issue. Playing as well as we can, certainly, but understanding and helping each other are the values that dominate this card table. My eyes are being opened to our collective vulnerability and insecurity: our talent for the game and where it sometimes eludes us: all of the above.

I hope that whatever next controversy arises for you, you will dare to take winning off the table.
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Consider this: The New York Times this morning quotes Roger Federer's sagacious remark after losing the Wimbledon title to Novak Djokovic yesterday."You can have a good tournament without winning."