u/SyllabubRadiant8876

I have been at a tournament in the UK this weekend. It's a fairly low-key 60 player event, but nevertheless had a few UK top-50 players in attendance. I noticed that, only 10 of the top 20 entrants (on UKBGF ratings), and only 5 of the top 8, made it through Saturday qualifying to the Top 32 Main event on the Sunday. From a quick spot check on BMAB these top 20 players have PRs ranging from about 4.5 to 7.5*. The top BMAB registered player (M1, PR 4.5) did not qualify. The four semi finalists' UKBGF ratings ranked them 18th, 20th, 36th and 44th out of the 60 entrants.

Is this a typical pattern in live tournament play, i.e. high-rated players seem not much more likely to come through than intermediates?

It seems strange than not one of the top 15 entrants (top 25% rated of the field) even got to a SF. This feels like either the mid-tier players have really stepped up, or the luck factor has gone wild this weekend! Interested in any thoughts...

*I suspect some of the BMAB PRs are quite out-of-date - I am certain that most of these folks currently play closer to PR 6.

I am learning bridge, mainly online via No Fear Bridge lessons, and really struggling in practice with "planning the play" as declarer. E.g. when to count winners versus losers and what to do with that information, drawing trumps first or later, when to discard versus ruff a loser, which order to play the suits (i.e. everything!).

When I do a quiz on any of these topics, I get pretty much everything right, but when I am presented with a hand, it all goes horribly wrong, even at a total beginners' level. After going down, I can always understand the solution given, but the steps/order seem quite different each time. Obviously NT vs suit contract is a fundamental difference, which might be part of my confusion.

Is this just a case of playing 100s of hands and getting it wrong loads to build up experience through learning from mistakes? Or is there any "rule" like a certain type of hand calls for a particular approach? Any good resources to help with this?

It seems to be happening more and more often online that people are asking what's taking me so long to roll/move. When they have selected the time settings for the match and challenged me.

E.g. this morning I was 1-4 behind in a 7pt match, had about 12 minutes left on my clock, and was giving serious thought to sending an aggressive cube - after about 30 seconds the opponent was typing "???". I sometimes point out that speed settings are available if they prefer a quick match, but usually just ignore them.

I would think nothing over the board of spending a couple of minutes on a crucial decision like that - am I being unreasonable doing so online?