Bridge Blog 1193: New gear, old mistakes

 

Everyone admired the brand-new bidding boxes Wednesday in the 10-table open game at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. Unfortunately, we didn't make the best use of them on Board 11, which we passed out. Hand analysis says we can make 5 Spades or 5 Clubs. I'm South and I'm dealer, nobody vulnerable.

South

Spades: K-J-5-4.

Hearts: A-9-8.

Diamonds: Q-3.

Clubs: J-7-5-2.

Eleven high card points. Fulfills the Rule of 15, but falls short on the Rule of 20. Should I open 1 Club in the first seat? I don’t. Partner Rod Sumner is North. Here's what he’s holding:

Spades: A-10-3-2.

Hearts: 4.

Diamonds: J-4-2.

Clubs: A-Q-8-6-4.

Also 11 high card points, also fulfills the Rule of 15. Rod also happens to meet the Rule of 20. Sitting in the third seat, he might open 1 Club, I would respond 1 Spade and we'd settle for at least a 2-bid. Result: Instead of 2 match points for the pass-out, we’d get 5.

That alone would boost our final 49.44% past the 50% mark, though it wouldn't improve on our 0.42 master point winnings. However, better performances on a couple other boards would have taken us there.

Board 19 was a defensive lapse that gave us a bottom board and cost us at least 7.5 match points. We let Myrna Mackey make an overtrick on a 3 No Trump contract, while two other 3 NTs went down. Hand analysis says E/W should only take 7 tricks in No Trump. The problem? After I lead the 9 from my Club holding of A-Q-10-9-7, Myrna, who has four Clubs, holds back on playing her King. So I take the trick and lead the 10, win again and switch to another suit. But then, when Rod gets in with his Ace of Spades, he doesn’t lead his remaining Jack of Clubs. 

Then there's Board 24. There’s a slam, 6 Clubs, 6 Diamonds or 6 NT, according to hand analysis. Rod plays it at 3 NT, making one overtrick instead of two or three. Two would win us 2 more match points, Three would reward us with 4.5 more.

Take away those fateful fluffs and we could be champs. Or at least silver medalists. We'd get at least 12 additional match points and second place overall North-South.

Nevertheless, we still can bask in our golden moment in the second round of the day on Board 23. Rod opened 2 Spades with a seven-card suit and everybody passed after Doug Newman, sitting West, doubled him, hoping his partner would show his best suit. Hand analysis says it should make 4 Spades and that's exactly what Rod did. Vulnerable. Plus 1,070. Top board.

Bridge Blog 1192: Thinking ahead

 

Partner Selina Volpatti proclaimed that it was the best hand she ever played as we shuffled our individual cards on Board 6 and put them back into the holder on Friday, April 17, at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Bridge Club.

        It was certainly our best hand of the day, a top board, one of the things that helped us do something we rarely do at NOTL, taking first place North-South away from perennial winners Claude and Muriel Tremblay, 57.44% to 56.55%.

        According to the ACBL results, Selina shouldn't have made it. Nobody else did on Friday. The analysis says that it's good for 3 Spades, but not 4. East-West has two Heart winners and a Diamond for sure. That fourth E/W trick probably comes when all the dummy's Spades are played before all of North's losing Diamonds can be trumped. Selina made sure she trumped them.

East:

Spades: 8

Hearts: K J 8

Diamonds: A Q J 9 7 6

Clubs: J 5 3

South (me):

Spades: Q J 6 2

Hearts: Q 7 5 2

Diamonds: 4

Clubs: A K 8 4

West:

Spades: 10 9 7

Hearts: A 9 4

Diamonds: K 8 2

Clubs: Q 10 9 6

North (Selina):

Spades: A K 5 4 3

Hearts: 10 6 3

Diamonds: 10 5 3

Clubs: 7 2

        How did we get to 4 Spades? East, as dealer, opened 1 Diamond. I doubled, asking for Selina to bid her best suit. She rose to the invitation with Spades. When they went to 4 Diamonds, she made the 4 Spade overcall. East led the 3 of Clubs. South's Ace won it, Selina cleared the dummy's singleton Diamond and got early ruffs on Clubs and Diamonds.

        Nobody else took more than nine tricks in Spades. At the Tremblay table, East won the auction at 4 Diamonds and made it.

Bridge Blog 1191: Buffalo Spring Sectional

 

I walked into the Buffalo Spring Sectional Tournament at the Buffalo Bridge Center on Friday morning, April 10, with a horrendous losing streak. How horrendous was it? So bad that my 37.13% in the morning pairs game was an improvement. Dead last, but still better than the 31% I had with Selina Volpatti and the 32% I had with Rod Sumner in Canada earlier that week. Also not so bad considering that partner Judy Zeckhauser (pictured) and I had played together only once before. Better attuned to each other in the afternoon round, we broke out of last place – eighth out of 11 pairs North-South with 43.19%.

        Things got even better for Judy and me on Saturday – 47.50% in the morning pairs. Two or three more good hands would have won us some master points. That raised our hopes for the afternoon game, which was interrupted after two rounds with 8½ tables by the sudden departure of one of the players to attend to his wife, who had suffered a bad fall. Instead of starting all over again, Brian Meyer showed his chops as a director by recasting it on the fly as an eight-table game and bringing it to a conclusion only a few minutes late. Meanwhile, Judy and I backslid to 42.54%. This time, though, we were only one percentage point behind the second-place North-South pair in the B strat.

         Despite four games with no master points, redemption was sure to come in the Swiss teams game on Sunday. All we had to do is win one round to win some little scrap of a point. Plus my Sunday partner, another Judy – Judie Bailey – was a more seasoned player. Our teammates, however, were unknowns, both to us and to each other. Gerry Steenberge, who had played in the tournament on Friday and Saturday, was from the Rochester area. His partner Aleksandar Ivanov, a last-minute pickup, was the Bulgarian-born brother-in-law of Diamond Life Master Dian Petrov. Aleks hadn’t gotten the details about playing in Sunday’s game and still was on his way from his home in East Aurora when things started, not arriving until after the first hand had been played.

        That didn’t hurt us, though. We romped to a 17-1 victory point win over one of the tougher teams -- Judy Graf, John Ziemer, Mike Ryan and Howard Foster. We also took the second match, 23-19, over another tough team – Kamil Bishara, Dian Petrov, Jay Levy and Fred Yellen – thanks to two of my efforts on doubled contracts, a 6-Heart sacrifice, down one vulnerable, that foiled an East-West slam, and a wildly distributional 5-Diamond-doubled overbid where I took 11 tricks in a lay-down.

        After that, our luck ran out. For the final two rounds, we were plunged into a round robin against two other low-riding teams. But as often happens in round robins, we got a worm. Beating one of the other teams gave us enough victory points to snag the bottommost rung among the stratification winners – second in B. What did we win? Brian Meyer said he couldn’t give us official scoring summaries right away because the results had to go through the ACBL first. It took until Monday to find out. 1.71 silver points.

        In all, the tournament had a total of 68 tables, with 292.48 master points earned by 67 players. The winningest – no surprise – was Saleh Fetouh with 15.10. Among his other achievements during the weekend, he was captain of the undefeated top place Swiss team. I was tied for 51st with Judie and Alexsandar. Gerry, who also had success in the pairs games, was 31st with 3.96.

        Sadly, it was further evidence of the declining state of bridge in Buffalo. It wasn't quite as well-attended as the 2025 Buffalo Spring Sectional, which had 71 tables and 74 players earning points. And it was a far cry from the 2024 Spring Sectional, which had 99 tables and 101 players earning points, and the pre-pandemic 2019 Buffalo Spring Sectional in the Main-Transit Fire Hall social hall in Amherst, which had 153 tables and 165 players earning points.

Bridge Blog 1190: Good Friday on the Titanic

I had that sinking feeling even before I saw the standings posted on the wall with one round to go on Good Friday afternoon at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. Selina Volpatti and I were dead last with 29%.

Let's face it. Below 30% is just plain disgraceful. Nobody else was even under 40%. Believe it or not, I breathed a sigh of relief when I checked the final results on Live for Clubs and discovered that we wound up at a still pretty awful 32.08%, thanks to a 50-50 final round.

Our descent into the depths began right away with our first opponents, Ineke and John Bezuyen. First board we played, I should've pushed for the 4 Spade game. Second board, I doubled their 5 Club vulnerable bid (after all, I had their Ace and another one), but they made it. Minus 750. Amazingly, another N/S doubled a bid of 4 Clubs! Minus 910. 

After that, we flung our inhibitions aside. We took the bid on 16 of the other 22 boards. Red flags were everywhere. Doubles were thrown at us five times, every one of them good. Three times we went down three vulnerable and once we suffered the dreaded down four vulnerable for minus 1,100.

Yes, winning all those bids lost us the game. Out of a possible 85 match points in the hands where we were declarers, we collected only 22. That's a paltry 25.88%. On defense, we were more respectable – 16.5 match points out of a possible 35. That's 47.14%. 

Bridge Blog 1189: Down One reconsidered

 

"Bd 2 at 4D down 1 was top score 8 out of 8. Also no zeros. All in all, a good afternoon."

That was partner Rod Sumner's email assessment of our game Wednesday afternoon at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. It was our only clear-and-away top board, though we tied for top on two other hands. Nevertheless, it got me wondering whether down one was good bridge this time around.

Well, no question about it on Board 2. Rod and I were East-West, North-South was vulnerable and, as dealer, I opened 1 Diamond with this hand:

Spades: 3.

Hearts: K-8-6-3.

Diamonds: A-Q-10-8-6-3.

Clubs: A-K.

Rod responded 1 Heart. After all, I could have had as few as three Diamonds. North, holding six Spades, bid them. (It was that kind of wildly distributional day, it seemed).

Curious about Rod's Hearts – did he have five of them? – I doubled, hoping he would give me a helpful response. South supported North's Spades and Rod, to my surprise, went to 3 Diamonds. North upped the Spade bid, then let me play it at 4 Diamonds.

According to Live for Clubs analysis, nine tricks is the best we could do. What made it a top board? N/S played it in Spades at five tables, making 10 tricks. Two of the E/Ws thwarted them by pushing up to 5 Diamonds and one of them was doubled. Another E/W played it at 4 Hearts, down two.

Unlike my Monday game with Selina, Rod and I avoided down-ones. We had just one other and it also was good. Board 15. N/S vulnerable. South was dealer. Three passes to me sitting East with this hand:

Spades: 7-3-2.

Hearts: A-K-Q-2.

Diamonds: A-J-3.

Clubs: Q-7-4.

I did the math. Of course, 1 No Trump. Everybody else passed. Rod, unfortunately, was at the bottom of his Pass:

Spades: 10-8-5-4.

Hearts: 9-8-5.

Diamonds: 9-8-2.

Clubs: J-10-8.

The math was definitely against us. South led the five of Diamonds and I took North's King with the Ace. Then I ran the Hearts, breathing a sigh of relief when they broke evenly. In fact, everything broke evenly. We got the five tricks we deserved – four Hearts and the Ace of Diamonds – plus a gift, either another Diamond or a Club, I don't remember which.

This one tied us for second-best with another E/W who went down one. Still another E/W actually made I NT (against the same guys that we nailed on Board 2). Hand analysis says I NT our way should go down two. Two other E/Ws went down two doubled.

Although we're a relatively new partnership and hadn’t played together for more than two months, Rod and I were respectable – third in our direction with 55.79%, with 0.75 of a master point. Great way to start off the new month.

Bridge Blog 1188: Is Down One really good bridge?

Although I didn't say it, that's what I was wondering after a while Monday afternoon at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. Partner Selina Volpatti and I played what seemed like an extraordinary number of contracts that fell one trick short. In truth, there were only (only?) eight out of 27. 

Selina played six of them. Her first successful down-one effort was a 4 Heart contract on the second hand of the day and it was a good one. Top board. East-West can make 5 Spades and seven of them did. 

Then, in the final round, Selina went down one on a 4 Diamond bid when the opponents routinely make 4 Hearts with an overtrick. That one was good for 7 out of 8 match points. 

But the rest of our down-ones were duds. Two were middle boards, the others were bottoms or next to bottoms. 

So back to our original question: Is down one good bridge? Not for me and Selina on Monday. Our down-ones delivered only 24 out of a possible 64 match points. Had we broken even, 50-50, in the down-ones, we would have been first North-South. As it was, we finished second with 57.64%, winning 1.69 master points. 

Bridge Blog 1187: Crawling from the wreckage

How badly did Florence Boyd and I crash and burn in the monthly special game at the Buffalo Bridge Center on Sunday, March 22? Let us count the ways. 

First of all, we were dead last, not just East-West, but for entire field of 12 pairs. Our 35.14% was a full 10 percentage points below the next lowest E-W, Julie Mitchell and Brian Fleming, and nearly six points beneath the bottom North-South, Barb Landree and Betty Metz. To actually win master points as B strat players, we needed at least 47% in our direction. 

God knows we were rusty. Neither Flo nor I had played competitively in more than a month. Plus she was in pain with a nasty crimp in her back. So we had our excuses. Lots of them.  

Take that passed-out hand on Board 16 in the very first round against Barb and Betty. The ACBL Live for Clubs recap showed that nobody else passed it out. Though West had only nine high card points, there was a six-card Spade suit, A-K-Q-10-4-3, a perfect pre-emptive 2 Spade opening bid. Four other Wests played it at 2 Spades, making two overtricks. 

And then there was Board 20, one of my infamous minus 1,100 games, which was a big help in boosting Davis Heussler and Linda Burroughsford to the top of the North-South pairs. After Flo opened with a pass, Davis bid 1 Diamond. Holding A-10-7-6-4-2 in Clubs and 11 high card points, I promptly raised to 2 Clubs. Linda immediately doubled. Little did I suspect that Linda's Clubs were K-Q-8-5-3. Davis passed. Down four doubled vulnerable. North-South can take nine or 10 tricks in No Trump, but only one of them bid it. Most of them played it in Diamonds, which is good for at least nine tricks. 

Bidding those two correctly wouldn't have gotten us out of our deep hole, though. We repeatedly missed going to game when we should have and failed to take all the tricks we were entitled to. And sometimes the really good players hit home runs against us, like Chris Urbanek and Kamil Bishara, who were the only ones to bid a small slam in Clubs on Board 10. Less perceptive North-Souths simply made game at 3 No Trump or 5 Clubs.