Bridge Blog 1167: St. Catharines Regional Part II

 

Bridge Blog Nov. 15, 2025

       What are you going to do now that you’re not working, somebody (maybe John Ziemer) asks me during the lunch break Friday at the Niagara Regional Tournament. Become a bridge bum?

       I go, oh no! In fact, because partner Selina Volpatti isn’t going to play Saturday – too tired – I’m planning to take the day off and get some laundry done. But that’s before Selina goes ahead and pairs me up for Saturday with one of the better players at the Bridge Center of Niagara – John MacKay. He’s always coming in ahead of Selina and me, that’s for sure. Looks like I’m making tracks for St. Catharines on Saturday after all.

       John and I compare convention cards and, like Selina and I did on Thursday, we start off against a pair of sharks – this time, it's Radu Nistor from New York City and Michael Gamble from British Columbia. They win the morning session with 72.38%. John and I are at the bottom of our section with 36.75%.

We certainly help launch them on their way. On our first board, we let them collect 17.5 of a possible 19 match points as the only East-Wests to bid 4 Spades and make it. Two boards later, they get 15.5 of 19 by making a 3 No Trump contract while half of the players in their direction go down at 3 NT. In between, they leave me in a 1 diamond contract and I make three overtricks – 14 out of 19 there. After one round, they’re 66.67% and they just get better.

Meanwhile, three of the four winners in our direction are Buffalo people. Jay Levy and partner are on top. Chongmin Zhang and Kathy Pollock are second and Saleh Fetouh and partner are fourth.

John and I compare conventions some more before the afternoon session starts and vow to be more aggressive. Maybe that helps. This time we’re ninth out of 12 pairs with 45.95%. I expect John to be discouraged, but he doesn't seem to be. We exchange phone numbers. Maybe this is the start of a beautiful relationship.

Meanwhile, in the afternoon, Buffalonians again are on top, led by Saleh Fetouh with 61.48%. Jay Levy is third. Min and Kathy are fourth. The two sessions add 12.37 gold points to Jay’s haul. Saleh, who says in the morning that he’s now got more than 1,000 points this year, collects 7.33. Min and Kathy get 8.37. The sharks? They’re at the top of the food chain – 29.31 gold points.

One reason I’m back in St. Catharines on Saturday is because Selina and I did well on Friday in a Swiss team game and I hope the bridge gods will keep on smiling. Playing with Darlene Scott, who’s a Unit 166 regional director in Toronto, and Elizabeth Williams, who hails from Burlington, we notch a shutout in our first eight-board round and limit the opponents to just one victory point in the next round. We lose three of the next four rounds, but only by small margins, and cling to the top position until just before the end. Second place has its rewards, though. We get 8.69 gold points. Swiss again on Sunday could make us even richer. 

Bridge Blog 1166: St. Catharines Regional, Part I

Nov. 13, 2025

       The Niagara Regional Tournament in St. Catharines, Ont., has been going for two days already by the time I push through the morning registration line on Thursday morning and I’m primed for competition.

       First guys we come up against, though, turn out to be primed all the time. A pleasant guy named Jason Morgan, sitting North, says he’s from Madison, Wis., and mentions that he doesn’t work anymore, despite his youngish appearance. He just does this. His partner, who says his name is Al, hails from Boston. The results identify him as R. Muggia. Sharks.

       They pick us pretty clean on the first two boards. Jason starts off with a 3 Heart contract and goes down one, which feels good to me, but isn't. Out of a possible 23 match points, we get 3.5. The winning East-Wests persevered in Spades, making three mostly, occasionally four. Here's another case of partner Selina Volpatti not rebidding a six card suit.  

The next hand finds Selina opening a Heart, me going to 2 Clubs with a six-card suit headed 10-9 and her raising me to 3 Clubs. I have four sure tricks outside of the Clubs, so I go to five. Here’s one of our other weaknesses – not recognizing a slam when it’s right there in front of us. All North-South gets is the King of Clubs and we’re a bottom board. Everybody takes 12 tricks our way and seven of them are at 6 No Trump, mostly by East. We go on to 41.76%, last on the list for East-West, second to last overall. Only the blissful Sikh guy, Indarjit Ahluwalla, and his partner do worse. We play them last and snatch 31 out of a possible 46 match points.

How did we do in the morning, people ask. We made all our opponents look good, I say. And how did we do in the afternoon? We made all of our opponents look better. Playing North-South this time, we wind up at 36.04%. Believe it or not, we're not last. Another pair finishes with 27.92%.

Winner in the afternoon is Buffalo’s Jay Levy, playing with Lino D’Souza, who’s from Burlington, Ont. They're at 66.52% and collect 13.26 gold points. Selina and I needed to hit at least 50% to catch any points at all. Well, better luck Friday, when we play in a teams game.

       Aside from Jay Levy, Buffalo is represented by Dian Petrov and Kamil Bishara, who do poorly in the afternoon, but well enough in the morning to get a fraction of a red point; John Ziemer and Mike Ryan, who had 48% in the morning and didn’t stay, and Linda Burroughsford and Davis Heussler, who are in the other section of open pairs and do well in the afternoon, but snag only red points.

There are 12 tables in our section A in the morning, 13 in the afternoon. There's a section B as well, plus Gold Rush pairs for those with fewer masterpoints and a team game. The ballroom is full and everybody remarks about what a good turnout this is. When it's over, the line waiting to get into the hospitality suite stretches all the way across the lobby (pictured).  

 

Bridge Blog 1165: Punching above our weight

Winning points in the Buffalo Bridge Center's party game last Saturday with Florence Boyd was no small feat. A lot of heavy hitters were there. I was particularly amazed to see us finish ahead of Platinum Life Masters Jay Levy and Chris Urbanek.

How did we do it? Not against the good players, that's for sure. We didn't see them in the first two rounds and we accumulated a big cushion accordingly.

Leading off with three hands against Pat Haynes and David Schott, we notched 13.5 match points out of a possible 15 by taking an extra trick in a 2 Spade contract, holding them to a single overtrick in a 4 Spade hand when almost everyone else made two and keeping them to a single overtrick again, this time in a 1 No Trump hand, while most others made two.

Just to show that wasn't a fluke, we followed that up with a similar round against Walt Olszewski and Jim Lanzo, who helped us along with a couple of gift tricks. This time we gained 10.5 match points. After two of nine rounds, we're sitting pretty with an 80% game.

It wasn't long, though, before we were hammered by Tova and Andrei Reinhorn (11.5 to 3.5 points) and when Jay Levy and Chris Urbanek came to our table, suggesting this was not their best day, they almost picked us clean, taking 12.5 of the 15 points. I was glad to limp home with 53.70% and 1.85 master points, narrowly outdistancing two of the better players, Mike Ryan and Howard Foster, at the next table, who had 53.33%. 

Bridge Blog 1164-A: Buffalo Fall Sectional Part I. Underachievers.

At least we had a good time, Judie Bailey and I console ourselves after Friday's sessions end at the Buffalo Fall Sectional Tournament at the Bridge Center of Buffalo. 

We could shrug off our less-than-stellar 44.01% in the morning session as rustiness and unfamiliarity with one another. We certainly would do better in the afternoon. But noooooo! We come in at 38.20%, dead last North-South. Only pair more miserable is the East-West combo of Rajat Basu and Sushil Amlani with 37.08%. They didn't deserve that, either. In the morning, they had been first in B. 

The afternoon had such bright spots too, like Board 1, where I was the only one to bid and make a 6 Diamond contract. Doubled. For that I have to thank to Mary Terrana and Gordon Crone bidding us up there with their good Spades. At most of the other tables, North-South made the same 12 tricks, but stopped at 5 Diamonds. 

Bridge Blog 1164-B: Buffalo Fall Sectional Part II. Bumps in the road.

The Buffalo Fall Sectional was like a car with more than 75,000 miles on the odometer. Little breakdowns kept slowing things down or bringing them to a halt. On Friday morning, it was a mixup in Boards 1 and 2, which somehow had the afternoon cards in them, if I understood the problem correctly. That also messed up the afternoon cards. No hand records, as a result. 

Then, on Saturday morning, the Bridge Mates, the electronic scoring gizmos, stopped communicating with the director's computer. Director Brian Meyer (pictured) explained later that 1990s ACBL technology was messing things up. For a couple rounds, scores were entered the old-fashioned way, handwritten on pickup slips, then Brian managed to get things resolved. Nonetheless, the morning game finished late. Brian started the afternoon game late. The day lasted about 20 minutes longer than usual. Evening plans had to be adjusted accordingly. 

Bridge Blog 1164-C: Buffalo Fall Sectional Part III. The old gray mare.

Sectional tournaments in Buffalo ain't what they used to be, I reflected as I looked around the cramped rooms at the Bridge Center of Buffalo. They used to fill the social hall at the Main Transit Fire Hall in Amherst, big enough to divide into two sections, with an extra row of tables for novices or single-session players along one wall. 

No more. Friday saw 13 tables in the morning, 10½ in the afternoon. Saturday had 12½ in the morning, 10½ again after lunch. I wasn't there on Sunday for Swiss teams, but only six teams played. In the old days, there would be 20 plus, even if there was a Bills game. Back then, there also would be a contingent of Canadians. Nobody from St. Catharines came over. With the exception of a couple from Royal Oak, Mich., who happened to be in town and a pair from Rochester on Saturday (that's one of them, Anthony Auriemma, in the photo), it was only us Buffalo players. 

Bridge Blog 1163: 3,000!

Bridge Blog 1163: 3000! 

    To my mind, 3,000 has always been a magic number. Back in the 1980s, when I was reading Barron's, it used to be the impossible dream for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And it's one of those milestones that baseball players aspire to. According to Wikipedia, only 33 batters are in the 3,000-hit club. When I was a kid, there were only eight. Roberto Clemente had exactly 3,000 hits when his chartered plane went down on New Year's Eve 1972.

    In the world of duplicate bridge, 3,000 is more of a dividing line. To become a Gold Life Master, the magic master point number is 2,500. Next step up is Sapphire Life Master and that's 3,500. 

    With 3,000, the difference it makes shows up when you sign in at tournaments. Less than 3,000, you play in the B stratification. More than 3,000, you're up against the big kids in the A strat. 

    When I became a Gold Life Master several years ago, I was playing five days a week and accumulating more than 100 master points every year. Since the pandemic, that's all ground to a crawl. These days there are only two games a week for experienced players here in Buffalo and I'm working on one of those days. Mostly I play Fridays, one of my days off, in Canada, where there's more tables in St. Catharines and Niagara-on-the-Lake. I haven't sought out an online game at all this year. 

    I expected the milestone to arrive at one of those games in Canada, but I've been stuck at 2,998.16 for a month. It took the Buffalo Fall Sectional this weekend to cross over. 

    In the Saturday morning session, Florence Boyd and I squeaked to 51.44%, second in the B strat and a surprising 2.01 silver points, but the news didn't get to ACBL central right away. I was still a B for the afternoon session. Could we capitalize on it? Hell, no. We wound up at 47.46%, seventh out of 10 North-Souths.