Bridge Blog 435: Syracuse 2

            Thursday was promising at the start. Ruthie and Judy and I did an early lunch at L’Adour – the French restaurant next to City Hall in downtown Syracuse where we ate Wednesday night – and it continued to be wonderful. Bottles of mineral water. Checkered napkins. Frenchy waiters with accents. Great frites. This time I had the croque madame, being a croque monsieur with a sunny-side-up egg on top. Excellent.

            And when I checked in at the partnership desk at the tournament, they had a partner for me for the Swiss teams – Jerry Minucci, a Rochester lawyer who said he had 1,900 master points and, as we filled out the convention card, seemed to be a more copacetic partner than the two I’d had already.

            The afternoon session started out with double confusion. First we went to our assigned tables and discovered they were right next to each other. We informed one of the directors, who flew out into the room and started switching around table cards, moving a section of people who were just settling down to play. Properly separated, we found ourselves in another round robin, playing against two other teams, but we were called aside after the first round (which we won handily) and were told we’d been assigned to the wrong group. We weren’t a B team after all, but part of the A/X group – one of the X teams. We were given a new number and sent back into the fray.

            In our seven rounds on the X level, we won one, lost five and tied one, hardly the sort of thing that earns gold points. (The overall A winners, incidentally, getting something like 10 gold points, were the Buffalo team of Meg Klamp, Joan Rose, Bev Cohen and Judi Marshall.) People asked me how my partner was and I said, “Grumpy.” The Rochester people who knew him seemed think that was an apt description, but he was good company nonetheless and resisted most of my efforts at post-hand analysis by saying, “That hand’s over.”

            Biggest disappointment of the game was in round seven, where we were up against some guys from St. Catharines who had spent the interval between the afternoon and evening sessions drinking at the bar of the restaurant where we had dinner (The Retreat in Liverpool, where Ruthie, Judy and I had absolutely the cutest waitress we’ve ever experienced – the divine Miranda).

            Anyway, on the hand in question, Jerry opened 2 Spades and I’m sitting with a 17-point hand, including an Ace doubleton in Spades. The St. Catharines guys jump into the bidding and hit 3 No Trump, whereupon I double them and we nail them big. Jerry runs his Spades. I pick up a gang of tricks. They’re down five, not vulnerable. Plus 1,100 for us. At Judy and Ruthie’s table, however, the other St. Catharines guys, equally loopy and charming, went 2 Spades-6 Spades and made the damn vulnerable slam for a plus 1,430 on their side and minus International Match Points for us. Amazing. I had another successful double come up short in the scoring department earlier in the day and I’m beginning to think that this doubling stuff is not a good strategy for Swiss teams.

            So what was my reward for two days of tournament bridge in Syracuse? Well, as one of our final opponents said, “If it feels good, it must be all right.” And it did feel good, despite the setbacks, and my range of experience has expanded. Not only that, I made it back safely to the Buffalo News in 2 hours and 15 minutes.

But pointwise, not so good. Wednesday’s Swiss play apparently yielded .20 points per winning round, which added up to .40. And Thursday’s was peculiar, due to our mixup at the beginning of play. Our victory in the B/C/D division was worth .22 points, whereas wins in the A/X group were worth .38. With a win and a tie, that was .57, plus .22. So .79, which gives me 1.19 for the tournament. No gold. But, hey, we have two more regionals this year – Grand Island and Niagara Falls, Ont. There’s hope.