Bridge Blog 446: Buffalo Fall Sectional -- Sah-weet!

          The absolute sweetest of September days – sunshine, the air like Chablis, a total delight. What better place to spend it than inside the Main-Transit Fire Company’s social hall.

          Is it equally sweet indoors? On a social level, kinda. On a competitive level, let’s remember who’s on the Swiss team with me – Faith Perry and Florence Boyd, who had an even more dismal Saturday afternoon game than Celine and I did. And Pawan Matta, who’s a newbie. Lovely, all of them. And unlike some people, we don’t need to win to have a good time.

          Good thing, too. Our first game against some Canadian ladies goes about as expected – lost by 9 International Match Points – mostly from me going down two on a 4 Heart contract that the other team made with an overtrick. Fine. Don’t want to win too early. We’ll have to face the really good players. No danger of that now.

          So guess who’s at our table for the second round? Two of the best players in the room – Jim Mathis and Saleh Fetouh. They got trounced by another A team in the opening round. Hey, all we have to do is hold our own, I tell myself. We do that exactly once in seven hands. On the other six, they rack up 41 IMPs against us.

          Now we’re really right where we want to be, I tell my teammates. Now we’ll play only the folks on the bottom. Sure enough, we squeak out a 15-11 IMP victory against the Judy Kaprove-Marietta Kalman team. Our first win. Now we’ll get some kind of master points. Round four, however, finds us up against Shakeel Ahmad and his wife Manju Ceylony. We do not win a bid. And from my notations, it looks like we let them take an extra trick in three different hands. On two of them, one less trick would set them. But losing 19-6 IMPs, those two hands wouldn’t make up all of them. We’re just outplayed.

          After lunch, we score our second and last victory of the day against the Harry Lyons-Clare Garelick team, a modest 10-4 IMP effort. We’re so low by the end of the day that we get shoved into the round robin game that pits the bottom three teams against each other. We don’t win there either.  Two matches won x .26 per match = .52 master points for the day.