Bridge Blog 447: Potpourri

          I should blog about today’s stratification, Airport Bridge Club manager Bill Finkelstein declares after the scores go up for Tuesday’s game. As miracles of stratification go, it certainly is remarkable. Out of 17 pairs in this 8½ table game, it looks like a dozen of them have won master points.

Partner Celine Murray and I are among them with our 54.47% effort – third in A and second in B among the East-Wests, third in B overall. It’s good for .97 points, bringing my total for the month into double digits – 10.81. Hooray!

Meanwhile, great fun in the West seat, which seemed to get all the cards Tuesday, including a 24-point hand (opposite East’s one-pointer) that was good for just 4 Hearts, and the weakest of weak 2 Spade bids (Q-10-9), doubled by Mike Kisiel, bumped up to 3 Spades by Celine, doubled again by Paul Ganley, and left there. Celine had an opening hand and five good Spades. I made the contract – vulnerable, plus 730, the most satisfying of our four top boards of the day.

Bill had apologized for the stratifications on Monday’s game – only half a dozen players took home points because the winners were all C strat pairs and no amount of miracle-making would spread the points  any further.

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Twice in the past week I’ve looked in my datebook, seen names crossed off and then discovered that, no, they weren’t supposed to be crossed off at all. I thought dark thoughts about Chuck Schorr when he was a no-show last Thursday. I had him crossed out for the 29th. Isn’t that the high holy days? Isn’t that what he said? But no, he contends. It was the 22nd. We’re playing on the 29th.

Fine, but it happened again on Monday. I arrive at the Airport Bridge Club to have Bill Finkelstein announce to me that I have two partners. I look in my book. Marie Suprinick’s name is crossed out. Usha Khurana’s is penned in. Marie often cancels on me. Perhaps she forgot. She claims she didn’t.

At any rate, Bill calls in a sub, Ruth Hnath, to play with Marie and I play with Usha (who said she would go home if she had no partner). Marie and Ruth come in second in C with 46% or so and get points. Usha and I are a fraction of a percentage point behind them and get nada. Plus we’re in the B strat. We’d need 57% to earn points.

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I love Swiss teams. Especially after Sunday’s Swiss teams game. During the previous week, I accepted an invitation from Selina Volpatti to play, then lured Mike Silverman to join us. We had no fourth member until Sunday, but Bill Finkelstein provided us with a good one – Florence Notto. We won our first three rounds, were shut out by the Jerry Geiger-John Ziemer team on the fourth, won two more and were in first place going into the last round. Four points behind us was the last team we were facing – the Kaproves and the Ahmads. We could lose and still win if we kept the margin close enough, but alas, we didn’t. Coming in second was nothing to sneeze at, though. We got 2.87 master points apiece.