Sunday, October 16, 2011

Bridge Blog 452: Regional Wrap-up

I scanned the list of master point winners so far between rounds in the Swiss teams game Sunday and had to scan quite a few names down to find a Buffalo area player. Top guy was 15th. The district point champ of the 1000-2500 division – Hao Ge from down around Cleveland – was 10th. Which one was he, I wondered, looking around at unfamiliar Asian players.
I had to scan a lot further to find my name. In fact, I started looking near the bottom, figuring my total was around 4 points. After my successes with Judie Bailey on Wednesday, I didn’t play the tournament on Thursday, narrowly missed getting red points in my two sessions with Celine Murray on Friday (and I do mean narrow – with our 50.38% and 52.24% games, we were less than a percentage point away from scratching).
And then there were my Saturday games with Usha Khurana, in which we competed in the C stratification because they average the master points and she has so few of them. There we were second in C in the morning with 48.61% (.87 point) and first in C in the afternoon with 49.7% (1.28 points).
When I found my name, it wasn’t on the next-to-bottom sheet, where I figured it would be, or even third from bottom. I was in 225th place with 6.25 points. Wonderful, considering.
Meanwhile, several of my bridge mates were doing even more wonderfully in the team games. In fact, they were downright spectacular. The Kaproves and Zittels won their Friday-Saturday knock-outs for 10.17 points. Mike Silverman, Helen Panza, Selina Volpatti and Adrian Figliotti were second in another Friday-Saturday knock-out game and got 8.9 points. 
Silverman made Life Master on Wednesday, as did Ross Markello, according to the Daily Bulletin. On Thursday, the Ritas – Sierocynski and Sofia – joined them. Friday saw Sue Neubecker make it. And that big knock-out win did the trick for Helen Panza on Saturday.
Moi? I went into Sunday’s Swiss teams session needing 3.13 gold points. To get them, we all (me, Faith Perry, Flo Boyd and Pawan Matta) needed to come in eighth in the B strat – as it turned out, it would take 117 victory points to do it.  
But we didn’t. Though we avoided any big disastrous shut-outs, we won only two rounds and finished with 77 vps. We would have needed 97 – another win – to earn any extra points in the C strat. Each round was worth .36 point. Final tally for the week: 6.97.

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