Most days of the week, I wouldn’t be able to play at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. Their open pairs games routinely start at 1 p.m. My shift at The Buffalo News officially starts at 5. Given the uncertainty and the delays involved in the international bridge crossings, I couldn’t guarantee just when I’d get back. But Friday is different. No work Friday night. So when Selina Volpatti invited me to play there, I was delighted to accept.
Getting there was a breeze. I crossed the Peace Bridge a few minutes before noon, got off the QEW at Thorold Stone Road, followed the highway through the tunnel under the Welland Canal, turned onto Highway 406, turned off immediately at Glendale Avenue and there I was. Elapsed time: A little more than half an hour. I was there early enough to grab a sandwich at the Tim Hortons in the strip mall where the club stood in a row of storefronts that includes a cat clinic.
The club itself occupies a double storefront. It’s big and bright inside, with large windows that face west from the room where we played. How delightful to see the afternoon sun! They had 14½ tables, a big game, but not their biggest, I was told. Sometimes they spill over into the tables in their other room. Membership, someone said, was about 400 – a serious bridge community. I recognized about a quarter of them from the sectional and regional tournaments.
No shuffling the cards, either. They had computer-generated hands and the cards all had little bar codes on the edges so that the machine could deal them. Scoring was on pick-up slips, giving us no idea how other tables played the hands, and those hands seemed rather tricky at first.
It took Selina and me a while to get our footing. We were winning bids at auction, but going down. We got caught in cross-ruffs. Every time we needed a finesse, it failed. With a big hand opposite Selina’s opener, I pushed her to slam, but it was a trick short. A couple times, she claimed a contract early while conceding a trick, only it was a trick she didn’t need to concede. I wound up telling her that we absolutely must not claim early when we play again the STaC at the Airport Bridge Club on Tuesday.
And then there was the uproar over our bidding. Selina opened a weak 2 Hearts while I was holding a seven-card Spade suit missing the Ace, plus four Diamonds headed by Ace-King. Counting eight tricks if we played in Spades, I bid 2 Spades and Selina passed. Our opponent called the director. Unless it was alerted, he complained, it was a demand bid.
We explained to the director that we hadn’t run into this before and, although we had a convention card from the regional tournament, it was out in my car. She let us keep bidding – the opponents doubled and competes – and when we were finished, she said to call her back later. The auction ran to 4 Spades, which the complainant doubled. After I made 4 Spades, he called the director again. He wouldn’t have doubled, he said, if we bid correctly. She said she’d look at all the results and adjust accordingly. When we had a sit-out on the next-to-last round, she came over and told us that she was scoring us for simply making 4 Spades. No double. It was still a good hand for us.
Unable to predict how we were doing from the scoring slips, we speculated about our final score. Over 50%? Doubtful. I’d be happy enough with something between 45 and 50%. I’d be OK with finishing in the low 40s, I added. Below 40%, I’d feel bad. When the results were posted on the bulletin board, we wound up with 46.70%, which nevertheless was good enough to be second in the C strat in our direction. The C strat, believe it or not. They must have averaged our master point totals. We earned .28 of a point.
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