Bridge Blog 500: King of the world (almost)

     You’ve got to admit, World Simultaneous Pairs sounds pretty impressive. It benefits UNICEF and the same hands are played all over the world. Plus you get to watch the aggregate scores pile up on the website as the results come in from England and Germany and Jordan and Peru. What don’t aggregate, however, are the master points. It’s not like the STaC or those other ACBL-wide events. What you get at your club is the extent of your reward.
          So on Monday, playing with Marilyn Sultz at Bridge Club Meridian (sitting on the stage in the Zion Church hall at the 16th table), I broke out of last week’s funk with a shiny 51.44% game, fifth North-South in the A strat, third in B, sixth overall in A. Points? 0.56.

          Projected worldwide, however, a score like that not only got lost, it got diminished, since our scores on each hand were computed against what everyone else did. Searching way down the list, I found us tied for 202nd with a pair from Japan with a score of just 50.31%. In all, there were 403 pairs. Bottom pair, two women from the Putney Bridge Club in England, had 29.56%. Top were two women from a place called the Bridge Academy in the U.S. with 69.63%.

          Tuesday I was scheduled to play with my Wednesday partner, Celine Murray, but game time arrived and she hadn’t. A phone call found her at home. She wasn’t feeling well and she didn’t even have me in her book. So at the last minute, I was paired for the first time with Bob Padgug, husband of one of the top local players and not a bad player himself. We have what feels like a pretty good game in the 10-table field, but we figure that no matter how well we do, we won’t beat Dan Gerstman and Chris Urbanek.

          When preliminary results come down, it turns out we’re second East-West, close behind Gerstman-Urbanek. Plus we had a good final round. Good enough, it turns out, to zip past them into first place with 63.89%, trailing only Bob’s wife Judy, who was top North-South. The master point payoff? 2.15. Hallelujah!

          Club manager Dian Petrov, having showed me on his iPad during the game how you can look up the worldwide results, emailed the link Tuesday night. Bob and I, he noted, were in second place worldwide. Not only that, our score plumped up a bit, to 64.06%. (Bob’s wife sank to 59.85%.) But that was only with half a dozen clubs reporting. As the night grew longer, we slipped to fourth place, behind a couple pairs from Germany and another one from Peru.

          Once all the results were in, we weren’t even Top 10 any more. Twelfth isn’t anything to complain about, though, out of a field of 346 pairs. And we were second in the U.S., behind a couple women from that Bridge Academy place who had 64.68%.