Friday, September 7, 2012

Bridge Blog 566: Good while it lasted

“We didn’t do anything wrong, did we?” Wednesday partner Celine Murray asked after we came in at exactly 50%. Well, we must have, but nothing immediately came to mind. At least there was nothing glaring. No minus 1100s. Well, there was that minus 600, but that depended on Celine finding the lead that would let us set Joyce Greenspan at 3 NT. We wound up tied for fourth in the B strat. 0.62 point for the day. 7.49 for the month.
Thursday I thought I was playing with Florence Boyd, but Flo thought she was playing with Faith Perry. The upshot – my partner was Mike Silverman. I reckoned this would be good and it was. We played a supremely steady game, aside from two hands I botched (an unfortunate 4 Spade contract that we never should have pursued and a slam that we should have set because we had two of the Aces, but I failed to recognize the killer  switch to Mike’s suit after I led my Ace.) Those two bottoms were offset by three tops – a 4 Spade bid that Mike made and nobody else did, a 4 Heart bid that Mike Kisiel doubled and I beat and a 4 Heart contract that went down three for Miri Salamone Burnett, back for the first time since she had her baby. Even our pass-out hand gave a better than average score. Final result: 55.09%. Second East-West, first in the B strat, 1.13 points for the day, 8.62 for the month.
The string ended Friday with Usha Khurana on what was a unusually sour day at the club. There was unhappiness with the 14-pair three-quarter movement, which required everyone to play two hands and move, even though it meant that the sit-out was short and we played every other pair. And then there were the hands themselves, which were singularly unexciting. There were no slams.  Most of the time, there wasn’t even game. We bid and made one game and that’s all our opponents did, too. But we fell short a lot on those partial score hands, sometimes due to good defense that denied us the extra trick, sometimes due to our own missteps. In the end, we had 41.25% – out of 13 pairs, next to last.

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