Bridge Blog 574: Back in the saddle

          Judie Bailey and I warmed up for next weekend’s Buffalo Fall Sectional Tournament with a game Monday at the Airport Bridge Club and concluded that we probably got all of the bad bridge out of our system. What other shred of encouragement could we salvage from a 40.88% game that left us dead last North-South? I scrawled notations on eight hands on my scorecard, details already forgotten, but had we achieved just an average score on them, we might have been contenders. Well, at any rate, we're warmed up.

          With that last-place finish, I fell solidly off my point-a-day pace for September. Would I be able to make it up in the double session pairs games on Tuesday? Having had my ups and downs with Tuesday partner Beverly Dale, I wasn’t sure if the Dale Effect (see Blog 556) would be in force.

          It seemed to be working more often than not (3 top boards, only one bottom) in the morning game. Our 55.83% put us second North-South and earned .83 of a point. The afternoon was harder to gauge, perhaps because it was a only a four-table Howell game (Rosh Hashanah seems to have diverted most of the Jewish players) and we kept hopping from North-South to East-West and back. At the end of the afternoon, our score was posted and we were dead last – 37%. It didn’t seem as if we were that horribly bad, but wait, we weren’t Pair 8. We were Pair 2, the winning pair. Our numbers had been transposed. So we were not bottoms after all, but overall tops in the A and B strats at 60.65%. Another 1.63 master points. Total for the month: 18.65!