Our
intention was to play pairs again Thursday, but at the registration table we
ran into Mike Silverman and Alicia Kolipinski, who were looking to fill out
their team for the two-session Swiss team game that was about to start. Better
chance for gold. We signed on with them.
Who
should we run into in our first round but one of the toughest A teams – Chris Urbanek,
Bud Seidenberg and, at our table, John Toy and expert Jan Assini from Cleveland.
They skunked us by 42 IMPs for a victory point shutout. Our second opponents
were another strong team that happened to be down on its luck. At our table
were Allan Beroza and John Ziemer. They shut us out on IMPs, 17-0, but translated
into victory points, it was only 27-3.
We
blanked a weak Toronto team in the third round, 25-0 IMPs, then hit some more
experts – Mike Ryan and Jerry Geiger – who handed us yet another IMP shutout,
20-0. When we broke for dinner, we had won just one match and had only 34
victory points. On the scoring chart, we were sitting in the middle of a bunch
of luckless C-strat teams. That, I told my teammates, is who we’ll play
tonight.
Sure
enough, we feasted on a couple of them with IMP margins of 43-0 and 17-2, which
brought us up to 90 victory points, 50% of a possible 180 at that moment. We
narrowly missed on the next round, losing by one IMP, then won the final round
by a single IMP. Our final total – 120 victory points out of a possible 240. It
had been fun, we all agreed. Much more fun than knock-outs.
I
tried counting down the incomplete results on the scoring chart and determined
that we could wind up as high as seventh or eighth in the B strat, which
awarded gold master points to the top eight finishers. Alas, we finished ninth –
five VPs below the eighth place team. Each winning round, however, was worth
0.31 red points and we won four of them. 1.24. Finally, Usha and I broke into
the point column.
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