Bridge Blog 778: Picnic

Everybody at the Unit 116 picnic Sunday was saying this is their favorite unit event. How come? It has to be the food. Wiedner’s chicken. Paul Zittel’s corn salsa. And Zittle’s corn on the cob, fresh picked that morning. It doesn’t get any better than that.

So credit the food with bringing a huge crowd to the Grandstand Casino Room under the race track grandstand at the Erie County Fairgrounds in Hamburg. They were running races outside during the afternoon. 26 tables in the morning session. 24 in the afternoon. Pretty much the same food as last year. Bigger crowd.

What made it notable, however, was the debut of the unit’s new electronic scoring devices. Identical to the ones I’ve come to know and admire at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines. The only difference is that the folks in St. Catharines have worked with it enough to make it run smoothly. Setting up the devices created delays at the start of the morning and afternoon sessions, which stretched the day out well past 7 p.m. Good thing I took the night off from work. My plans for twilight gardening, however, were cut pretty short.

I’m not sure if the electronic devices also were responsible for the delays in posting scores, but it seemed to take longer. In the morning session, scores were posted and then revised to combine the two sections of players. Partner Myra Razik and I finished with 52.62%, fourth in A and third in B for 0.77 of a master point, then got revised to 52.42% and 0.44 of a master point. In the afternoon session, we nearly made up for that subtraction. Our 50.96% game placed us eighth in the B strat overall for 0.28 of a master point. We were low enough so that we don’t show up in the results posted on the Unit 116 website.

          Unexpected big winners, near as I can tell, are Carl and Jan Hasselback, who were first in B and C in the morning for 4.21 points and first in C in the afternoon for 1.70 points. Only team to outdistance them was Jay Levy and Bud Seidenberg, second overall in the morning (3.83 points) and second overall in the afternoon (2.34 points).