Bridge Blog 805: Buffalo Regional Day 5

Things reached the silly stage sometime Saturday afternoon, around the time that Sam Maitra at Table 3 was telling the joke that asks what you call 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean. To that, Guy Murray  across the aisle at Table 9 added the one about why man-eating sharks don’t eat lawyers.

Betty Metz and I had seen the ocean-bottom depths in the morning, coming in dead last at 39.89%, which was a lot better than the 29.89% I expected. It was so bad that my finest moment was a revoke. Not noticing a singleton King of trump (Hearts) in my hand when they first were led, I produced it to over-ruff the declarer. Director Alex Barrilles pronounced a one-trick penalty, distressing the declarer, a cute, youngish, but tightly-wound, dark-haired Torontonian named M-Christine El-Hoss, who was playing with her enigmatic shaved-head husband, Ragi (pronounced Ra-jee, I was corrected after I called him Ra-gee).  

So she was down one at 4 Hearts, but by rights, according to the printed hand records, she should have been down three. She got 12 of a possible 17 match points. After the match was over, she went over to the directors’ table to appeal, but apparently to no avail. Not that it ruined their game. They were first East-West with a stellar 71.10%. They went on to add a 60.68% game in the afternoon, third overall. Their aggregate performance won them the most possible gold points – 10.15.

At any rate, in the afternoon session, Betty and I were just having fun. Fun yielded a 50.98% game, fourth East-West in our section, the reward being 0.79 red points. Paltry? Yes, but it continues my record of accumulating points, no matter how fractional, each day of the tournament.  

Random notes: Prior to the morning game, Betty Metz remarked how people had been giving her a hard time about playing with me. Guess they think I’m the enemy. She said she didn’t care. I don’t care either. We had a good time.

Nevertheless, as Unit 116 president, she had plenty of things to be serious about, mostly arrangements for the next regional in 2015. She was in serious conversations all day long. The good part is that she’s gotten it moved to October, week and location still to be determined. Location probably will not be the fairgrounds again. The Canadians Saturday said they had trouble finding it. They also said they liked being able to leave the game and go right upstairs to their hotel room.