Saturday, October 17, 2015

Bridge Blog 854: No waiting

Airport Bridge Club manager Bill Finkelstein expressed disdain for the ACBL-wide Instant Matchpoint Game on Friday, or at least for the way the scores were rated. To that extent, they did indeed seem a bit peculiar, but I still got a kick out of seeing immediate results.
It helped, of course, that partner Selina Volpatti and I were doing well (and could see our successes right then and there on the oversized Instant Matchpoint score sheets). In the final round, however, we also were able to watch how we were falling behind the other pair with whom we were tied atop the North-Souths. They won the gold point. We came in second with 55% and took home 1.83 master points, half of them red ones.
I had told Selina our chances of earning points would be better in Buffalo at the Airport Club (a 5-table game) than they would have been in the bigger game in St. Catharines, Ont. Let’s take a look at their website and see. Aha! They had 18½ tables, but the results are not listed in Instant Matchpoints. Perhaps they didn’t do it, after all. No, they didn't. They played different hands. A 55% there would have finished fourth North-South and given us just 0.95 of a point.

Well, how about the other game in town – the one at the Bridge Center of Buffalo? They played the ACBL cards. Our 55% there would have been not quite so good – only third North-South, yielding 1.34 points. 

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