Well,
we weren’t contenders in Sunday’s Swiss team extravaganza. We lost our first
round, 25-5 Victory Points, thanks to some overbidding on my part, and it was
pretty much downhill from there, even though I tried to be more cautious.
We
prevailed in only two rounds, against teams that finished lower than we did. We missed bidding slams. Or else we bid slams and fell one trick short.
Against Jerry Geiger and John Ziemer, we fell one trick short on five of the
seven hands and lost by 25 International Match Points. At the end of the day, we
had just 65 VPs, which might put us in last place, but left us instead
38th out of 41 teams. Two wins gave us 0.72 red points. A consolation, but a
small one.
Our
first loss, it turned out, was to the local team that went on to become the overall
winners – Shakeel Ahmad; his wife, Manju Ceylony; Ten-Pao Lee and Gaurang
Sheth. Four doctors – three physicians and, in Ten-Pao’s case, a Ph.D. in
economics. Their reward: 17.85 gold points.
Other
winners in the first round were the team that included Mike Silverman and Bill
Boardman, who knocked off a quartet that included the two hotshot kids we
played in the knock-outs on Friday. Score, 51-0 IMPs. Nationally-ranked
players, Mike said. Unfortunately, this put Mike’s team up against more tough
players and they failed to win the gold master points that Bill needs.
One
of the kids – the one who took forever to play a card Friday – turns out to be
Gordon Zind from Ottawa, who says on his page on bridgewinners.com that he wants
to become an options trader. Says he plays mostly professionally and teaches
online. The other is Sean Gannon from Decatur, Ga., who two months ago finished
third in the World Open Youth Championships. Surprisingly, their team only won
three of the seven Swiss team rounds.
No comments:
Post a Comment