Friday
the 13th. No other explanation for the way our best intentions cratered. Even
getting there in good time was a failure. Arose 15 minutes earlier than
Thursday, still had to make a mad dash down the Queen Elizabeth Way, buffeted
by high winds, after a 15-minute wait for Canadian customs at the Peace Bridge, and arrived a minute before starting time, just like I did on Thursday.
We
got stuffed in the first round of the compact bracketed knock-outs, the round
robin competition where we had two out of three chances of winning, thanks to
one bad hand against each opponent. When we also lost the consolation round on International
Match Points (though winning one set of six boards by just one IMP to earn 0.30
of a red point), teammate Larry Murray was ready to jump ship. His partner
Beverly Ganim had let a negative double stand, with disastrous results. After that, he said, he couldn’t take
the afternoon game seriously.
Nevertheless,
he hung in for the single session Swiss team match. We started off brightly, as a team ranked in the C stratification, beating our first B strat opponents, 17-12 IMPs, then losing honorably in the second set of Bs, 17-11,
putting us exactly in the middle of the pack.
But
then we ran into two A strat teams,
the first being Buffalonians Jerry Geiger and Mike Ryan. They stuffed us, 41-0.
So much for our hopes of bonus points. Then we hit another A team, Canadians, the Bambrick team, who nailed us, 31-0, en route to a third-place finish. Our reward for winning that first round – 0.20 of a red point.
In retrospect, just an awful day, winning just half a red point, although we
did better than some of our Buffalo acquaintances, namely John Kirsits, Bill Boardman and Paula Kotowski, who played in the same games
and got nothing at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment