Bridge Blog 987: Buffalo Regional Day 5

         Cleveland Fleming and I try extend the good fortune we had Thursday night in the Saturday morning side game – me needing to play the next side game Saturday afternoon to preserve my gold points from way back on Wednesday.

But we blow a couple hands early in this four-table Howell arrangement and we just can’t recover. We're 45.83%, sixth out of the eight pairs. Our one bright moment was a 6 No Trump contract against the winners, Cleveland ladies Gladys Martin and Edia Shai (who sounds and looks middle European, but says she was born in Israel).

          However, for all my activity in the side games, I discover just now (as I’m belatedly reviewing my ACBL Live emails on Sunday night) that I’ve been rewarded for all the side games I played.

Turns out I’m fourth among all the side game players, behind the Cleveland ladies and Buffalonian Pat Lakeman. I get 2.95 gold points that I didn’t even know were there for the taking.

I’m also assured by the directors that I will get gold for the win Art Matthies and I had Wednesday afternoon. The points for Art, who has been absent since then, remain red.

Cleveland and I sign up to play the afternoon side game, but only one other pair is ready to join us. They put us into the single-session Swiss team game instead, all four of us, and that's not a bad thing. We win our first round, tie the second and win the third. Now sitting us second overall, we get to play the final round against the first-place team, the one that slam-dunked my people in the single-session Swiss game on Friday – the Costello team: Jay Costello, Donna Steffan, Chongmin Zhang and Glenn Milgrim.

This time we play Jay and Donna. Interrupting the first board are the faint strains of the William Tell Overture. Cleveland’s cell phone. He forgot to silence it. There’s a penalty for that. Donna calls the director. The penalty, he says, will be determined when we finish.

After they whup us soundly, the penalty is decided – 3 victory points. Although it makes our defeat more emphatic, there's no impact on the final outcome. We fall back to third place overall, second in the B strat. 2.09 red points.

Meanwhile, my second-best Buffalo Regional has gotten even better. 15.96! A new high, 0.30 better than my previous best last year.

That makes me only 67th among all players at this affair. The daily bulletin (wonderfully compiled by Andrei Reinhorn, to whom a few hats should be doffed) shows the leaders – Kevin Dwyer of Melbourne, Fla., and Shan Huang of Toronto – tied for the top with 97.46 points. Best Buffalo player, Saleh Fetouh, has 42.30 points. He’s tenth.