The grand Swiss team finale. 41 teams. I’m with Joe Miranda, with
whom I’ve had wonderful games in tournaments past. Also with Usha Khurana and
John Marvin, usually a good combination.
And we are good, at least for a while, at
least after we lose our first game to the Passer team (at our table, Elaine
Kurasiewicz and Barry Passer, who passed my team in the final round of the single-session
Swiss team game on Saturday).
We rise up in the second round to defeat the
Florence Boyd team (my frequent club partners Marilyn Sultz and June Feuerstein
at our table) and then face a top-ranked pair who apparently also are 1-1 at
that moment, the Heckley team from Toronto, which includes two top-flight
players, Martin Hunter and Keith Heckley. At our table, it's Jonathan Steinberg, with
his paid pro, Alex Hudson from Raleigh, N.C., sitting sullenly South in a black San
Antonio Spurs jacket.
Miraculously, we win that round, thanks to
Martin overreaching at Usha and John’s table and going down a lot doubled.
But our luck ends there. We get stomped in
round four by none other than Thom Burnett and his daughter, Miri
Salamone-Burnett. Had Joe and I restrained ourselves and not overbid two times and not
gone down way too much doubled, we would have prevailed.
Heaven knows which high-flying team we
would have encountered if we won that round and were sitting 3-1 at midpoint,
but we wind up facing a tough bunch anyway, Dian Petrov and Paul Janicki. They stomp us too. And so do our opponents in the last two rounds, even a team I thought
we had a chance against, Linda and Paul Zittel.
We wind up with just our two winning
rounds, nothing else, very close to the bottom of the heap (fifth from the bottom: the bottom, alas,
being the Florence Boyd team, which only registered a single tied round).
For
our efforts, we win 0.72 of a point. Small, but it nevertheless pads my six-day total to 16.68, surpassing my till-now topmost tournament total ever – 16.44 – at Rochester
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