Friday, November 10, 2017

Bridge Blog 994: Niagara Falls Regional Friday

          Omigod! Not only am I late getting on the road, like after 9:05 a.m., but that sunshine and those clear streets at my house disappear in a cloud of snow flurries minutes later as I pass Buffalo State College.
          Worse yet, they start to accumulate on the Niagara Thruway. Flat-out speeding to pick up partner Helen Panza at her home on Grand Island is out of the question. Nobody’s daring more than 60 or 65 mph.
          Exit on Whitehaven Road and the pavement is actually slippery. There’s an oncoming salt truck. Can this really be ... winter? And, more immediately, can we get to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Niagara Falls, Ont., before the 10 a.m. game starts?
          Well, the sun returns as we zip along the Niagara River on the former Robert Moses Parkway, the mist of the Falls colluding into a huge clump in front of us. There’s no wait at the toll barrier (thank you, EZ-Pass!) and no wait at the border checkpoint, either.
I drop Helen at the front door of the hotel with Canadian cash for the entry fee. Despite the time it takes to park in the hotel/casino ramp (sixth floor, I was fourth floor Thursday), Helen is still at the registration desk when I rush into the Grand Ballroom. We’re in. We’re C strat, East-West, Table 16, which turns out to be a late addition in the front of the room near the desk. So late it has no bidding boxes. Big turn-out today.
Our section of the open pairs is 16½ tables, a little serpentine after the first 15. I feel more at home with Helen as a partner, but the final results aren't much better. Our 42.82% establishes a new midpoint in my scores, but it’s also my first last-place finish. However, the race for the bottom in the J Section is so tightly packed that one percentage point better – another 5 match points – would put us in 12th place.
Where could we make up those 5 match points? Perhaps in my misplay in the next-to-last hand in the final round against Ranald Davidson and Susan Cooper (who’s wearing a cap and clearly undergoing cancer treatments. Been there, I tell her.).
Anyway, as I yank out a pass card, all the auxiliary cards in my bidding box come out with it. They’re wet! While I spend the next couple minutes drying them with Starbucks napkins from my pocket, play commences and I pull a wrong card. Instead of taking a trick with the Ace of Spades, as I intended, I inadvertently pull a low Spade.  
So Susan makes an overtrick. Then Ranald takes the pile of cards I’ve been drying and gives them the finishing touch on the leg of his jeans.
If I play the right card, Susan makes 3 Clubs instead of 4. The 2 match point difference would lift us out of last place. To earn gold or red master points, however, we need to be over 50%. If there’s any comfort, it’s knowing that better Buffalo players than us – John and Martha Welte, John Ziemer and Vic Bergsten, John Kirsits and Ken Meier  also miss out on points in the morning. They rebound in the afternoon. We do, too, but not enough. 
After lunch in the Hard Rock Café with Canadian partner Selina Volpatti and her partner, Chris the priest, we return to find ourselves assigned to the same Table 16 where we began five hours earlier, this time as North-South.
I win a lot of auctions in the afternoon session, but it’s not necessarily a good thing. When we finish, the Bridge Mate scoring gizmo shows that both we and our opponents, St. Catharines heavyweights Brian Macartney and Clyde Paul, have 44%, but they’re 12th and we’re 14th!
The actual tally moves us up. We’re 13th, with an even 45%, still pathetic, but it’s my second-best game of the week.
When East-Wests skip a table in the afternoon, we avoid playing the pro, Mark Itabashi, and his lovely partner, July Ratley. Is she paying for him to be here, I ask someone who might know. Sure, she is, they say.

In that case, she does not get her money’s worth Friday morning. They’re ninth East-West in the I Section, earning 0.82 of a red point with a 52.17% game. In the afternoon, they come in second North-South with 61.85%, copping 5.01 points. Good, but nothing like our friends Rashid Khan and Vera Carpenter from Toronto, who are second overall for the day. They rake in 13.46 points. 

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