Bridge Blog 995: Niagara Falls Regional Saturday

         Will playing with an unfamiliar, but experienced, partner change my fortunes in the open pairs game? David Monro of Peterborough, Ont., and I will find out. He has 2,400 points. I have 2,300.

          We’re the last to sign up for the morning session and instead of an open pairs game, it’s an A/X pairs game. All heavy hitters.

Our morning opponents include top-notch Torontonians Rashid Khan and Vera Carpenter, the bodacious Buffalo pair of David Colligan and Davis Heussler, and Phyllis Jones of Brampton, Ont., who I’m seeing among the winners a lot this week. She’s a winner again Saturday morning.

          The other East-Wests, meanwhile, include Chris Urbanek and Saleh Fetouh, two of the best Buffalo players, paired today with savvy Canadians; four dominant St. Catharines players, Brian Macartney, Jeremy Smee, Clyde Paul and George Morrissey, plus Torontonian Jonathan Steinberg and his young pro from North Carolina, the sullen Alex Hudson.  

We are assigned to Table J-19, which doesn’t exist at first and which doesn’t have bidding boxes or a Bridge Mate scoring gizmo for a while either.

          Eventually, it all settles down. We finish with 49.04%, tied for 12th out of 19, my second-best score of the week, despite a few misunderstandings that lead to minus 1,100 scores, but at least there are no recriminations. One of those 1,100s was a 7 Diamond sacrifice that kept opponents Margaret and Paul MacFarlane from succeeding at 6 Hearts. Plus 3 match points.    

Nevertheless, David gives me pause when he’s late coming back from lunch (he was at the next table with a couple senior ladies at the buffet in the casino). While he tarries, director Martin Hunter, no slouch himself, sits in for the first two boards of the afternoon session. He gets weak hands, though, and has no impact. We have a near top and a near bottom. And, after David arrives, another near top.  

Our afternoon effort fades after that, though. We finish with 41.97%. No points again. None at all so far for eight sessions of the tournament. 

My hopes now rest with the big Sunday Swiss team game, where partner Selina Volpatti and I will have to compete again in the A/X division because it’s stratiflighted, not stratified, and any player with more than 2,000 points is barred from the B/C/D division.

But we don’t have a team. I collar Amir Farsoud, who Selina lined up to play with us, and he says his back is bothering him. Look how I’m standing, he says, hunched. He won’t play Sunday. I put our names on the bulletin board opposite the partnership desk. We’ll come up with something.