Bridge Blog 1016-B: St. Catharines Sectional, Part II

From left, Miro, me, Selina and Ana

Sunday’s forecast was fearsome. Winter weather advisory. Snow, sleet and freezing rain from morning till 7 p.m. I set my cell phone alarm early and got up before it even went off.

Yet nobody was using windshield wipers in front of my house on Richmond Avenue. Nothing worse than a foggy haze all the way to St. Catharines.

Our pickup teammates – Miro and Ana Kovacevic, immigrants to Canada from Serbia whom I’d met in the A/X game Saturday (we started both sessions from the same table) – proved to be very agreeable. Selina and Ana promised to exchange e-mails. We got a group photo together, taken by their 14-year-old son, who was working as a caddie in the Swiss team game.

We had confidence in each other as players as well, a feeling bolstered by the first round, when we beat our opponents by 6 International Match Points. Losing the second round to a Hamilton team by 6 IMPs did not discourage us. We went on to trounce our next opponents by more than 30 IMPs.

After the lunch break, we were beaten back again, losing by 9 IMPs to Peter Petruzzellis and Adam Weiss-Margules, whom I’d encountered Saturday. (Teamed with Buffalonians Donna Steffan  and Jay Costello, they went on to win the day.) Distress deepened with a 17 IMP loss in Round 5, 12 of those IMPs on one hand where Selina went down at 3 No Trump and the opponents made an overtrick.

Round 6 pitted us against two familiar folks from St. Catharines – genial John Mackay and long tall Jane Jennings. We fought each other to a 6-6 IMP tie.

Which unfortunates would we face in the seventh and final round? None other than two of the best players in Buffalo – Mike Ryan and John Ziemer – who, since they were playing us, clearly were down on their luck. It didn’t change. We posted our biggest triumph of the day against them – 40-5 IMPs.

With 3½ winning rounds, worth 0.32 point per round, we were guaranteed at least 1+ silver point for our efforts. But it was better than that. We tied for third in the X strat – 1.97 points. (No, not a tie, now that I see the final results online. The folks we were tied with, the John Mackay-Jane Jennings-Jerry Smee-Clyde Paul team, turn out to be an A team.) Miro and Ana declared that we should team up again at another tournament. Selina and I heartily agreed.

Meanwhile, this was my best-ever effort in the St. Catharines Sectional – 6.66 points. Best previous was 3.85 in 2010, when I was on a Swiss team with Helen Panza, Paula Kotowski and John Kirsits and we finished first in the third bracket.

My luck continued outside the Holiday Inn. It was raining, but the temperature hadn’t plunged. It hung in just above freezing all the way home. No sleet. No ice.