Bridge Blog 1053: Buffalo Regional Tournament, Days 2 and 3

Thursday teammates Hinda Silber, left, and Anita Greenberg. The guy in the blue T-shirt in the background is my partner David Colligan.

Nonchalant doesn’t work for me Wednesday. I show up at the hotel mostly still known as Adam’s Mark a few moments before the morning game starts at 10 a.m. and partnership chairman Dian Petrov is in an uproar. I need to show up much earlier.

Blame it on the parking enforcement officer who waved me away from an illegal spot in front of Tipico, I protest. Took me five minutes to find a place to put the car. Have to have my coffee.

At any rate, I have a partner for the pairs games Wednesday. She’s Marie Melnichuk, she’s Canadian, from Collingwood, on Georgian Bay. She doesn’t have a lot of points, but she's an agreeable player and we have a solid morning game, so solid that we’re shocked to see that our score is a mere 44.72%.

In the afternoon, we promise each other we’ll do better, but we falter.

Our biggest mistake is a bid over the opponent’s 1 No Trump bid, when I give her the 2 Club signal for a long suit and she figures Clubs are the long suit. I think she likes Clubs, so when the opponents double, I pass. She redoubles, hoping I’ll bid something else. I think she’s reaffirming Clubs. We have four Clubs between us. I’m lucky to make five tricks. Nevertheless, it’s minus 1,600, a bottom board.

Despite things like this, we’re not much worse than morning – 42.78% – but we’re last in our section. For all our good intentions, we get no points whatsoever.

The day isn’t a total loss, however. One of our opposing pairs in the morning wants teammates for Thursday Swiss teams. Anita Greenberg and Hinda Silber are an established partnership from Toronto and they seem lively, attractive and agreeable.

I text my Thursday partner, David Colligan, the good news and he advises me to arrive half an hour early so we can go over our convention card.

I try, but arrive only 15 minutes early, to the approbations of my teammates and partnership chairman Dian Petrov. Besides, how could it possibly take 15 minutes to fill out a convention card? Doing it with David shows me how. 15 minutes isn’t enough.

Plus we come up against one of the toughest teams in the room in our first round – Paul Janicki and Lew Richardson from Toronto. We don’t make serious mistakes, but they prevail nevertheless, conquering us by 19 to 10 International Match Points.

What stings is our loss in the second round, 25-1, to an Erie, Pa., pair. It all comes down to two unfortunate hands. I get too excited about a 20-high-card-point 2 No Trump opening hand opposite David’s 3 Club opener and push it to slam, which it doesn’t make. The other table wisely stops at 3 NT, making two overtricks. On another hand, our partners go down doubled on a hand where we make a 4 Heart game. That’s all it takes – two bad hands.

The upshot is that we finally get easy opponents – our old friends Mary Terrana and Ruth Wurster, the only team to get no points whatsoever in the Swiss teams game. We win 25-7 IMPs and go to lunch full of hope for the afternoon.

        We return to wind up on the short end of a free-swinging 31-21 game. Hinda is discouraged and figures the day is over, but David reminds us we still have a chance.

        Sure enough, we prevail over some Waterloo, Ont., ladies, 31-18, then narrowly win the sixth and final round, 17-16.  

        It doesn’t feel like victory – we have only 83 victory points out of a possible 180 (a measly 46% if we were playing match points), but David says that since we’re in the C stratification, we might have scratched.  

       And we do. We tie for fourth in the C strat. Instead of earning 1.50 red points for winning three rounds, we capture 2.06 gold points. We’re jubilant. We talk about hooking up again next spring to play the Easter Regional in Toronto.