Bridge Blog 1056: Buffalo Regional Tournament, Day 6

Final minutes of Sunday's Swiss team event at the Buffalo Spooktacular Regional Tournament

      Our Swiss team just never gets it together – me and Joe Miranda, Usha Khurana and John Marvin. We routinely fail to take the tricks we should take. We let the opponents off the hook again and again. We break one of the cardinal rules of Swiss team strategy – we double and allow the other side to make their contract when they shouldn’t. Not once, but twice.

      We start out against a team of Toronto experts, who slam-dunk our asses en route to overall victory and 17.50 master points. Then we allow a poor team to take us further down, thanks to an unsuccessful double that should have been a sacrifice on our part. Without that, we beat them.

       We win two rounds out of seven and one is totally undeserved. Well-seasoned player Cleveland Fleming, of all people, fails to run the dummy’s long Diamond suit (he plays a low card and lets me win a trick with should have been a losing 9 of Diamonds, then can’t return to the dummy). Down five, vulnerable.

     Our reward for this sorry exercise – 0.72 of a red point. Our Victory Point total of 65 is third worst in the field. Yet there are people who get more VPs and fewer points because they won only one round, among them District 5 overall master point leader Sue Lan Ma.

     Out-of-town players dominate the leaderboard. The first all-Buffalo team – Chongmin Zhang, young whiz Ethan Xie, Penny and Peter Shui – is seventh, second in the B strat. They win 6.44 gold points.

     There’s a four-way tie for the top among overall point winners for the tournament – Kevin Dwyer and Shan Huang, both of Melbourne, Fla.; Joan Millens of Kingston, N.Y.; and Kevin Bathurst of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. They all had 92.50 points, 7.38 of them for finishing fourth in the Swiss teams.

      Top Buffalonian on the list is ninth. It’s Jay Levy with 59.43 points. Saleh Fetouh shows up next in 15th place with 54.32 points.

      Then there’s Jay Costello, tied for 23rd with 34.45; Chris Urbanek, 25th with 33.90; Donna Steffan, tied for 26th with 33.07; and Shakeel Ahmad and Manju Ceylony, tied for 28th with 32.46.

      I’m 176th with 7.92 points. In all, 476 players got points.

      How does this compare with my outcomes in other Buffalo Regionals? Middle of the pack. Here’s the history.  

      2017 – 16.68, 70th.

      2016 – 15.66, 97th.

      2015 – 5.38, 220th.

      2014 – 9.77, tied for 138th.

      2013 – 4.59, 330th.

      2012 – 12.12, 153rd.

      2011 – 6.97, 247th.

      2010 – 7.59, tied for 243rd.

      2009 – 4.15, 420th.

      2008 – 12.70, 118th.

      2007 – 5.44, 337th.

      2006 – 1.94, five-way tie for 332nd.

      2005 – 2.73, three-way tie for 432nd.