Bridge Blog 1076: A St. Catharines Sectional to Not Quite Remember

My 2019 tournament curse, which began when I was knocked out by illness at the Buffalo Winter Sectional last month, continues in St. Catharines two weeks ago.

The bad news begins when partner Selena Volpatti texts in sick Friday morning. No problem. There’s time to hightail it to the game at the Airport Bridge Club, where I acquire a last-minute partner, Ted May. Problem. Ted and I pull off a dead last 31.25% game. No problem. Got that bad bridge out of my system.

Selena’s still out of the picture for Swiss teams on Sunday. I’ve taken a vacation day to play. No problem. Regular Saturday partner Denise Slattery agrees to come along. No team? Still no problem. The partnership desk fixes us up with a couple from Welland – Steve and Cathy Williams – whose teammates unexpectedly bowed out.

They’re newbies, though, and rules say that if any player has more than 2,500 points, the team has to play against the experts in the A/X division. No problem, I tell the team. A/X wins are worth 0.31 point per round. B/C/D are just 0.18. We’ll win a couple rounds, maybe even three, and earn a silver point.

Four rounds later, at the lunch break, we’re winless, so low on the A/X totem pole that we’re consigned to the round-robin three-way match at the bottom. No problem. It increases our chances of winning something. And nobody plays the round-robin more than once.

But no, no and more no. We lose to the other robins. And then we wind up back at the same tables to face another bunch of birds as unfortunate as us. They prove to be more fortunate. Once again, we win nothing.

No points. No consolation.  Well, maybe one. Just before our second flight with the round-robin, director Martin Hunter comes to our table and apologizes for putting us in the A/X pool just because I recently slipped past the 2,500-point mark. Had I requested a step-down to the B/C/D game, the directors would have considered it. No guarantee that will happen next time, he says, but you can ask.

Now that I look back at the results, there’s a second consolation – even though we lost every round, even though we accumulated only 32 victory points, more than 50 fewer than the next team in front of us, we’re not last.

Holding the bottom rung is a St. Catharines team that’s far more experienced than we are – longtime partners John Marskell and Joan Soifert, with the astute Amir Farsoud and his partner, one Susanne Kosky. They, too, are winless. And they have just 23 victory points.