Bridge Blog 1163: 3000!
To my mind, 3,000 has always been a magic number. Back in the 1980s, when I was reading Barron's, it used to be the impossible dream for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And it's one of those milestones that baseball players aspire to. According to Wikipedia, only 33 batters are in the 3,000-hit club. When I was a kid, there were only eight. Roberto Clemente had exactly 3,000 hits when his chartered plane went down on New Year's Eve 1972.
In the world of duplicate bridge, 3,000 is more of a dividing line. To become a Gold Life Master, the magic master point number is 2,500. Next step up is Sapphire Life Master and that's 3,500.
With 3,000, the difference it makes shows up when you sign in at tournaments. Less than 3,000, you play in the B stratification. More than 3,000, you're up against the big kids in the A strat.
When I became a Gold Life Master several years ago, I was playing five days a week and accumulating more than 100 master points every year. Since the pandemic, that's all ground to a crawl. These days there are only two games a week for experienced players here in Buffalo and I'm working on one of those days. Mostly I play Fridays, one of my days off, in Canada, where there's more tables in St. Catharines and Niagara-on-the-Lake. I haven't sought out an online game at all this year.
I expected the milestone to arrive at one of those games in Canada, but I've been stuck at 2,998.16 for a month. It took the Buffalo Fall Sectional this weekend to cross over.
In the Saturday morning session, Florence Boyd and I squeaked to 51.44%, second in the B strat and a surprising 2.01 silver points, but the news didn't get to ACBL central right away. I was still a B for the afternoon session. Could we capitalize on it? Hell, no. We wound up at 47.46%, seventh out of 10 North-Souths.
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