Bridge Blog 735-B: Long haul just got longer

Gold life master by 2017? That means maintaining a pace of 200 master points a year. Not only did I fall 18 points short in 2013, but in the home stretch my average was 10 points a month.

Assuming only 10 points a month, how long would it take to get from my year-end total of 1,658.43 to the gold number of 2,500?  I need 842, so that’s 84 months. Seven years. 2020.

Bridge Blog 735-C: Alternating currents

Sometimes this week was up, sometimes it was down. Monday was down with Marilyn Sultz, 44.68% on a day when the winners got just over 52% and seven other pairs (out of 10) were clustered right around 50%. At least we weren’t last.

Tuesday was up with Florence Boyd. 53.67% was better than we thought we did and it made us first in the B strat for 0.72 master point.

Wednesday stayed up with Celine Murray. In fact, our 56.71% was the week’s best effort. Still, we were third out of 10 pairs overall in a five-table Howell game, earning 0.50 point.

Thursday Dianne Bloom and I thought we were doing terrific, but wound up with just 47.43%. Were our last two rounds really that bad? Let’s take a look. Yes, they really were. Before we hit those final two tables, we were at 56%.

Friday in St. Catharines, in a 13-table game, Selina Volpatti and I put out a 53.53% effort, fifth in A, third in B, 0.49 of a point.

No chance to bump up totals Saturday. Bad weather depressed turnout at the Airport Bridge Club.  There were just four pairs. Two tables. No points. Twenty-seven hands in three nine-board rounds. Either you won for one game point, tied for half a point or lost for a zero. Playing with Chuck Schorr, we lost the first round, 5-4; tied the second and won the third, 5.5-3.5, finishing in second place with 51.85%.

Bridge Blog 734: Restarting

Having notched my first master points of the year at the Buffalo Winter Sectional last weekend, I came into the first full week of January full of confidence, bolstered even more on Monday when Nadine Stein and I turned in a 57% game, finishing third.

Then along came the Blizzard of 2014, with the attendant driving bans, states of emergency and general treacherousness on the highways. The Airport Bridge Club sent out e-mails with the latest Winter Storm Warnings on Tuesday and Wednesday, along with the announcement that there would be no bridge that day.

When things settled down on Thursday, Dianne Bloom and I could only muster at 45.24% effort, not nearly enough for points. Friday in St. Catharines, Ont., Selina Volpatti and I began the session with a pair of 6 No Trump slams, in which I made the overtrick on the first one for a top board and lost an unnecessary finesse on the second one, making just 6 NT, good for 4.32 out of a possible 14 game points. On offense for most of the day (19 out of 26 boards), we finished with 52.16%, fifth overall North-South, third in B, earning 0.48 of a master point.

Bridge Blog 733: Foreign dividends

Haven’t looked for the Airport Bridge Club’s year-end master point totals (I suspect that club manager Bill Finkelstein, late reporting to the ACBL this month, probably hasn’t posted them yet), but I checked out the list at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont., after the game finished Friday.

Theirs are hung out on clipboards, so I had to turn back a few pages to find my name in 260th place. I earned 6.28 Canadian master points which, unlike the dollar, are taken at par by the ACBL. On another sheet, I discovered that I played there 19 times and had an average of just over 51%.

Leading the list for 2013 in St. Catharines were Jeremy Smee with 215.29, George Morrissey with 156.40 and Brian McCartney with 150.01. They were the only ones in triple digits.  

Bridge Blog 732: Bill would've fixed it

Great commotion at the start of the third two-board round Friday at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. One of the players, Janet Glazebrook, suddenly wasn’t feeling well and had to leave, accompanied by her husband, Dennis, who was playing with someone else.

Janet was North-South, Dennis was East-West. Easily solved by pairing up their partners, but wait – this was a 15 ½ table game. Instead of having one sit-out, East-West would have two. Or would they?

For a minute or two, there was talk of East-West having two sit-outs, but the cobbled-together pair decided to play East-West, thereby creating a sit-out in both directions. For the rest of the afternoon, the idle pairs retreated to the other room, picked up a deck of cards and played a couple hands while they were waiting.
The sit-out never reached Selina Volpatti and me, we played a full 13 rounds. Meanwhile, during the confusion, it seemed to me that Airport Bridge Club manager Bill Finkelstein would have come up with a more creative solution, eliminating the sit-outs. Selina and the others at our table agreed.

Bridge Blog 731: Not quite out with the old

The ACBL has posted its year-end master point race results, but for us players at the Airport Bridge Club, they’re not quite all there. According to the website, they haven’t been reported. So my incomplete 2013 total is 178.34, with 147.77 Ace of Clubs points.

How many did I earn at the club last month? It’s a little hard to reckon. Aside from STaC Week, my datebook indicates a grand total of 1.97 (I had a brief Santa Claus rally the week before Christmas, but it fizzled. Plus I didn’t play at all from Christmas Eve onward.)

Will it make a difference? I’m in fourth place in the Unit 116 Ace of Clubs race in the 1,000-2,500 point division. Liz Clark is third with 182.61, so there’s no catching her. Fifth-place Ken Meier might surge past me, however. He’s got 139.01.

Over in the Mini-McKenney competition, which counts all points earned everywhere, my total of 178.34 is good for seventh place, but it’s within hailing distance of sixth-place David Hemmer. He’s got 179.47.

Meanwhile, first place in my division in the Unit 116 Mini-McKenney is John Ziemer with 378.23, also with a few points pending. Only two other players in the unit earned more than he did – Chris Urbanek with 408.58 and Dan Gerstman with 446.25. Neither of them reached the Barry Crane Top 500, which lists all the leading point collectors. It took 465.90 to reach 505th place on the list.

Bridge Blog 730: Buffalo Winter Sectional

The weather was so bad on Friday, Jan. 3, the first day of the tournament that I wondered if I would make it on the drive out to the Main-Transit Fire Hall in Williamsville. Black ice on the Kensington Expressway and the Thruway. Scary. I thought I had flat tires.

Plus, when I got there, I wondered if I was going to get to play. My designated partner, Selina Volpatti, e-mailed to say there was three feet of snow in her driveway in Niagara Falls, Ont. And she doesn’t want to come over here when the weather’s bad, even if her driveway is clear.

But who should be looking for a partner but my Wednesday compatriot, Celine Murray. They’d paired her up with a guy who was only going to play the morning session, so she shed him and there we were, playing Friday as well as Saturday, which we’d already planned. (She’d called Thursday night wondering if I was available, which I wasn’t at that point.)

Last time Celine and I played, back on Dec. 23, we’d registered a dismal 34.72%. The morning session at the tournament was better, but not much. With the cards repeatedly leading people to bid unattainable games, we limped in with 39.58%, tenth out of 11 North-South pairs.

We saw improvement Friday afternoon, 44.12%, eighth out of 11 pairs, and a little more Saturday morning, when the weather was better, 44.47%, tenth of 13 North-Souths. It took until Saturday afternoon to make our breakthrough – 53.30%, eighth overall North-South, fourth in the B strat, for 0.64 of a silver point, first point (or fraction thereof) of the new year.

For the Swiss teams on Sunday, I kept my expectations low. If we win two rounds, I’ll be happy, I told teammates Usha Khurana, Joe Miranda and Selina Volpatti. As it turned out, we won our first round, lost the second and won the third right before the lunch break. Anything more will be gravy, I said.

          And gravy there was. We won two more rounds, piling up 104 victory points. We would have needed three more wins, not just two, to be among the top seven A strat leaders. Ruthie and Michael Kozower were seventh with 121. Nevertheless, we got 0.26 of a silver point for each victorious round. Not bad.

          Yes, not bad, but nowhere near what Davis Heussler did. He had 13.70 and he didn’t even place among the leaders in the Swiss teams, which is the usual path to victory. Second was his frequent partner, David Colligan, with 11.78 (looks like he won three rounds in Swiss). What’s more, they’re both C strat players. Their secret? They swept both the morning and afternoon games on Saturday, picking up 11 points.

After that on the leaderboard, the high strat players step in. Stan Kozlowski, part of the team that finished second in the Swiss teams, was next with 11.62. His teammates Bert Hargeshimer and Christy Kellogg tied for fourth with 11.48.

          In all, 142 players earned points. I was 82nd. Saleh Fetouh, who usually tops the list at the sectionals, was tied for 101st with 0.91.