Bridge Blog 1157: Bragging rights

I didn't want to prolong the conversation with the American customs guy at the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge on Friday afternoon – after all, I'd waited a @*#^&! hour in line to get there – but when he asked if there was money involved in my bridge game in Niagara-on-the-Lake, I was tempted to elaborate about how, no, it was just for master points and bragging rights. 

On this particular Friday, though, there was plenty to brag about. My Canadian partner Selina Volpatti and I had our finest game in a long, long time, maybe our best ever – 68.15% with eight top boards –  and collected 1.47 of those black master points, ending a month-long drought. Too bad we weren't this sharp a week earlier, when the winners were getting gold points. 

Bridge Blog 1156: Slack-a-bed?

Should we be sending get-well cards to the scorekeepers who keep track of the master point races at the ACBL or should we just be giving them a big, loud wake-up call. Because if they aren't on extended sick leave, they must be in hibernation. There's no update on the website, which should have been done more than two weeks ago, by Feb. 6. What it shows instead are last year's final totals. 

Bridge Blog 1155: Have cards, won't travel

Don't we Buffalo bridge players travel any more? Just a precious of us got to the Niagara Winter Sectional in St. Catharines last weekend. 

I only spotted Jay Levy on Friday. Jay won 15.96 silver points at the tournament and was fourth overall. Davis Heussler and David Colligan were there Friday afternoon, according to the results, but they were in the other section and somehow I missed seeing them.

Jay was back on Saturday, along with John Ziemer and Mike Ryan. I kept looking around for Saleh Fetouh, who is attracted to these silver-point affairs like a cat to tuna, but no Saleh. 

Bridge Blog 1154: Experts in a dying field

One of the topics that came up in a pre-game chat with longtime Bridge Center of Niagara mainstay and current ACBL District 2 chairman Wybren "Webe" Hoogland at the Niagara Winter Sectional in St. Catharines was the sorry state of bridge in Buffalo. Just one fulltime sanctioned club, the Buffalo Bridge Center, and the only open games there, the ones on Wednesdays and Fridays, attract barely enough players to fill three tables. By comparison, the Friday games in Niagara-on-the-Lake usually have six or seven tables and the ones in St. Catharines routinely have nine. 

At the Bridge Center's annual meeting and game a couple weeks ago, the issue of low attendance came up, partly because of another issue: low revenue. Promises were made to try to attract some of the newer players to those games. Voila! There was a fourth table last Friday. Could it be that it's beginning to work? 

Bridge Blog 1153: Jinxed

Are the bridge gods punishing me for that minus 1,100 scoring error  two weeks ago at Niagara-on-the-Lake? I'm starting to have my suspicions. Not only did the mistake take me and Selina down from 52% to 48% in that game, but we've been descending deep into misery ever since.

Our sojourn at the Niagara Winter Sectional in St. Catharines, Ont., last weekend began with another minus 1,100 and it didn't get any better. We played only the afternoon session on Friday and our 40.02% barely kept us from settling in dead last. 

Morning and afternoon sessions on Saturday gave us two chances to escape, but our 45.67% in the morning didn't even come close. Third from last north-south in our section. Then again, we needed 60% to scratch. Tough crowd. 

Us? Not even tough enough to muster even 50% against Selina's delightful daughter, Maria Cerenzia, who has only five master points, and she was at the bottom east-west. 

In the afternoon, we were the ones who sank to the bottom. Actually, a three-way tie for the last place in our section at 40.74%. Well, if we're going to be that miserable, it's good to know we have company.

Bridge Blog 1152: Magic number

Minus 1,100. It's one of my magic numbers in bridge. Getting that score involves going down, way-y-y down, doubled. Four tricks short if you're vulnerable, missing by five if you're not. It's almost always a bottom board. The only time it's good is when you're keeping the opponents from making a dead-certain slam. I've done that a few times and can testify that it feels  perversely satisfying, kind of like being the bloody hacked-up Spartacus character at the climax of a gladiator movie. And you can always find consolation in the thought that it could be worse. Minus 1,400 or even minus 1,700. 

I've bestowed the gift of a minus 1,100 so often over the years that it's become a running source of mirth between me and John Ziemer, a very good player who cut his teeth in the game at Linde Chemical with that gang of guys who used to play every day at lunch. 

A couple weeks ago, I wrote another chapter in the minus 1,100 annals at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Duplicate Club when I entered that score in the electronic BridgeMate and attributed it to our opponents instead to me and Selina Volpatti. I saw it that night when I was looking over the resume of scores online, thought, uh-oh, and wondered if anyone else would notice. 

They sure did. Selina nailed me about it as we were sitting down for the first round of the St. Catharines Winter Sectional on Friday afternoon. Her phone rang more than once, she said, and she wound up having to go in and repair the damage. 

Me? After the apologies and the embarrassment, I had to laugh. The magic number had hexed me again. And what happened on our very first hand in the tournament? Down four doubled vulnerable. Can't get away from it. 

Bridge Blog 1151: Piece of cake

 

Of all the people I'm surprised to see at the bridge game in the Niagara-on-the-Lake Community Centre, the one who surprises me most is Dianne Kunselman. I always considered her a pillar of the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, an illusion I probably developed because she was a longtime director of the games there. 

So I asked her Friday how come. Her reason: She feels the game in St. Catharines has gotten too noisy and cramped since the club has given up its extra room in the plaza. Since this is a hike for her -- she lives in St. Catharines -- that's quite an endorsement. Plus she said she likes the people. I agree. On Friday they even brought in a couple birthday cakes for one of the players, a guy named George who was turning 95. No chorus of "Happy Birthday," though. George wasn't feeling well. He stayed home.