Bridge Blog 1202: While the cat's away

 

Monica is off touring Scandinavia and this mouse is playing a lot of bridge. How much bridge? Four straight days of face-to-face competition for the first time since the pandemic.

Friday, Aug. 14. Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont., with my usual Friday partner, Selina Volpatti. Ordinarily, we play in Niagara-on-the-Lake on Fridays, but this time around there was a sectional tournament for non-life masters there. Not such a good day for us. 41.35%. Third from last among 15 pairs.

Saturday, Aug. 15. Back at BCON to get my first look at the Saturday Night Live game, which I would never get to if my sweetie was around. Selina directed. Making it livelier was wine by the glass. Partnered with an agreeable novice, David Baker, who introduced himself by informing me that he has just 10 master points. We got along just fine, though. In a 3.5 table game, we managed 51.04%, fourth overall and just 0.21% short of earning master points. We agreed that not only did we play well for first-timers, but we also had a good time.

Sunday, Aug. 16. Judy Zeckhauser and I had a good time at the monthly Buffalo Bridge Center party game, even though we didn't play very well. Not dead last, but at 43.75% we were far away from the winners' circle. At Table 1 early in the game, we learned that Buffalo's foremost master point winner, Saleh Fetouh, is suffering from macular degeneration to the extent that he has trouble reading the bids and seeing the cards. Nevertheless, while we had to tell him what our bids were and which cards we were playing, his powers of concentration were unimpaired. They beat us in match points, 11.5 to 9.5. He and partner Jay Levy finished second North-South and earned 1.27 points.

Monday, Aug. 18. Back to BCON, this time in the company of two other Buffalo players – Mike Ryan, who topped the North-Souths on Sunday playing with Howard Foster, and my good friend Bill Finkelstein, who drove. Selina and I more or less held our own when Mike and Bill came to our table, limiting them to 13 match points out of a possible 24. They were more dominant elsewhere, finishing second East-West with 59.03%, collecting 1.69 master points. Selina and 1 did not go unrewarded, though. Fifth in the B stratification with 50.46%, happy to earn 0.42 of a master point.

Bridge Blog 1201: Blind Dates

I was pleasantly surprised to be paired with Susan Hawes, whose partner didn't show up, at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Duplicate Bridge Club on Friday, Aug. 7. She's not only an attractive presence (think Jamie Lee Curtis), but also a seasoned player. When we hastily compared bidding and conventions, we seemed to be very much on the same wavelength.

We shrugged off the first boards. The opponents took most of the bids. But after a few rounds, it was clear that this was going to be a bad day, a very bad day. Maybe a day below 30%. When the rankings on the Bridge Mate showed us in last place at the end of the afternoon, I was gratified that we managed to crawl away with 34.17%.

How did it seem so right at first and go so wrong? Bottom board straight from the get-go on the first hand, but still, that one was unavoidable. They bid 2 Hearts, making two overtricks. Impatient with the gloom by Board 4, I pushed Susan's raise of my Spade opener to game. Susan had three low Spades and two Aces, but East held K-Q-J-10 in my suit. Ouch! Bottom board, but compared with down-one at 3 Spades, it cost us only one extra match point.

Same with Board 8, the next notation on my score sheet. With four Spades to the King and an Ace of Clubs, I should have answered Susan's fourth-seat 1 Spade opening bid. It's good for 11 tricks in Spades. Amazingly, nobody bid game, though Susan says she would have. We're in a five-way tie for top board. Bidding game, we’d be two match points better.

Little stumbles and setbacks like those kept happening. Still, it would have taken a major blessing from the bridge gods to win us some master points. The two pairs who scratched North-South were tied for first, almost 25% ahead of us.

A week earlier at NOTL, a different story. I was paired for the first time with another player without a partner, Mike Freeman, a Toronto attorney who's lately moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake. Among eight tables, we were third North-South with 53.87% for 0.53 of a master point. It was my best game for the entire month of July. 

Bridge Blog 1200: Thou shalt not pass???

 

Rod Sumner and I were in a funk. We hadn't earned master points together in a coon's age and we sank to a new low – 30.21% – on June 17 at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. But things finally took an upturn on the following Wednesday, June 24. Rod even sent me a celebratory text message of sorts: "Much better result. 1.62% out of second place."

Actually, if we added that 1.62% to our 51.02%, we would have been third overall and first in the B stratification. Nevertheless, we hauled in 0.42 of a master point and it made me wonder how we would have finished if we had gone ahead and bid on the two hands where we passed out.

The first one, Board 18 against two long-term partners, John Marskell and Joan Soifert, was not our hand at all. Just 17 high card points between us. At every other table, East-West took the bid and went down, mostly in No Trump. Nothing we can do about that.

No such excuse, though, for the other one, Board 3 on the final round of the day against Kathy Morrison and Keith Heckley, Sitting South, I'm declarer, but I have only nine high card points. Pass. So does Kathy, who's sitting West. Rod, on the other hand, has 12 hcp and we're not vulnerable. With his holding, I would open:

Spades: A-9-6-3. Hearts: 10-7. Diamonds: A-K-9-8. Clubs: J-9-5.

If he opens 1 Diamond, I go 1 Spade (I have K-Q-7-4 and 10 hcp) and we play it at 2 Spades. Most North-Souths did that and made an overtrick. That would give us six extra match points, enough to end up third overall and first in B.

Fortune smiled again Friday, June 26, with Selina Volpatti at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Bridge Club. We finished third North-South with 52.98% and got 0.53 of a master point. But once again there was a pass-out. Good? Or bad? This time, not so clear cut. We're vulnerable, Selina is the second seat for bidding and she's got 12 hcp:

Spades: K-9. Hearts: A-K-4. Diamonds: J-4-3. Clubs: J-10-7-5-2.

She passes. So does East. If Selina opens, I have a bid. But after three passes to me, I don't.

Spades: Q-10-8-6-3. Hearts: 8-5. Diamonds: A-9-8-5. Clubs: A-8.

Elsewhere, North-South played it in Clubs, Spades and No Trump. It makes 3 Spades. That would have given us an extra 2.5 match points. Enough to make a difference? Not quite. We needed 3 to overtake the second-place finishers, Harold Nash and my good friend Rod. They bid it and made 4 Clubs.

Bridge Blog 1199: The long and short of it

 

The Longest Day was too long already after only about a dozen hands at the Bridge Center of Buffalo for my Sunday morning partner Judie Bailey. Only 15 more boards to go, I reassured her.

She thought it was the air conditioning, or rather the lack of it, that was sapping her energy. It didn't help that we were playing in an 11-pair Howell movement, which disoriented us and everybody else by taking most of us to a different table for every round. Plus we were one of the pairs that didn’t get a sit-out.

Nevertheless, Judie soldiered on through. When cool breezes began to reach us in the final round, she started feeling better, just in time for a total drubbing by Mike Ryan and Judy Graf, who gave us three straight bottom boards. We were at 56.77% when we arrived at their table and 50.93% when we walked away.

Amazingly, that calamity took us down only one peg in the final standings, from first in the B stratification to second. This being part of the District 5 Sectional Tournament at the Clubs (STaC), I was grateful to collect some fraction – 0.83 – of a silver point.

For the six-table afternoon session, fresh partner Florence Boyd and I sat North-South for the entire game and started out like demons. In our first set of four hands against Ruth Nawotniak and Joyce Frayer, we won 14.5 out of a possible 20 match points.

The thrill of that victory didn't last long. Next visitors to our table – Joyce Greenspan and Jo Nasoff-Finton – slapped us down with two bottom boards. One of the other hands was a pass-out. We never bounced back. Our final score was 44.17%, second from the bottom North-South, ninth out of 12 pairs overall.

Bridge Blog 1198: Bottoms up! (with an addition)

 

In this week's episode of NPR's "Hidden Brain," the guest, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, proposes a riddle to host Shankar Vedantam that sort of goes like this: If there is one lily pad in a pond (or lake) at the beginning of spring and the number of lily pads doubles every day, when does the pond (or lake) fill up completely with lily pads? 

Added note: What I forgot to say when I originally posted this was that finding an answer often involves looking at the question from a different direction. The discussion revolved around how the subconscious mind knows things that the conscious mind doesn't and that sometimes it takes stepping away from thinking about the original question so that the subconscious mind has a chance to take a fresh view. One example: Sleeping on a decision before making a final choice. Further example: I realized that I needed to add this explanatory note after I woke up this morning. 

About 16 hours earlier, I saw how thinking applied from a different direction could be applied to the final results of the Friday afternoon game at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Duplicate Bridge Club in Canada. Checking our final scores on the BridgeMate, our opponents said, "Oh, you're fourth." To which my first-time partner Harold Nash replied that he preferred to look at it as third ... from the bottom.

Harold is the oldest player at the game – he's 96 – and I marveled at how sharp and delightful he is. Like in Monday's game, another first-time partnership for me (see Blog 1197), we started out with the blessing of bad hands, which let us get used to each other while playing defense.

Unfortunately, the blessing didn't do us much good this time. We were 45% after the first round and 45.42% at the end of the day. In the final tally, when everybody finished playing, we had advanced to second ... from the bottom.

Bridge Blog 1197: Answering the call

 

"Canada," the screen flashed when the phone rang shortly before 10 a.m. Monday, just as I was getting ready to roll out of bed and mulling what to do after that. The woman on the other end of the line said that Myrna Mackey needed a partner today at the Bridge Centre of Niagara. Was I available to play?

On one hand, I could do yard work. Or else I could spend an afternoon at the tables in St. Catharine's. The choice was clear. Not only is Myrna quietly sweet, she's also one of the better players at the club. We'd never partnered up before, but I figured we’d work things out.

What helped, especially in the early rounds, were the cards. They were awful. With nothing to bid on (in our first three hands, one or the other of us had high card points in the low single digits), we passed a lot. What also helped was we were in tune defensively. Our opponents didn't get any tricks they didn't deserve.

We breezed along until the final round, when we ran up against Jane Jennings and Donna Fettes and won just six of 24 possible match points. Did that take the bloom off our afternoon? Not much. 61.34%. Second overall. We begin the new month with 2.48 master points.

Bridge Blog 1196-A: Back to the tables -- Under the radar

 

But at least not under the tables on Thursday morning at the Anchor Bar at Maple and Sweet Home Roads in Amherst, my first game in nearly two weeks after a trip to Washington, D.C., for a wedding.

This was Third Thursdays, a non-ACBL-sanctioned game directed by my dear friend and sometimes partner Judie Bailey that I never expected to play in. Back when it met at a country club, it was ladies only. Lately, however, a gentleman has been invited to fill out an empty chair and on Wednesday, while I was homeward bound and stopped at a Starbucks in Clark's Summit, Pa., Judie texted an invitation to me.

Indeed, I was not the only gentleman who helped fill up four tables in the side dining room at the Anchor Bar. There were three of us. Entry fee was $1. Judie told me to sit anywhere East-West. I'd never met the attractive white-haired woman across from me, Judy McDermid, one of three Judys present, but we quickly determined that we could do things like 14-30, asking for key cards in a slam attempt.

Before play, a waitress took orders for lunch and when food came out, we took a break after the second round. Music from the restaurant's sound system sifted into our area. Elsewhere sports channels played on flat-screen TVs, a few patrons sat at the main bar and, in the regular dining room, there was a group of Red Hat ladies having lunch.

In all, we played 16 boards in four rounds. Aggressive me, I took the bid on at least half of them and was nailed for minus 1,100 on the second hand when I went after a 5 Spade sacrifice. Sitting North and doubling was Paula Kotowski, who reminded me how I kept her from getting her final points for Ruby Life Master 17 years ago when I failed to return a card for her to trump. She was delighted to inflict some revenge. Down 5. But was it a bottom board? The scoring slips later showed that North-South could take 12 tricks.

Even so, this was not a slam-bidding crowd. Mostly, they were social players familiar with some of the modern bridge basics. Nevertheless, there were a few that I know from the clubs – the aforementioned Paula Kotowski, Florence Boyd, Dorothy May, Judy Kaprove and Paula Salamone. I hadn't seen Paula Salamone since before the pandemic. We greeted each other with a hug.

No results right away. Judie let me know with an email on Friday and it turned out that we club players carried the day. Judy McDermid and I tied for first with Paula Kotowski and her partner with a 29. Figuring a maximum of three match points on 16 hands, that would translate to 60.41%. Paula Salamone and Flo Boyd and their respective partners tied for second with 28, or 58.33%.