Bridge Blog 1189: Down One reconsidered

 

"Bd 2 at 4D down 1 was top score 8 out of 8. Also no zeros. All in all, a good afternoon."

That was partner Rod Sumner's email assessment of our game Wednesday afternoon at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. It was our only clear-and-away top board, though we tied for top on two other hands. Nevertheless, it got me wondering whether down one was good bridge this time around.

Well, no question about it on Board 2. Rod and I were East-West, North-South was vulnerable and, as dealer, I opened 1 Diamond with this hand:

Spades: 3.

Hearts: K-8-6-3.

Diamonds: A-Q-10-8-6-3.

Clubs: A-K.

Rod responded 1 Heart. After all, I could have had as few as three Diamonds. North, holding six Spades, bid them. (It was that kind of wildly distributional day, it seemed).

Curious about Rod's Hearts – did he have five of them? – I doubled, hoping he would give me a helpful response. South supported North's Spades and Rod, to my surprise, went to 3 Diamonds. North upped the Spade bid, then let me play it at 4 Diamonds.

According to Live for Clubs analysis, nine tricks is the best we could do. What made it a top board? N/S played it in Spades at five tables, making 10 tricks. Two of the E/Ws thwarted them by pushing up to 5 Diamonds and one of them was doubled. Another E/W played it at 4 Hearts, down two.

Unlike my Monday game with Selina, Rod and I avoided down-ones. We had just one other and it also was good. Board 15. N/S vulnerable. South was dealer. Three passes to me sitting East with this hand:

Spades: 7-3-2.

Hearts: A-K-Q-2.

Diamonds: A-J-3.

Clubs: Q-7-4.

I did the math. Of course, 1 No Trump. Everybody else passed. Rod, unfortunately, was at the bottom of his Pass:

Spades: 10-8-5-4.

Hearts: 9-8-5.

Diamonds: 9-8-2.

Clubs: J-10-8.

The math was definitely against us. South led the five of Diamonds and I took North's King with the Ace. Then I ran the Hearts, breathing a sigh of relief when they broke evenly. In fact, everything broke evenly. We got the five tricks we deserved – four Hearts and the Ace of Diamonds – plus a gift, either another Diamond or a Club, I don't remember which.

This one tied us for second-best with another E/W who went down one. Still another E/W actually made I NT (against the same guys that we nailed on Board 2). Hand analysis says I NT our way should go down two. Two other E/Ws went down two doubled.

Although we're a relatively new partnership and hadn’t played together for more than two months, Rod and I were respectable – third in our direction with 55.79%, with 0.75 of a master point. Great way to start off the new month.

Bridge Blog 1188: Is Down One really good bridge?

Although I didn't say it, that's what I was wondering after a while Monday afternoon at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. Partner Selina Volpatti and I played what seemed like an extraordinary number of contracts that fell one trick short. In truth, there were only (only?) eight out of 27. 

Selina played six of them. Her first successful down-one effort was a 4 Heart contract on the second hand of the day and it was a good one. Top board. East-West can make 5 Spades and seven of them did. 

Then, in the final round, Selina went down one on a 4 Diamond bid when the opponents routinely make 4 Hearts with an overtrick. That one was good for 7 out of 8 match points. 

But the rest of our down-ones were duds. Two were middle boards, the others were bottoms or next to bottoms. 

So back to our original question: Is down one good bridge? Not for me and Selina on Monday. Our down-ones delivered only 24 out of a possible 64 match points. Had we broken even, 50-50, in the down-ones, we would have been first North-South. As it was, we finished second with 57.64%, winning 1.69 master points. 

Bridge Blog 1187: Crawling from the wreckage

How badly did Florence Boyd and I crash and burn in the monthly special game at the Buffalo Bridge Center on Sunday, March 22? Let us count the ways. 

First of all, we were dead last, not just East-West, but for entire field of 12 pairs. Our 35.14% was a full 10 percentage points below the next lowest E-W, Julie Mitchell and Brian Fleming, and nearly six points beneath the bottom North-South, Barb Landree and Betty Metz. To actually win master points as B strat players, we needed at least 47% in our direction. 

God knows we were rusty. Neither Flo nor I had played competitively in more than a month. Plus she was in pain with a nasty crimp in her back. So we had our excuses. Lots of them.  

Take that passed-out hand on Board 16 in the very first round against Barb and Betty. The ACBL Live for Clubs recap showed that nobody else passed it out. Though West had only nine high card points, there was a six-card Spade suit, A-K-Q-10-4-3, a perfect pre-emptive 2 Spade opening bid. Four other Wests played it at 2 Spades, making two overtricks. 

And then there was Board 20, one of my infamous minus 1,100 games, which was a big help in boosting Davis Heussler and Linda Burroughsford to the top of the North-South pairs. After Flo opened with a pass, Davis bid 1 Diamond. Holding A-10-7-6-4-2 in Clubs and 11 high card points, I promptly raised to 2 Clubs. Linda immediately doubled. Little did I suspect that Linda's Clubs were K-Q-8-5-3. Davis passed. Down four doubled vulnerable. North-South can take nine or 10 tricks in No Trump, but only one of them bid it. Most of them played it in Diamonds, which is good for at least nine tricks. 

Bidding those two correctly wouldn't have gotten us out of our deep hole, though. We repeatedly missed going to game when we should have and failed to take all the tricks we were entitled to. And sometimes the really good players hit home runs against us, like Chris Urbanek and Kamil Bishara, who were the only ones to bid a small slam in Clubs on Board 10. Less perceptive North-Souths simply made game at 3 No Trump or 5 Clubs. 

Bridge Blog 1186: Circumstances beyond my control

 

That's what's been keeping me from the tables since mid-February. My partner Monica had her right knee replaced on the 17th and I've been on caregiver duty ever since. She's recovering nicely, but here at the two-week mark there are quite a few tasks she can't yet accomplish by herself. 

So afternoons at the bridge clubs in Canada are out of the question for a while still. When new partner Rod Sumner called recently to see if I was available for a Wednesday at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, I estimated that I wouldn't be free to come back until at least St. Patrick's Day. But, I cautioned, it may take a little longer. 

Bridge Blog 1185: The champ

Nobody in Buffalo racks up more master points these days than Saleh Fetouh. The retired radiologist collected 1,021.31 last year, almost four times as many as the player in second place, Davis Heussler, who had 258.82. 

The good doctor was off and running toward another millennium in January with 143.01. How did he do it? Not from playing club games. He only won 3.29 that way. And it wasn't online either. He added just 2.71 there. 

His success, as we knew all along, came from the regional tournament circuit. He started off the month at the Myrtle Beach New Year's Regional in South Carolina, where he and partner Vic Queros of Phoenix brought home 47.33 points. He bagged another 16.12 the following weekend at the Cleveland Rock and Roll Regional with various partners, but did far better two weeks later at the Houston Lone Star Regional. Teamed again with Vic Queros, the two of them got 38.06 points. 

The rest of the points must have come the final week in January in South Carolina, where he played in the Hilton Head Low Country Classic Regional. There his partner was Jiang Gu of Mountain Lakes, N.J., and he came home with a total of 56.69 points. He tacked on another 48.49 in mid-February at the Indianapolis Crossroads of America Regional, playing this time with Suman Agarwal of Columbus, Ohio. 

Bridge Blog 1184: Dateless

Not all is lost, I consoled myself after plans fell through for playing the Friday and Saturday sessions at the Niagara Winter Section Tournament (see Blog 1181). There's always Swiss teams on Sunday.

Wrong-g-g-g!

Partner Selina Volpatti texts me Saturday night to report that our Swiss teammates came down sick at the tournament on Saturday.

So even though an old Ricky Nelson song is running through my head this morning, I have to look at the bright side.

I'm avoiding some godawful virus right before my significant other goes in for knee replacement surgery on Tuesday.

And, as a bonus, I got to sleep in till 11 a.m. instead of rising at the crack of dawn. Now I'm all coffee-ed up and ready for a leisurely day off, maybe even see if I can beat the Bridge Baron at his game. 

Musical interlude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgjrrJTjnbg

Bridge Blog 1183: Star-crossed

 

Uh-oh, I just saw something that may alter my attitude toward this game in the horoscope column in The Buffalo News for Friday, Feb. 13, ("Royal Stars" by Georgia Nicols, a Vancouver-based Buddhist who used to be a movie and theater critic). Here's what she says:

"Today Neptune moves to the top of your chart to stay for the next decade. This means you might begin to question what you're doing in your life."

Actually, I've been asking that question since my 57-year career with The News ended back in November. So far, one of the answers is to play more bridge.