Bridge Blog 934: Buffalo Winter Sectional, Day 3

David Hemmer (orange shirt in the distance) explains how to share boards for Dupli-Swiss

I got it. The prize. The sheet that the tournament director and his minions use to keep the running total for the Swiss teams. It was just lying there on a table as I was giving the Social Hall at the Main-Transit Fire Hall a final scan for trash as part of the clean-up crew.

Ordinarily this would be the Holy Grail. But in this day of results posted on the internet, it’s detritus. Nevertheless, it’s a running total, which follows us, the Anderson team, Team 1, as we struggled to a successful finale. 5-17-47-76-78-106. Second in B. And it tells us what we got. 3.22 silver points.

First in B was the Olszewski team, which included Paula Kotowski, the alt director at the Airport Bridge Club, and the Pieterses, Barbara and Martin. They were only five Victory Points ahead of us (28-31-55-60-86-111). We didn’t play them. In fact, the only bunch ahead of us that we played were the fourth-overall finishers, the Pollock team. At our table, that was Dian Petrov and Bill Rushmore. They shut us down almost completely in the fifth round, 28-2 Victory Points.

Our team – Florence Boyd (my partner), tournament chairman Betty Metz and her partner, Barbara Landree, only won three rounds, but we won them big. And one of our losses was by a single IMP point. We finished seventh overall. 

What helped actually was that fifth round loss to the Pollock team. It put us up against much weaker opponents in the finale – the Jones team, mostly Lockport players, which at our table meant Jim Lanzo and Gay Simpson, who recruited me for clean-up detail. We beat them handily, 28-2 VPs.  

My take for the tournament – 5.97 silver points. Was this my best sectional ever? Let’s go to record books. Aside from STaC competition, it looks like this was my second-best silver point effort, topped only by the April 2012 Buffalo Spring Sectional, when I won 7.52 points. I commonly get one or two.   

Note: Second experience with Dupli-Swiss and a much smoother one than the first taste of it in the Fall Sectional. David Hemmer, who set it up, advised us all at the start how to put the boards we played onto the bank of chairs in the middle of our four-table clusters, which shared eight boards each round. In our cluster, at least, it worked just fine. Plus the hand records gave us something to mull over after every couple rounds. 
Incidentally, the Hemmer team – Bud Seidenberg, Saleh Fetouh and Kamil Bishara, all heavy-duty players – won five rounds, tied their finale, and finished first overall, winning 9.35 points. Overall, there were 24 teams.