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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
When I went to give Selina the $7 fee to play last week as I checked in, she remarked, "Why don't you join?" It took only a second to do the math. It's $20 Canadian to join and members pay only $5 to play. I'll make my membership fee back in no time.
The Bridge Centre of Niagara is a similar bargain, although it's pricier. Membership last year was $50 Canadian, but you get two free plays ($7 a game) and a discount on the fee.
Joining the Buffalo Bridge Center on this side of the bridges probably would be the diplomatic thing to do, but at $80 US, it's no bargain. Members play for $4 less than non-members, so it would take 20 visits to recoup, but alas, the only games I could play would be Friday (often only three tables, a topic of discussion at the club's annual meeting last week) and special once-a-month games on Saturday or Sunday. Playing Sunday would mean burning a vacation day
That left us four match points behind the North-South winners, Claude and Muriel Trembley, but should we really be complaining? We still had a 57.92% game. We got go to bring home 1.62 master points.
Plus, that last round against Darlene Menhennet and Leslie Nash (daughter of the recently departed Kit Nash, who was a petite force of nature) may have been sour, but it wasn't all that bad. It started out so sweetly, with me making 3 Spades, a top board.
But then we were all left-footed. I should have sabotaged them when I bid 4 Diamonds to deny them a sure 3 Heart contract. Leslie doubled. Down 1, plus 100 for them. No problem. When they make 3 Hearts, they get plus 140. But I didn't count on how wimpy the East-Wests would be at the other tables. They gave up and let North-South play and make 3 Diamonds.
Nothing we could do about the third hand, either. We take our two Aces and that's that. At some tables, the suit was Diamonds. Two Wests played and made a 5 Diamond bid. At our table, East played 4 Hearts and made an overtrick. Not as bad, though, as the table where West played 3 No Trump and ran all 13 tricks -- seven Diamonds and six Hearts. With a Club lead, the one North should have made since it was his longest and strongest suit, 3 No Trump goes down two. Here it is:
South (dealer)
Spades A-9-4-3-2; Hearts 2; Diamonds 10-4; Clubs K-Q-10-6-5.
West
Spades Q; Hearts K-7; Diamonds K-Q-J-9-8-7-5; Clubs J-4-2.
North
Spades J-10-5; Hearts 10-8-4-3; Diamonds 6-2; Clubs A-9-7-3.
East
Spades K-8-7-6; Hearts A-Q-J-9-6-5; Diamonds A-3; Clubs 8.
To complete our knee-scraping, the round finished with East-West making two overtricks on a 3 No Trump contract. Bottom board. Nobody else in No Trump got overtricks.
Actually, Selina forgot that we tripped up just as badly in the very first round. She opened a Spade and I was holding a 17-point No Trump hand. We arrived at 6 Spades, then wound up being the only North-South who bid the slam and didn't make it.
At the Buffalo Fall Sectional last year, the good Dr. Saleh Fetouh greeted me with the news that he had just reached 10,000 master points. If all of his points are properly aligned, that would make him a Platinum Life Master. Or maybe a Grand Life Master, if he's won in a high-level event like the Bermuda Bowl.
It's highly unlikely that I will ever reach that exalted level, even at the rate of 1,000 points per year, like Saleh in 2024. Even the next ACBL level, Sapphire Life Master, will take 3,500 points. And not just any points. It would take 700 silver, red, gold or platinum points, half of them gold or platinum. That's a tall order. I have only 102.89 gold points and no platinum points whatsoever. I'd have to become a tournament rat to get those.
However, I'll give a little cheer when I reach a little bitty milestone this year – 3,000 points. In tournaments, that's the dividing line between the A and the B stratifications. Since I usually play with partners with fewer points, I might still be in B if those games where the directors average us out. If they don't, we'll be swimming with the barracudas.
In truth, in my current state of skill and the time I can devote to playing this best-of-all-possible games, I'll be happy to chalk up a couple points a month, like I did in 2024. Lo and behold, that's happened already. At our first two Friday games at the Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., club, my Canadian partner Selina and I finished second and third overall, 66.82% and 58.68% respectively, good for 1.21 and 0.73 points.
Add to that our single online excursion into Okbridge, where we saw all the same folks we saw last time we played there in October. It can be a tough crowd, so we were overjoyed to finish sixth out of 33 pairs in a 12-board ACBL game with 57.21%. That got us another 0.54 of a point.
Can New Year's resolutions really be resolute? We'll find out here in 2025 as I try to revive my posts on this-here bridge blog.
First, let's consider one of my other resolutions – making it to the tables, real and virtual. It's a modest goal, an average of once a week. So far, so good – three times in three weeks, once virtual and twice face-to-face.
Nevertheless, how often that happens depends on circumstances beyond my control, like medical appointments and whether I've got a partner. Fridays should be constant. That's when I venture across the border to join my Canadian partner at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines or at the spiffy Community Centre in Niagara-on-the-Lake. But last year she had a lingering health crisis and that kept us apart for several months.
If the fates allow, the next two weeks promise to be above par. I'm booked with my Canadian partner for all three days of the Niagara Sectional Tournament in St. Catharines on Super Bowl weekend. And next week there's Friday again at NOTL and Saturday at the monthly special game at the Buffalo Bridge Center.
Somebody at NOTL asked me yesterday why I don't play more often in Buffalo. Alas, with nearly 3,000 master points, I can only do the open games and the Buffalo Bridge Center has just two of them – Wednesday and Friday. And Wednesday's out. I work.
