Bridge Blog 1160: Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

What’s the difference between earning master points and finishing dead last? Near as I can figure from reviewing the 24 boards in Friday’s game at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Bridge Club, it took just five of those 24 boards to seal our fate at the bottom. With 51.5 match points in a seven-table game, we came in at 42.92%. Had those five boards turned out differently, by my estimate, we could have collected an extra 15 match points or so and wound up in second place North-South.

Board 4. Selina doesn’t like to rebid her six-card suits, which cooked us here. She’s got Diamonds. I have six Hearts, five Spades. High cards in both those suits are Jacks. At 3 No Trump, she’s down four. At 3 Diamonds, it’s down one, which would have given us 2.5 more match points.

Board 9. Bad sacrifice on my part, pushing Selina to 4 Spades, which opponent Susan Hawes doubles because she’s holding five of them (her partner is void). If they play at 4 Hearts, they’re down one. Plus 4 match points for us if I pass.

Board 14. Selina opens 1 Diamond, I bid 2 Clubs with six of them, she bids 2 Spades. I’m holding A-J-9-2 in Spades. Why don’t I raise to 3 Spades? She would go to 4. It makes 5 Spades and would give us an extra 1.5 match points.

Board 20. Another bottom at 5 Hearts doubled vulnerable, down three. Blame me for the bad minus 800 sacrifice. Down two, minus 500, would have been a top. Down three also would have been a top if any of the other East-Wests had bid their 6 Diamond or 6 Spade slams. So it could've been 5 match points for us instead of zero if the stars aligned.

Board 24. I open 1 Diamond. Selina responds 1 Heart. Holding 4 Spades and a relatively balanced 13-point hand, I go 1 No Trump. Selina has 10 high card points and A-Q-4 in Spades and can’t resist raising to 3 No Trump. The math is not in our favor. Her cards come down and I see 3 Spade tricks, 2 Club tricks, a Diamond and a Heart. There's no way to expand on that. Down two. We’re 2.5 match points better at 1 No Trump.

Bridge Blog 1159-A: Way Overdue

A week ago, at the Buffalo Summer Sectional Tournament, none other than one of my bridge idols, Saleh Fetouh, remarked that I hadn't posted anything here on the Bridge Blog in a long time. 

I had to concede that he's right, though not from a lack of bridge thoughts bouncing around my brain. There just hasn't been enough of a break in the parade of other obligations to write them out. 

By maybe here, having taken off from work for the past seven days for my Birthday Week, there's a window of opportunity. Let's start with the one that's the longest overdue and most nagging.

Bridge Blog 1159-B: A sure thing

It's the Longest Day game on Saturday, June 21, at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. Board 12. The opponents are our old friends Chandi Jayawardena and Wybren "Weeb" Hoogland. We manage to drive Chandi, sitting West, up to 4 Diamonds, thanks to a Heart bid by my partner, Selina, which I boosted to the 3-level.

I have a flat and mediocre hand, three three-card suits topped by Jacks, but my Diamonds are sparkling: K-Q-J-10. I've got three tricks in Diamonds. Partner surely has one more somewhere for that bid of hers. I double. Hearts are led, but the Ace belongs to Weeb and it's a singleton. 

We get nothing more than my three Diamonds. Plus 510 for the opponents. Bottom board for us. When I mention it to Saleh Fetouh, he shrugs. "It happens," he says.

Bridge Blog 1159-C: Busted bonanza

That Longest Day game would have paid off handsomely in master points if we had been on the ball. We're in the B strat, so all we needed to collect 2.30 points for the top of B was 55%, which is well within our wheelhouse on our good days. 

Not this time. Even if we'd succeeded in the busted double, we wouldn't have come close to scratching. As it was, we were next to last North-South with 38.19%, one of our most wretched recent results.

Bridge Blog 1159-D: No regrets? Well, not too many

Despite our sorry showing on The Longest Day, club play on shorter days has given Selina and me a string of successes lately. Since the beginning of June, our record looks like this:

June 6. 61.25%. First N/S at Niagara-on-the-Lake Bridge Club. Also notable as one of the rare occasions where we managed to beat genial game director Claude Tremblay and his wife Muriel. They almost always win.

June 13. 56.97%. Second N/S at NOTL, behind Claude and Muriel.

June 27. 45% with Lynn Hale, 11th out of 15 pairs in a Howell game at NOTL.

July 4. 48.50%. Fifth N/S at NOTL.

July 16. 55.21%. Second N/S at Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines. Missed first by 0.52%.

July 18. 55%. Third N/S at NOTL. 

Bridge Blog 1159-E: Let there be cake!

This year I revived my annual gift of paying the day's entry fees for fellow players at bridge clubs for the first time since the pandemic. And since I took the entire week off from work, I was free to treat the players to a free game at St. Catharines on Wednesday, July 16, which ordinarily would be a work day, and the folks at Niagara-on-the-Lake on my actual birthday, Friday, July 18. 

On Wednesday, there were 9 1/2 tables and the director presented me with a slip that said $342. For Friday's 7 1/2-table game, where due to a late start from home and an unexpectedly long line into Canada at the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, I arrived a minute before play was supposed to start, the tariff was just $140. That's Canadian bucks. 

So in St. Catharines, that was about $250 US, less than I anted up for some of those birthday games in Buffalo before the pandemic. At NOTL, it was $102. To my mind, not a bad price for a pair of happy afternoons.

Bridge Blog 1159-F: Do the Bridge Gods give birthday presents? Yes, they do.

On the very first board we played on Wednesday, July 16, at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, I was dealt this hand.

Spades K 9 3

Hearts A J 9 4

Diamonds A K Q 8 7 6

Clubs ----- (void)

It's Board 7. All vulnerable. I'm sitting South, as usual, and I'm the dealer. I open 1 Diamond, although a 2 Club bid, signaling a killer hand, might be more appropriate. Mary House, sitting West, passes. Selina may or may not have bid 1 Spade with this hand.

Spades Q 6 5 2

Hearts Q 8 3

Diamonds J 10 9 5

Clubs 10 5

Don Pratt, sitting East, does not hesitate to bid 2 Clubs. He's got six of them and 13 high card points. I rebid my Diamonds. Mary raises Don's Clubs. Selina raises my Diamonds. Don plunges ahead to 5 Clubs. I go 5 Diamonds. Don doubles. Feisty and full of myself on this occasion, I do not hesitate for a second. Redouble!

Mary leads the Ace of Clubs and I nail it with a trump. I draw Diamonds in two rounds. I lose the Ace of Spades (Don obligingly playing his Ace the first time they go around) and one Heart. The score? A nice round 1,000. Top board to start the day. 

In the rest of the room, three other North-Souths bid 5 Diamonds. One of them made an overtrick. They must have double-finessed East's Hearts. Another was down one trick. I'll bet West held up on the Ace of Spades, which I was fearing. At one unfortunate table, North-South wound up at 3 No Trump by North. East-West ran their Clubs. Down three. 

Bridge Blog 1159-G: Do the Bridge Gods give birthday presents? No, they don't.

No birthday bonanzas on my actual birthday on Friday, July 18, at Niagara-on-the-Lake. Every little victory was like pulling teeth. First hand I played, Board 6, was a 4 Diamond sacrifice. Down one versus Jean and John Roynon, an aimable but tough pair who could have made 5 Clubs vulnerable if they'd pushed it, or sent me down two doubled if I dared 5 Diamonds. It didn't feel good, but it was second-best board. 

Then Board 11 found me going for 3 Hearts doubled, not vulnerable, against two lovely senior ladies, Donna Williams and Marguerite Luczay, admirable for her long, long, long white hair. Down one. Minus 100. Was that really a top board? Yes! They could have made 3 No Trump, 6 Spades, 6 Hearts or 6 Diamonds.

So how well did the gods smile on me as I was turning 83? Let's get a little wonky here and count up the match points on all the hands I played. OK, I was declarer on 10 of the 24 boards. A top board was worth 5 match points. I won 30 out of a possible 50 points, in other words, 60%. Our final totals? 66 match points, 55%, third North-South. Not nearly enough juice to beat Claude and Muriel Tremblay, though. They finished first with 67.25%. 

Bridge Blog 1158-A: Cruel, crueler, cruelest

When I'm updating the totals in the masterpoint races in the Duplicate Bridge column for The Buffalo News, I routinely assume that if somebody doesn't bump their numbers up during a particular month, then they just haven't played. Could be sick, could have better things to do. 

Now April has come along and crushed that assumption. Unless I've forgotten some small sliver of success somewhere, I've finished with no points whatsoever, even though I've played weekly in Canada and even had an extra day for the Unit 255 special game at the beginning of the month. I give up, T.S. Eliot. You're right. It's cruel.

Bridge Blog 1158-B: Howdy, stranger!

I never know what to expect when I'm playing with an unfamiliar partner. Not that I mind, really. It's fun to get to know somebody new from a bridge perspective and I've had that chance three times in the past month or so.

I should have done well with Sue Bergman when I enticed her to join me in the Swiss team game at the Buffalo Spring Sectional at the end of March. She's been playing competitively twice as long as I have, even though she has fewer master points. She was a perfectly pleasant partner and wasn't distressed when a couple communication problems turned up. It felt like a good game, but it wasn't. We weren't able to lift up our less experienced teammates and won only one round out of five. 

For that special Unit 255 game in St. Catharines, Ont., on April 5, it was a Saturday, so I could play, but Canadian partner Selina Volpatti already had someone. She could arrange for someone for me, she said, and she did. Her choice turned out to be the supremely accomplished Ginger Grant, who coincidentally is the grant-writing master at a college in Toronto. Ginger and I got along great, but the results didn't reflect it. We wound up out of the money at 45%. Selina was first North-South. 

Last Friday at the game in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., I found myself sitting across a tan, wiry gentleman named Paul Roy, who had come without a partner. Selina paired us up so she could devote full attention to directing the game, which she needed. Paul, just back from Florida, where he golfs and bridges all winter, played smoothly, perhaps because we were on defense most of the time. In the end, we were sixth out of eight North-Souths, another 45%. If I'm sitting across from him again this week, we certainly have room for improvement.

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. 

Bridge Blog 1150: Dual citizenship

I am now a member of two duplicate bridge clubs on the other side of the border -- the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, where I've been on the roster for many years, and now the Niagara-on-the-Lake Duplicate Club, where my Canadian partner, Selina Volpatti, is directing for the next couple months. 

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

Bridge Blog 1149: Did we fall or were we pushed?

We fell down in our final round, partner Selina Volpatti declared this Friday  afternoon after we came in second North-South and third overall in the six-table Club Championship game at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Duplicate Bridge Club across the bridge in Ontario. Out of a possible 20 match points in the round, we only got 7.5. 

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. 

Bridge Blog 1148: Points, schmoints!

 

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.

Bridge Blog 1147: Resolute

 

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.