I walked into the Buffalo Spring Sectional Tournament at the Buffalo Bridge Center on Friday morning, April 10, with a horrendous losing streak. How horrendous was it? So bad that my 37.13% in the morning pairs game was an improvement. Dead last, but still better than the 31% I had with Selina Volpatti and the 32% I had with Rod Sumner in Canada earlier that week. Also not so bad considering that partner Judy Zeckhauser (pictured) and I had played together only once before. Better attuned to each other in the afternoon round, we broke out of last place – eighth out of 11 pairs North-South with 43.19%.
Things got even better for Judy and me on Saturday – 47.50% in the morning pairs. Two or three more good hands would have won us some master points. That raised our hopes for the afternoon game, which was interrupted after two rounds with 8½ tables by the sudden departure of one of the players to attend to his wife, who had suffered a bad fall. Instead of starting all over again, Brian Meyer showed his chops as a director by recasting it on the fly as an eight-table game and bringing it to a conclusion only a few minutes late. Meanwhile, Judy and I backslid to 42.54%. This time, though, we were only one percentage point behind the second-place North-South pair in the B strat.
Despite four games with no master points, redemption was sure to come in the Swiss teams game on Sunday. All we had to do is win one round to win some little scrap of a point. Plus my Sunday partner, another Judy – Judie Bailey – was a more seasoned player. Our teammates, however, were unknowns, both to us and to each other. Gerry Steenberge, who had played in the tournament on Friday and Saturday, was from the Rochester area. His partner Aleksandar Ivanov, a last-minute pickup, was the Bulgarian-born brother-in-law of Diamond Life Master Dian Petrov. Aleks hadn’t gotten the details about playing in Sunday’s game and still was on his way from his home in East Aurora when things started, not arriving until after the first hand had been played.
That didn’t hurt us, though. We romped to a 17-1
victory point win over one of the tougher teams -- Judy Graf, John Ziemer, Mike
Ryan and Howard Foster. We also took the second match, 23-19, over another
tough team – Kamil Bishara, Dian Petrov, Jay Levy and Fred Yellen – thanks to
two of my efforts on doubled contracts, a 6-Heart sacrifice, down one
vulnerable, that foiled an East-West slam, and a wildly distributional
5-Diamond-doubled overbid where I took 11 tricks in a lay-down.
After that, our luck ran out. For the final two
rounds, we were plunged into a round robin against two other low-riding teams. But
as often happens in round robins, we got a worm. Beating one of the other teams
gave us enough victory points to snag the bottommost rung among the
stratification winners – second in B. What did we win? Brian Meyer said he
couldn’t give us official scoring summaries right away because the results had
to go through the ACBL first. It took until Monday to find out. 1.71 silver
points.
In all, the tournament had a total of 68 tables, with
292.48 master points earned by 67 players. The winningest – no surprise – was
Saleh Fetouh with 15.10. Among his other achievements during the weekend, he
was captain of the undefeated top place Swiss team. I was tied for 51st with
Judie and Alexsandar. Gerry, who also had success in the pairs games, was 31st
with 3.96.
Sadly, it was further evidence of the declining state
of bridge in Buffalo. It wasn't quite as well-attended as the 2025 Buffalo
Spring Sectional, which had 71 tables and 74 players earning points. And it was
a far cry from the 2024 Spring Sectional, which had 99 tables and 101 players
earning points, and the pre-pandemic 2019 Buffalo Spring Sectional in the
Main-Transit Fire Hall social hall in Amherst, which had 153 tables and 165
players earning points.
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