Bridge Blog 1200: Thou shalt not pass???

 

Rod Sumner and I were in a funk. We hadn't earned master points together in a coon's age and we sank to a new low – 30.21% – on June 17 at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. But things finally took an upturn on the following Wednesday, June 24. Rod even sent me a celebratory text message of sorts: "Much better result. 1.62% out of second place."

Actually, if we added that 1.62% to our 51.02%, we would have been third overall and first in the B stratification. Nevertheless, we hauled in 0.42 of a master point and it made me wonder how we would have finished if we had gone ahead and bid on the two hands where we passed out.

The first one, Board 18 against two long-term partners, John Marskell and Joan Soifert, was not our hand at all. Just 17 high card points between us. At every other table, East-West took the bid and went down, mostly in No Trump. Nothing we can do about that.

No such excuse, though, for the other one, Board 3 on the final round of the day against Kathy Morrison and Keith Heckley, Sitting South, I'm declarer, but I have only nine high card points. Pass. So does Kathy, who's sitting West. Rod, on the other hand, has 12 hcp and we're not vulnerable. With his holding, I would open:

Spades: A-9-6-3. Hearts: 10-7. Diamonds: A-K-9-8. Clubs: J-9-5.

If he opens 1 Diamond, I go 1 Spade (I have K-Q-7-4 and 10 hcp) and we play it at 2 Spades. Most North-Souths did that and made an overtrick. That would give us six extra match points, enough to end up third overall and first in B.

Fortune smiled again Friday, June 26, with Selina Volpatti at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Bridge Club. We finished third North-South with 52.98% and got 0.53 of a master point. But once again there was a pass-out. Good? Or bad? This time, not so clear cut. We're vulnerable, Selina is the second seat for bidding and she's got 12 hcp:

Spades: K-9. Hearts: A-K-4. Diamonds: J-4-3. Clubs: J-10-7-5-2.

She passes. So does East. If Selina opens, I have a bid. But after three passes to me, I don't.

Spades: Q-10-8-6-3. Hearts: 8-5. Diamonds: A-9-8-5. Clubs: A-8.

Elsewhere, North-South played it in Clubs, Spades and No Trump. It makes 3 Spades. That would have given us an extra 2.5 match points. Enough to make a difference? Not quite. We needed 3 to overtake the second-place finishers, Harold Nash and my good friend Rod. They bid it and made 4 Clubs.

Bridge Blog 1199: The long and short of it

 

The Longest Day was too long already after only about a dozen hands at the Bridge Center of Buffalo for my Sunday morning partner Judie Bailey. Only 15 more boards to go, I reassured her.

She thought it was the air conditioning, or rather the lack of it, that was sapping her energy. It didn't help that we were playing in an 11-pair Howell movement, which disoriented us and everybody else by taking most of us to a different table for every round. Plus we were one of the pairs that didn’t get a sit-out.

Nevertheless, Judie soldiered on through. When cool breezes began to reach us in the final round, she started feeling better, just in time for a total drubbing by Mike Ryan and Judy Graf, who gave us three straight bottom boards. We were at 56.77% when we arrived at their table and 50.93% when we walked away.

Amazingly, that calamity took us down only one peg in the final standings, from first in the B stratification to second. This being part of the District 5 Sectional Tournament at the Clubs (STaC), I was grateful to collect some fraction – 0.83 – of a silver point.

For the six-table afternoon session, fresh partner Florence Boyd and I sat North-South for the entire game and started out like demons. In our first set of four hands against Ruth Nawotniak and Joyce Frayer, we won 14.5 out of a possible 20 match points.

The thrill of that victory didn't last long. Next visitors to our table – Joyce Greenspan and Jo Nasoff-Finton – slapped us down with two bottom boards. One of the other hands was a pass-out. We never bounced back. Our final score was 44.17%, second from the bottom North-South, ninth out of 12 pairs overall.

Bridge Blog 1198: Bottoms up! (with an addition)

 

In this week's episode of NPR's "Hidden Brain," the guest, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, proposes a riddle to host Shankar Vedantam that sort of goes like this: If there is one lily pad in a pond (or lake) at the beginning of spring and the number of lily pads doubles every day, when does the pond (or lake) fill up completely with lily pads? 

Added note: What I forgot to say when I originally posted this was that finding an answer often involves looking at the question from a different direction. The discussion revolved around how the subconscious mind knows things that the conscious mind doesn't and that sometimes it takes stepping away from thinking about the original question so that the subconscious mind has a chance to take a fresh view. One example: Sleeping on a decision before making a final choice. Further example: I realized that I needed to add this explanatory note after I woke up this morning. 

About 16 hours earlier, I saw how thinking applied from a different direction could be applied to the final results of the Friday afternoon game at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Duplicate Bridge Club in Canada. Checking our final scores on the BridgeMate, our opponents said, "Oh, you're fourth." To which my first-time partner Harold Nash replied that he preferred to look at it as third ... from the bottom.

Harold is the oldest player at the game – he's 96 – and I marveled at how sharp and delightful he is. Like in Monday's game, another first-time partnership for me (see Blog 1197), we started out with the blessing of bad hands, which let us get used to each other while playing defense.

Unfortunately, the blessing didn't do us much good this time. We were 45% after the first round and 45.42% at the end of the day. In the final tally, when everybody finished playing, we had advanced to second ... from the bottom.

Bridge Blog 1197: Answering the call

 

"Canada," the screen flashed when the phone rang shortly before 10 a.m. Monday, just as I was getting ready to roll out of bed and mulling what to do after that. The woman on the other end of the line said that Myrna Mackey needed a partner today at the Bridge Centre of Niagara. Was I available to play?

On one hand, I could do yard work. Or else I could spend an afternoon at the tables in St. Catharine's. The choice was clear. Not only is Myrna quietly sweet, she's also one of the better players at the club. We'd never partnered up before, but I figured we’d work things out.

What helped, especially in the early rounds, were the cards. They were awful. With nothing to bid on (in our first three hands, one or the other of us had high card points in the low single digits), we passed a lot. What also helped was we were in tune defensively. Our opponents didn't get any tricks they didn't deserve.

We breezed along until the final round, when we ran up against Jane Jennings and Donna Fettes and won just six of 24 possible match points. Did that take the bloom off our afternoon? Not much. 61.34%. Second overall. We begin the new month with 2.48 master points.