Bridge Blog 371: Buffalo Winter Sectional Day 3

It was bad, bad right from the beginning. It took our Swiss team of Faith Perry, Ginny Panaro, Flo Boyd and me four rounds to break into victory point double digits. At that point, some of the leaders were in triple digits. Nevertheless, we were a C team and after lunch we rebounded, winning two straight rounds and reaching a somewhat respectable position. “You guys are doing goood,” Judy Kaprove cooed, coming back from a glance at the scoreboard.  Not really, but better than her team, I guess.

We lost our final round, though. Even if we won, we’d have been about 20 points short of coming in third in C. Even if I hadn’t screwed up those four hands that cost us about 15 International Match Points, we still wouldn’t have cut it. To match the team that actually did come in third in C (1.96 points) – Paul and Linda Zittel, Joe Rooney and Bill Boardman – we needed 111 points. As it was, we collected .52 silver points for our two victorious rounds. Total for the tournament – 2.13.

“Who’s that woman?” somebody asked during the lunch break, indicating a rather trim and attractive brunette in a purple sleeveless vest. Dunno, I said, but I think she’s Canadian. Sure enough, there she is in the picture of the winning A team on the Unit 116 website. The Gordon team. Her team. She’s Diane K.M. Gordon from St. David’s, Ont.

Bridge Blog 370: Buffalo Winter Sectional Day 2

The rich definitely get richer at these sectionals. And why not? The superior players rise to the top. Friday’s leading pair – Bud Seidenberg and Jay Levy, who had 8.38 first day points – added 3.88 more Saturday morning by coming in second overall. Saleh Fetouh, who’s played with more than one partner, has two seconds Friday and a first and a fifth place finish Saturday for a total of 13.93. Jim Mathis, who has more than 10,000 points lifetime, has added 9.19.

We lesser mortals settle for crumbs from the table. Celine Murray and I managed a 56.75% game in the morning session Saturday, mostly by playing defense, and wound up fifth overall in the B strat, but got better points (1.33) by being second East-West in our section. There were two sections in the morning – 21 tables.

In the afternoon, we took more chances and paid for it by finishing out of the points with a 49% score in a single section 15-table game. So here I am with 1.61 points after two days. To match the 3.68 points I got in last year’s winter sectional, our Swiss team on Sunday will have to come in at least second in the C strat. Yes, C strat. Faith Perry and I are paired with Flo Boyd and, I believe, Ginny Panaro. Despite my 1,000 points, we’ll still add up to just a C.

Meanwhile, hospitality Saturday matched hospitality Friday. More yummy cranberry bread. There was still some confusion about table arrangement, but not as much. Our lunch party at Le Metro in Williamsville included two players from the St. Catharines, Ont., club who suggested that so few Canadians were playing because there was so little publicity about the tournament. The ACBL website didn’t have anything more than a phone number for the longest time, they said, and nobody from Unit 116 sent any info over to them. Note to Unit board: Get some fliers and e-mails and web posts out for these things.

Bridge Blog 369: Waiting for a train

Here it is, the seventh of the month, and the ACBL hasn’t posted the final results for the 2010 Ace of Clubs and Mini-McKenney races. They've even put vague little notes on the website saying it's "being slightly delayed." Did the holiday mess things up or is there a glitch in the system? 

Bridge Blog 368: Buffalo Winter Sectional Day 1

          All the usual suspects were among the leaders after the morning session – Dan Gerstman, Jim Mathis, Bud Seidenberg, Saleh Fatouh, Chris Urbanek. They all were there and they certainly showed their superiority to us mere mortals. Aside from Chris Urbanek, Judy Kaprove and I didn’t run into the big guns in our 13-table section of the 25.5 table game, but we didn’t do much anyway – 47%, well below where we could get points. Looking over our successes and failures, I concluded that what hurt us most were those hands we overbid. There were quite a few of them.

          The afternoon found us slowed down by our wonderful lunch at the Falafel Bar and making mistakes. In my dozy condition, I mistook an Ace of Diamonds for an Ace of Hearts on one hand and steered us into a Heart contract that was way inferior to the Spade game we should have made. Despite all that, we had a better round – 49.29%. “Hey,” one of our East-West opponents, Dian Petrov, announced, “you won .28 of a point!” And he was right. We were sixth in the B strat in our direction in the combined scores for the two sections. Well, better than no fraction of a point at all.

          The winter tournament’s traditional site, the big upstairs meeting room in the Wick Center at Daemen College, is in the final stages of a between-semesters painting project, which means no curtains on that wall of windows. It was glare city during the sunny early round. Bob Andersen, who recently had cataract surgery, was wearing sunglasses.

          Aside from a shortage of places to hang coats in the morning, all the arrangements seemed in order. The cranberry bread on the breakfast snack table was especially good – no need to stop for my morning cowboy cookie if this keeps up. For the afternoon – a tray of cut-up fruit, which disappeared almost completely.

New unit president Betty Metz – a less authoritative figure than her predecessor, Judie Bailey – kept her remarks brief and to the point. Tournament director Dick Rasmus did his usual job without any hitches that I noticed. Well, one – the serpentine arrangement of the tables in our section, which caused some confusion in passing the boards and consternation among East-Wests wondering where they should go next.

Bridge Blog 367: Where's our results?

I just checked the ACBL website for scores in the Inter Club Championship Game on Monday (Blog 365) and the Airport Bridge Club isn’t there. Club manager Bill Finkelstein must have submitted them. Did they reject him because he played Boards 13 to 36 instead of starting with Board 1? There are no scores at all for Boards 35 and 36 in the tabulation tables.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the scores we would have gotten and added them up. Sure enough, there were a couple tops where I expected them, but our overall percentage is just a hair over 50% without Boards 35 and 36.

Bridge Blog 366: New Year's resolutions

Four things that I promise not to do the next time I play with Judy Kaprove, which will be on Friday in the Buffalo Winter Sectional Tournament.

1.                          Don’t pre-empt if you’re the dealer, especially if you have a seven-card Spade suit that starts out A-K-Q-J.

2.                          Don’t delay in leading a singleton Ace in defense.

3.                          Don’t forget how to signal point count when partner makes a take-out double. 

4.                          Don’t push to 3 No Trump when partner is showing 10 points or less.

       I did all of these things when I played with Judy at the Airport Bridge Club on Tuesday, but it was good to get them out and identified. All of them resulted in bottom boards, or near bottoms. Without those mistakes, we would have broken over 50%. As it was, we were 45.64%, 10th out of 12 North-Souths.

Bridge Blog 365: Out with the old

          Looks like all the Buffalo clubs I played at in December have shipped their results off to ACBL Central down South. Everything seems to be accounted for in my list of pending points – all 17.63 of them. That would bring my 2010 total to 287.02, with about 240 for the Ace of Clubs race, down from 309.90 (261.53 Ace of Clubs) in 2009.
          So I enter the brand new year with a career total of 1,035.52 masterpoints, which elevates me to a much tougher division in the national Ace of Clubs and Mini-McKenney races. My end of November totals, which got me fifth in Ace of Clubs and 76th in Mini-McKenney, would have put me in 39th place in Ace of Clubs in the 1,000-2,500 point division and off the list entirely in Mini-McKenney.

          I’d no longer be the top dog on the District 5 or Unit 116 levels, either. I’d be 10th in Mini-McKenney in the district, fourth in the unit. Ace of Clubs would be better – second to Mike Kisiel in the unit and the district.

          At least 2011 is off to a decent start. First game was Sunday. Arriving at the Airport Bridge Club without a partner, I was paired with Judie Bailey, with whom I came in first in the B stratification last Monday at the Whist Club. We made some great top boards and some grievous errors for bottoms and wound up with 54.17%, good for second North-South and .49 of a point.

Back on Monday with Usha Khurana in her last game before she goes home to India for month, we played in the Inter Club Championship game and registered 52.08%, good for second North-South and .42 of a point. Perhaps our score will perk up when it’s compiled nationally. We scored a couple tops that nobody else should touch – two overtricks that we didn’t deserve on a 4 Spade contract and a successful 4 Diamond doubled vulnerable contract (plus 710) that should have gone down one.