Bridge Blog 532: Cleveland Regional II

          We had such a good start in the afternoon session of the Swiss teams game Friday. Even our loss in the first round wasn’t a bad one. Minus the one bad board, we would have won it. My fault. After two passes, I bid a 3 Heart preempt in the third seat, thinking to shut out the East guy, whose name was Lou. Trouble was, my hand was too strong for the preempt. Seven Hearts headed by the Ace-Queen, Ace-Queen-x of Clubs. No Spades at all. Lou steps up with a 3 Spade bid. Partner John Kirsits, who has a weak hand with three Hearts in it, passes. We set Lou by one trick. At the other table, Lou’s teammates bid 4 Hearts vulnerable and made an overtrick. Without that, we would have beaten them 11-9 IMPs, which would have given us 19 victory points, instead of six.

          We excelled in the next three rounds, though, winning them 14-11, 16-8 and 15-8. By the time we broke for dinner, we had 72 VPs and were tied for fourth in B, which would get us 2 or 3 gold points if we kept up the good work.

          Our good work put us up against good opponents in round five – Buffalo people, Mike Ryan and Bert Feasley. Yet we played well against them. After five boards, we made a 5 Diamond game that the other side didn’t and avoided serious damage when they went to 6 Hearts doubled, not vulnerable, to keep us from making a 4 Spades vulnerable game. We were up 9-3 IMPs when we played the final board. Mike Ryan went to 4 Spades and John, holding five good Spades, made a perfectly reasonable double. (The dummy and I had one Spade each.) At any rate, Ryan drew one round of trump, ran out four good Heart tricks, got a couple Diamonds and finally end-played John on the 11th card, obliging him to lead from a Q-8 of Spades into a K-10. Plus 790. I didn’t think it would be so bad, assuming that our teammates also bid 4 Spades and made it undoubled. But theydidn’t. They bid 4 Spades, all right, but Helen Panza went down two. That gave them 14 IMPs, beating us 17-9. Had John set Mike Ryan or if our teammates had figured out how to make 4 Spades, we would have beaten those folks.

          John was spooked and we never recovered. The next team shut us out, followed by Sally and Gary from Wheeling, W. Va., who fought us to a draw on four hands, then made game where our partners didn’t and beat us 9-1. Our bid for gold was over. In the final round, because one team walked out (was it those people who erupted in the corner during round five and were threatened with being thrown out?), we were pressed into a three-team round robin. We beat one of the teams and lost to the other. We got credit for half a win. Each round you won was worth .31 of a master point, so for the day we won either 1.08 or 1.09. Add that to our 1.79 from Thursday and we can’t be too unhappy, even though we didn’t get any gold.

Bridge Blog 532-A: Cleveland Regional II

          After the Swiss teams game was over Friday night, we spent our time in the hospitality suite munching pizza and debating how we should have played a hand where the bidding involved the New Minor Forcing convention. I’ve operated on the assumption that New Minor Forcing is the opening bidder’s way of checking for an eight-card major-suit fit. He bids a minor suit, you bid a major, he has three cards in your major suit and wants to determine if you have four or five of them, so he bids 1 No Trump. Then, if you have five of the major and 10 high-card points, you bid the other minor suit – the new minor – and, since it’s a cue bid, it’s forcing. The declarer is obliged to bid again.

          No, no, no, John says. The declarer doesn’t have to have three cards in your suit. He’s just bidding 1 No Trump to see if you have five of them and 10 points. Then he bids something. This approach is borne out by the commentary on the convention on the ACBL website. I’m wrong, although I like my method better. How did I come up with this approach? Was this one of Bill Finkelstein’s lessons? Was it one of his lessons that I twisted around and screwed up? At any rate, it screwed up one of our contracts.

John opened a Diamond. Holding seven Hearts (but not the Ace) with a void in Spades, I bid 1 Heart. He bid 1 No Trump. Since I had more than 10 points and at least five Hearts, I bid the new minor – 2 Clubs. He responded 2 No Trump, which sort of baffled me, since I thought we looked at this convention the same way. (The ACBL article says 2 NT “denies four Hearts or three Spades, maximum [strength].”) Well, not knowing any of that, I certainly doIn't want to pass. He makes 3 NT on the nose, but the hand actually makes 4 Hearts with an overtrick. His question: Why didn’t I bid 4 Hearts?

That was one of our misplays in the round where we were shut out, but we made worse errors to get there. Figuring that setting our opponents in 4 Diamonds would be better than getting set at 4 Hearts, I passed instead of bidding it. We set them one trick, but at the other table it was 4 Hearts, bid and made. And then on the next hand, I passed at 3 Clubs with an iffyhand instead of returning John to No Trump at game level, vulnerable, or in my mind, questionable. At the other table, it made 3 No Trump. Take away those two hands, which cost us 19 IMPs (21 with the New Minor Forcing fiasco), and we still lose, but only 7-0, giving us 7 Victory Points. Enough for gold? I’m not so sure.

Bridge Blog 531: Cleveland Regional I

   It's a good team, really -- me, Dotty May, Helen Panza and John Kirsits -- all life masters, about 3,500 points among us, so we were primed, despite our lack of sleeip for our first round of knock-outs in the Cleveland Regional at 1 p.m. Thursday. We run up against a team with 4,500 points from Ohio, kept it close through the first two rounds (three points between as at halftime), but a couple bad boards sank us in the later rounds. We licked our wounds at a nearby Irish pub and prepped for the evening single-round Swiss teams event.
   We're the 16th team of 16 in this evening game and our first opponens in these 6-board matches are paired with two of the best Cleveland area players -- the lovely Susan Stark and Jan Assini, the hottest-looking player in the room. They whip us by just 5 International Match Points. After that, we narrowly beat an Asian couple from Cleveland -- Sue and Lu -- and have a happy old time with a pair from Pittsburgh, Madeleine and Lessa, who are as loose as the club players back in Buffalo. We beat them only by one IMP.
   There are bonus points for the top four teams in the B strat and with the fourth and final round to go, we're fifth. We need a good game to make the magic circle and we get one in a hand where Kirsits opens 1 No Trump and I'm holding seven Spades to the King-Queen, four Diamonds to the King-Queen-Jack, a singleton Club and a singleton Ace of Hearts. The woman sitting West -- Florence from Pittsburgh -- bids 2 Hearts and I double for the stolen bid to transfer to Spades. John almost forgets the convention, but after a mninute or so, bids the Spades. I answer 4 Clubs -- Gerber. He bids 4 No Trump -- showing 3 Aces. That's all we need. I jump straight to 7 Spades. John has to play out the trump to make sure there isn't a 4-0 split that would beat us, but there isn't. It's a 1510 score, good for 14 IMPs (the Pittsburgh ladies' teammates stopped at 4 Spades, making 7). Our 19 IMP victory lifted us to third place in B for 1.79 red points.
   I write this from the business center at the Holiday Inn, while my teammates are celebrating up in the hospitality suite (which I'm told is sweet indeed, here in Cleveland/Independence). I stupidly left the power cord for my laptop at home and have about 10 minutes of juice left in it. An awkward situation. Thank god for this crappy Dell machine.

Bridge Blog 530-A: M.I.A.

          A fully-filled-out dance card, or in my case, a fully-scheduled bridge datebook, doesn’t guarantee that you won’t occasionally be a wallflower. Sometimes more than occasionally. This week it happened three times.

          On Tuesday, I showed up at the Airport Bridge Club and learned that partner Marie Suprinick once again wasn’t feeling well. Marie wakes up hurting and begs off on about 50 percent of my dates with her. Should I just not take any more dates? Well, Ah’m just a boy who cain’t say no. I haven’t the heart to. At any rate, substitute Ruth Hnath came in and we had a better game than most of the ones I have with Marie – 51.72%, .34 of a master point.

          On Wednesday night, my Thursday partner – Alicia Kolipinski – called to say she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t play. Unlike Marie Suprinick, she didn’t want to schedule a new date. She didn’t think she’d be playing for a while. I was crestfallen. “Hope you feel better soon,” I said and wondered if I should be sending her a get well card. Plus we had done so well in the ACBL International Fund Game last week. I was really, really looking forward to playing with her again.

          So club manager Bill Finkelstein called in his Thursday sub – Faith Perry, who’s always the life of the party. We had a great time together. We always do. Trouble is, we also both overbid. By the time we reined in our wilder instincts and settled into winning a couple boards, we were thoroughly out of contention. It was so bad that Faith figured we had a 20% game. It turned out not to be quite that bad, but our 40.88% was wretched enough to be dead last overall.

          Then, during lunch after Thursday’s game, my Friday partner, Nadine Stein, calls to say she can’t play. I’m dumbfounded. Is a date with me a curse? This time I’m paired with another partnerless player, Bill Regan, who’s not overly adventurous and therefore a good counter-balance to my intemperance. He was wondering what he was in for, however, after I pulled a not-vulnerable sacrifice bid on the third hand of the day and went down five doubled. We recovered, though, and came home with a 53.83% game, third in the B strat, .28 of a masterpoint.

Bridge Blog 530-B: Man in the mirror

          My past two weeks at the tables have felt like mirror images. Last week yielded a sub-50% game that earned fractional points, a better sub-50% game that didn’t, and that really big game with Alicia Kolipinski in the ACBL International Fund Game on Thursday, where we came home first overall with 61.61%, which earned us 3 points, maybe more on the district level. (I’m told the ACBL doesn’t tally these games up until the end of the month).

          This week I played five times – no golf games or medical appointments getting in the way this time around – with results that are surprisingly similar. This time there were two down days -- a dead-last 40.88% on Thursday with Faith Perry and a just-missed 47.42% on Monday with newbie partner Judy Zeckhauser. And there were two days when we got fractional points for showing up among the leaders – the 51.72% on Tuesday with Ruth Hnath and the 53.83% with Bill Regan on Friday. And then there was the bright, shining moment on Wednesday with Celine Murray, 59.52% for first-place overall in a double-point game, giving us 1.84 master points. Total for the month of May so far – 8.24. Maybe more, if Alicia Kolipinski and I got some district points in the ACBL International Fund Game.

Bridge Blog 530-C: Damned if you don't

          Last game of the day with Celine Murray on Wednesday, there are two passes to me and I’ve got a 10-point hand – five-card Spade suit headed by Ace-King and an outside King, Diamonds probably. The way I understand the Rule of 15 – 10 points + 5 Spades = 15 – I should open it. So I do. Celine then bids 2 Hearts. I have only two Hearts and no obvious responding bid. I pass. She goes down three vulnerable. Bottom board.

          I should have bid, Celine contends. Hers was a new suit at the 2 level, a demand bid. She had an 11-point hand. She thought we might have game. I apologized, but said I thought that, as a passed hand, she was showing me no Spade support and a big preference for Hearts. Plus, I was opening light in the third seat. Turns out she also had three Spades and figured that a simple raise wouldn’t have showed enough strength. If I recall correctly, other pairs made seven tricks in Spades, so we wouldn’t have done very well there, either.

          I’m still baffled by this one on Friday when one of my opponents, Margaret Miles, starts talking about a partner who did the same thing to her – passed, then made a 2-bid over her weak third-seat opener and berated her for passing because he was giving her a demand bid. Margaret, who’s been playing this game seriously a lot longer than I have, maintained that a passed hand has no claim to a demand bid and that if they bid a suit, that’s where they want to play it. She couldn’t remember who the guy was, but she didn’t want to play with him again.

Bridge Blog 529: Going wide

          I told our opponents in the ACBL-wide International Fund Game on Thursday that partner Alice Kolipinski and I had an uncomplicated relationship. Which was true. We didn’t do any fancy conventions, just played a solid, straightforward game.

As North-South, we were on offense more than defense and, as South, Alicia played more hands that I did. The good part was that we didn’t screw up very much. It felt like a good game and it was. We finished with 61.61%, first overall, netting 1.5 red points and 1.5 black points at the club. That more than doubled my total at the Airport Bridge Club so far this month.

Director Bill Finkelstein suggested that 61.61% probably wouldn’t mean much in the distribution of major wads of points on the district and nationwide levels. At this point on Thursday night, no nationwide or district tabulations have been completed, but now that I’ve looked into a couple club websites, I’m starting to think that we may have done something significant.

Only four clubs took part in the game in District 5 – Beechwood near Cleveland, where the only pair who beat us was Buffalonian Bev Cohen and her partner with 63%. At the Greensburg club down near Pittsburgh, nobody had 61%. As for the only other District 5 club, the one in Altoona, Pa., they don’t have a website.
          So just for the heck of it, I looked at clubs in Westchester County down near New York City. A seven-day-a-week club called the Bridge Deck in Scarsdale had one North-South pair at an amazing 70%, but nobody else was better than 61%. The Hartes Club in White Plains, however, had a really big game (35 pairs in four sections) and several big hitters. A pair named Halina Jamner and David Yates had a 74.70% game, earning 7.50 points at the club. Seven others came in between 61.9% and 69%.

Scores weren’t that high at a few Florida clubs I just looked at, though. Generally, only one pair was outpointing us in each game. Same in Toronto and Chicago and even the Honors Bridge Club in New York City, where there were 30 pairs, there was a 70%, one in the mid-60s and one which tied us exactly at 61.61%. So I suspect we may have captured some extra district points, if they’re available, but nationally? Finkelstein is probably right. We’re too low.