In November of 2024 two dates were circled on everyone’s calendar. The presidential election that featured Kamala Harris (after Joe Biden was convinced to stay on the sidelines) and Donald Trump was scheduled for Tuesday, the fifth. It was difficult to imagine a pair of candidates any more different than they were. Most supporters of each considered that the election of the other would be disastrous. The experts judged it a toss-up.
The other big day was Thursday the 28th, Thanksgiving. Sue and I had been invited to Burlington, VT, to celebrate the occasion with the extended Corcoran family, but we had felt awkward at the previous such gathering that we had attended, and so we declined.
The last regional bridge tournament on the calendar in New England was scheduled for Monday the 18th through Saturday the 23rd at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT. The Nutmeg State had not hosted a regional tournament since February of 2019.1 I had amassed lot of hotel points for IHG, the company that owned both Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza. During the summer I had unsuccessfully tried to use them for the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, in September. No such rooms were available. Since the dates for the Harvest Regional in Norwich had already been published, I immediately reserved a room for all five nights and paid for it with points.
Xenia Coulter.
Abhi Dutta asked me to play with him on the first three days. Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider were looking for teammates for the Swiss team games all week.2 My other three prospective partners were fellow members of the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). John Lloyd agreed to play in the bracketed pairs on Friday, and Eric Vogel committed to the Get-Away Teams on Saturday.
Xenia Coulter, who grew up in Ann Arbor, attended U-M, and lived in a town near Norwich, volunteered to play with me in the open Swiss scheduled for Thursday. Xenia and I had never played together before. We spent quite a bit of time going over the convention card via email. The HBC scheduled a special game for Veterans Day, November 11. We played together in that event and finished third out of eight, which was worth 1.34 masterpoints. I added Xenia to my list of partners, which at the time totaled 151.
Here, then, is a snapshot of my calendar for early November.
In addition to what is shown above, I also played in my regularly scheduled bridge games on the first two Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays at the HBC as well as the Sunday afternoon game with Sue. I also played in the two Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). In the week before the tournament I played Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday (twice), and the following Saturday. All of my preparation was relegated to the remaining three days.
The latest iteration of Covid was spreading fairly rapidly through the HBC. YL tested positive for Covid after the game on Saturday the ninth. Mike Carmiggelt. tested positive after the game on the tenth. I played against YL, but Sue and I did not play against Mike. We both wore masks because we had the sniffles. Other regular players at the HBC who reportedly had contracted Covid were Jim Macomber, Laurie Robbins, Lesley Meyers, and Bill Watson.
Wednesday, November 13: I never felt even a little sick, and by Wednesday my congestion was no worse than usual. However, Sue was much worse. She told me when I returned from the evening bridge game at about 11:00 that she had trouble breathing and could not sleep. I was very alarmed at this development. For the last few years she generally slept with a CPAP machine and supplemental oxygen. She asked me if we had any Alka Seltzer Cold Plus packets. I remembered seeing one in a drawer in my bathroom. I fetched, and she dissolved it in a glass of water and drank it.
I was already in a very bad mood. After playing two nondescript bridge games it occurred to me that I had come to enjoy the game a lot less than most of the other players. Almost everyone talked about the hands at the table, a practice that annoyed me greatly. People made the same old jokes, such as Eric’s “best for last” comment in the last round of almost every session, just to have something to say. I would have laughed if the remarks were original or funny, but I could not remember doing so even once since the lockdown. So, I had become almost completely a silent participant in club games.
Thursday, November 14: In the morning I drove to CBS and bought Sue Package of Alka Seltzer Cold Plus. It seemed to help, but she complained that it tasted terrible. I also picked up some groceries.
I had nothing of great importance scheduled for either the 14th or 15th. I am almost always worn out after the Wednesday night game. On Thursday I planned to go walking at about 2:00, but between shopping, naps and preparing supper, I never managed to do it. I had heard from Charles Schwab that one of my Treasury bills would mature on that day.
Friday, November 15: I sent out an email to the regulars at the SBC at around 8:00. It announced that there would be no more games in November and erroneously stated that the next game would be on December 3, which was a Tuesday.
I also did my cash worksheet for the rest of the month. I transferred a few thousand dollars from the Schwab account to cover the cash needed rest of the year. I discovered that I could not afford any of the T-bills that were available. I decided to buy a CD from Chase instead.
I did not find time to walk on Friday either. For the previous six weeks I had been reading a massive novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle that I had checked out from the Enfield Public Library. It was certainly one of the strangest books that I had ever read. It was published in 1969, when Nabokov was 90. The two main characters, who are siblings as well as cousins, converse in French, Russian, and English, with a little Italian thrown in. The main plot is about their torrid off-and-on sexual relationship, reportedly consummated more than one thousand times! There are also many subplots, and the setting is not on Earth (called Terra in Ada), but a similar place called Antiterra3. Despite the fact that Ada had been on the shelf for fifty-five years, no one in Enfield had ever filled out the little form provided for short comments at the back of the book. I rated it as 8. My comment was “Incomprehensible but awesome.”
I finished Ada on Friday and returned it to the Library. I checked out two new books, Pnin, a much shorter and more light-hearted novel by Nabokov, and Mrs. Osmond, the only “literary” novel by John Banville on the shelves that I had not read. I was surprised to see that Banville had also published a new crime novel called The Drowned. It featured both of his pathetic sleuths, Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford.
Before going to play bridge at the HBC on Saturday I took an antihistamine to assure that I did not need to cough or blow my nose much. I wore an N95 mask. My partner, as always, was Peter Katz.
I played pretty well throughout most of the game. We finished second for the third week in a row.
My most grievous error came on the hand shown at the right. I, sitting West, passed. If the vulnerability had been reversed, I might have tried 2♦. Tom Katsouleas bid 4♠, and everyone passed. Peter led the ♠A. I played my lowest club (encouraging). Peter continued with the king and a third club, which I ruffed.
I neglected to notice that Peter led the 10 rather than the 8. I had to decide between ♥10 and ♦A. Peter had, in fact, asked me to return a heart. If I had, we would have set the contract. It would not have helped us much because the only team that beat the contract also doubled, and we did not.
Sue finally felt better. She fixed Jambalaya for supper, but she complained that she could not smell it. I ate my serving, and I even had dessert. I had been constipated for a few days, but it in no way affected my appetite.
While we ate supper I washed three pairs of bluejeans and one sweatshirt. An hour or so later Sue moved the clothes to the dryer and set it for thirty minutes. I checked them when the dryer stopped. They were all still a little damp. I put them on for ten more minutes, and I noticed that the dryer’s drum was not rotating. I had to hang the garments on the shower rod and hope that they would dry by the time that I left for Norwich on Monday.
Juan Cole was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. His website was called “Informed Comment.” He specialty was the countries of the Mideast.
Sunday, November 17: I woke at around 6:00 on the morning after a good night’s sleep. Michigan’s football team had had its second bye week, and so I did not rush into my office to check the results on the Internet. I tried to think of everything that I needed to do before leaving the next morning for the tournament. Aside from packing, the most important item was to pay Cox Cable and the statement balance on my Chase IHG credit card. I had some tea and a red Delicious apple (4016) while I scrolled through the websites that I checked every morning—The New York Times and Washington Post, Doonesbury and Non Sequitur, Juan Cole, the Onion’s “opinions”, CNN, and Twitter.
I then sent out an email that corrected the date for the next game at the SBC. It was scheduled for December 4, not, as designated in Friday’s email, December 3.
After a while I had a hankering for some Bowl & Basket chicken noodle soup, an envelope of which was surely the best bargain available for $.495. Really! A box with two envelopes still cost only $.99. I always ate two bowls. On this morning, however, I could barely finish the first one. I felt a little woozy and very weak. At 8:30 I woke Sue up and immediately went back to sleep.
When I woke up an hour or two later I vomited. I drove to CVS and bought a box of ten pouches of Purelax, the store brand of polyethylene glycol 3350. I dissolved one in a glass of water, drank it, and lay down. I got up three times to go to the bathroom and each time I had a small bowel movement. I felt much better. However, the next time that I got up I vomited again. There was no way that I could drive to Norwich and play two sessions of bridge the next day if I could not keep any food down.
I called the hotel in Norwich and postponed my arrival until Tuesday. I let Abhi, Mike, and Jim know that I would not be there on Monday. For supper Sue fixed me a piece of chicken, some leftover vegetables, and two biscuits. I had no appetite. I had a few nibbles, but I uncharacteristically left most of it on my plate. I did not vomit.
My negative result is on top. Sue’s positive one is below.
Monday, November 18: I did not rise from bed on Monday, the first day of the tournament, until after 8:00. Sleeping that late was extremely unusual for me. When I woke Sue up she informed me that she had tested positive for Covid. I was not surprised. Her coughs had diminished only a little, and she was still quite congested. She also said that she could not smell the Jambalaya. Her doctor advised her that if I tested negative, I should get the Covid booster and the flu shot.
I ate two bowls of soup. I ate most of a sleeve of crackers over a period of a few hours. I took the second sleeve of Purelax. It seemed to work pretty well. I felt somewhat better, but I had little energy, and I could not concentrate. Although I did not vomit all day, I canceled my hotel reservations and let Abhi, Jim, Mike, John, Xenia, and Eric know that I would not be coming. So, I would be on a “staycation” until at least Tuesday the 26th.
Sue and I watched TV all evening. Our chairs are ten feet apart, and I wore my N95 mask whenever I was around her.
Tuesday, November 19: My energy was better, but I doubted that I could have mustered the power of concentration necessary for two sessions of tournament-level bridge. I slept most of the day, but I had no other symptoms.
In the afternoon I drove to ShopRite and Stop and Shop and bought almost $50 worth of groceries. The most important purchases were the restocking of my personal staples that I had allowed to get very low because I expected to be at the tournament—Caffeine-free Diet Coke, soup, brats, apples, and potato chips.
I tried to schedule an emissions inspection for Sue’s car for Wednesday, but no one answered the phone at The Mad Hatter at 4:45. They reportedly closed at five.
Wednesday, November 20: I tested myself for Covid right after I awoke. The result was clearly negative. Sue spent most of the day in bed, as she had been doing for a week or so. She could breathe OK, but she was still very stuffy and had even less energy than usual.
I drove Sue’s Subaru Forester to The Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Only one other customer was inside, and he was not there for an emissions test.
What a throwback this place was. Three very stoic guys came in and out. The one who took my $20 and key seemed to be in charge, but the other guy who stood at the cash register might have been a partner. There was no one under 40.
I began to suspect that I might have had a very light case of Covid when my nose was running constantly on Sunday. Sue’s case is certainly not light.
The seven remaining envelopes of Purelax.
Thursday, November 21: I still did not feel “regular”. I therefore drank a third sleeve of Purelax.
I made an appointment for a flu shot and a Covid booster at Walgreens at 3:30. However, the questionnaire that I filled in online asked if I had been in close contact with anyone with Covid in the last fourteen days. When I answered in the affirmative, the program said that I was not eligible for the shots.
The pharmacy it the all-brick area to the right of the last awning.
Sue called Jason, the pharmacist at Walgreens. He advised her to tell me to answer the “close contact” question in the negative and to then fill out and submit the rest of the form. Unfortunately, I could not find a way on the web page to add my patient info to the existing appointment, and so I made a new appointment for 4pm.I arrived at Walgreens shortly after 3:30. I explained the situation to the lady at the counter. About ten minutes later she administered one shot in each of my muscle-bound arm. I did not even feel the first one. This was different from the previous occasion in that she did not ask me to wait around afterwards for fifteen minutes to see if I had an adverse reaction, and she never asked for my insurance card.
It rained for the first time in several months, but Enfield received less than an inch.
The heater in my car was not working again. I had tried every combination of settings. Nothing seemed to work. This happened in 2023. On that occasion I took it into Lia Honda. After a few minutes they told me that there was nothing wrong with it. It functioned correctly for the rest of the winter.
Friday, November 22: I slept until 8:10. I awoke after a very vivid dream about driving in the snow. I was behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler that contained file cabinets. It crashed because someone tried to get an oversized load through a snow-covered narrow road and got stuck. After the crash someone drove off with my tractor-trailer. Incidentally, I have never driven a truck of any kind. I did drive a pickup in the army. I got into trouble when I moved it without fastening the seat belt. That maneuver involved a journey of less than 50 feet that began and ended in a parking lot. An Air Force captain chewed me out for fifteen or twenty minutes.
Both arms were a little sore when I woke up, but I was in no way impaired.
Sue ordered some food from Olive Garden. I drove there and picked up the bag.It cost a little over $50 with the tip. I parked in pick-up space #6. To my left was space #8. To the left of that was space #7. Go figure.
In the afternoon I received a phone message from Lynn Duncan, a bridge player from the Boston area, asking me to play in the Swiss in Norwich on Saturday. I wondered if a card for me was on the partnership desk. I was probably feeling good enough to play, but I could not risk attending when Sue was sick. She was feeling better, but she still spent a lot of time in bed.
Saturday November 23: I walked six laps (3.33 miles) in the Mall. Santaland was up set up very nicely in front of the old entrance to JC Penney, but there were very few walkers or shoppers. Haven Games was the only place that was busy. I probably could have done the remaining three laps, but I did not want to overdo it.
U-M defeated Northwestern 50-6. That gave the Wolverines a 6-5 record going into the final game with Ohio State. It also clinched a slot in a bowl game.
Sunday November 24: I walked 5 miles outside, two laps of my usual circuit. It was 51° when I started and 45° when I finished. I noticed that the pine tree behind the fence at the corner of School St. and North St. that suffered from the same disease as the one that had blown over in our yard had broken in two. A ten-foot tall stump remained.
It never occurred to me to examine the results from the bridge tournament that I had just missed.
Monday November 25: I walked 4 miles outside. The weather was very nice, but a bit of pain in the lower right section of my back led me to cut off one mile by turning onto School St. from Hazard Ave. Still, I managed to walk 12.33 miles in three days, a post-Covid record.
Tuesday November 26: The staycation was over. For the first time in more than a week I drove on the highway. There was not much sunshine. I resolved to make an appointment for my car’s heating problems when I returned. I was pleased to see that the price of a sausage biscuit with egg at the McDonald’s was still $5.25 (including tax).
Geof Brod.
I played bridge with John C. We did badly. I overheard Sally Kirtley tell Geof Brod that the attendance at the regional tournament in Norwich was not very good. She also mentioned that approximately 90 tables worth of people played in an online regional that ran from the 18th through the 20th. The tournament’s flyer has been posted here. Geof remarked that it had not occurred to him that the ACBL was competing with regionals. This had long been obvious to me. Incidentally, no other district had scheduled a regional during this period.
Just before supper I watched episode 7 of Reindeer Mafia.4
1. I started playing bridge at regional tournaments in 2006. For the next fifteen years a regional had been held in February in Cromwell, CT. One was scheduled for 2020, but only a week or two before the event the Red Lion Hotel was closed by the state for failure to pay taxes. The tournament was hurriedly moved to Sturbridge, MA, that year.
2. The flyer and schedule for the tournament have been posted here. It included no knockouts, and the only bracketed games—in which all participants played against people with similar levels of experience—were pairs games on Friday and team games on Sunday. I intended to complain about this when the Tournament Scheduling Committee reported at the Executive Committee meeting in Warwick in September. However, the TSC presented no report. So, I tried to make my point at the end of the meeting, but no one was paying attention because we were being pressured to play in the evening side game. I was just told that they wanted to emphasize the NAP and the bracketed pairs.
3. Antiterra was described as a sort of inside-out version of Terra. The two calendars were out of kilter a bit. Antiterra had banned electronic technology. The telephone system, which was invented by the deranged aunt of the two principal characters, was somehow based on water.
4. A description of this streamed series from Finland can be found here.
In “Pro-Am” events one player in each pair has a limited amount of experience, usually short of Life Master rank. Bob Bertoni ran such contests on Friday evenings at the sectionals sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association. As an … Continue reading →
In “Pro-Am” events one player in each pair has a limited amount of experience, usually short of Life Master rank. Bob Bertoni ran such contests on Friday evenings at the sectionals sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association. As an officer of District 25 he brought them to regional tournaments. The first one few were moderately successful. The last one before the pandemic, held in Nashua in June of 2018, was a huge success—21 tables! I attended the first Pro-Am, the last one, and all in between.
The last item discussed at the district’s Executive Committee meeting at the 2023 Gala in Marlborough, MA, was how to attract people to the evening games. At the last minute I, remembering that the Pro-Am had attracted so many players before the pandemic, suggested trying a Pro-Am pairs game. Susan Miguel, the district’s vice-president at the time, asked after the meeting if I would volunteer to “run it.” Thinking that she meant at the next tournament in February in Southbridge, I agreed.1
Well, the district’s February tournament was not held in Southbridge; it was in Mansfield, MA. Furthermore, it was not a real regional—it was limited regional with a simultaneous open sectional. So, there no Pro-Am was on its schedule.
There was a tournament in April in Southbridge, but Susan, who by this time was the president, wanted to have the Pro-Am at the June tournament, the Granite State Getaway, in Nashua, NH. I guess that I could have said no, but I did not want to go back on my word. She let me choose whether the event would be on Friday or Saturday. My wife Sue, who agreed to help with the project, and I selected Friday. I sent the first promotional mailing on Saturday, April 6. It is posted here.
While researching the 2016 event I discovered that one of the big attractions was the half-price entry fee. I emailed Sue Miguel to ask whether we could offer a similar incentive in 2024. Here was her incongruous reply.
This time we’ll charge the full amount BUT we’re going to make sure we have LOTS of things making it fun and are will be [sic]great to advertise.
For starters we’ll have special food. We can also offer raffles, prizes and a little trinket everyone can receive just for playing.
As soon as we wrap Southbridge, we’ll put our minds on it.
Let’s see if we can find a theme to run with…
This sounded horrible to me. The atmosphere at a Pro-Am is less relaxed than the atmosphere in an Open Pairs game, but the theme is well established. Pros are there to give tips and confidence; Ams are there to get better. Both are there to get acquainted with someone from the other group.
That’s the theme!!!
I’ll make an ad but I need a couple of days to regroup and recover.
Directors in Hawaiian shirts, themed party food and gifts. Everyone gets a lai [sic] at the door.
Can’t wait….
Anyone for bridge?
I had to wonder if she had ever been to a luau. Most people who vacation in Hawaii for a few days attend one, but no one ever goes more than once. The hula dancing and the juggling of flaming torches are rather spectacular, but the food is secondary.
When I told my wife about this scheme, she had the same reaction that I did: “Are they going to make people eat poi?”
Anyway the only way that I could imagine to connect luaus to Pro-Am events was that professional hula dancers in grass skirts often tried to train unsuspecting (and usually intoxicated) amateur tourists in the art of hip swiveling. I doubted that we could persuade many people at a bridge tournament to participate in anything similar.
So, I decided to keep promoting it as an event with interesting bridge and painless learning without emphasizing the luau angle. Several people responded to my first email. Two volunteered as Pros. I was able to match Curtis Barton up with the only Am who responded, Daniel Sheinen. So, counting Sue and me, we now had one full table and one extra Pro.
On April 29 I received an email from Stuart Showalter, who had been appointed editor of a newsletter that Sue Miguel dreamed up.
Sue Miguel tells me you could write a short piece for the District 25 newsletter concerning the Pro-Am returning to Nashua. I think something about 250- 300 words would work well. See the attached copy of our March issue. Your article could be along the lines of the “Bridge Fest Returns” article in that issue.
Thanks, and let me know if you have any questions.
I composed about 250 words and sent them to him with a bunch of photos. He thanked me, but I never saw a newsletter that contained any of them. Before writing this I looked on NEBridge.org for newsletters, but I found nothing.
On May 20 I sent an email to all of the non-Life Masters in the district with less than 750 masterpoints. It featured a photo of the hotel, some gold bricks that I found on the Internet, a full-width photo of the Pro-Am event in 2018, and a photo of a wahine throwing a shaka. I argued that Friday was the best day for a non-LM to attend the tournament. They could pick up some gold in the morning and afternoon at the Bracketed Open Pairs and get some tips from “pros” in a fun setting. It is posted here.
This email received quite a few responses. The one that I received from Sue Miguel was totally unexpected.
The countdown has begun to the Pro-Am. I can’t wait. Already have a date to play with Denise.
As much as we appreciate everything you’re doing to make the event a success, I have to remind you that the only person who is authorized to send out emails on behalf/for the District is Neil Montegue.
In addition, we added a new communications protocol to our governance routine…..ALL emails from EVERYONE (even me) need to be reviewed by Denise before they are sent. In this case, she would have pointed out you omitted Bridge FEST! from the list which is now going to create much confusion. Also, we already had an email scheduled to go out today. We promised our members we wouldn’t be over sending emails and we need to adhere to what we promise.
Let me know if there is anything you need for the Pro-AM and keep us in the loop about the level of BUZZ you’re feeling.
Thanks again,
I immediately crafted this response:
I was unaware of any such “protocol”. I certainly never tried to edit or approve emails sent by authorized others when I was Communications Manager. Nobody approved any emails that I sent.
The only BridgeFEST event on Friday is the bracketed pairs, which I definitely highlighted (although I did not use the term because I sent the email to all “Ams”, some of whom would presumably not be considered “New and Advancing Players”). It is difficult to promote a full-price red-points-only event held in the evening at a regional. I expect few (if any) players to participate who did not play on Friday. The only other event on Friday is an Open Swiss that is unlikely to appeal to many Ams. So, the focus of the email was on the unique bracketed pairs and the Pro-Am. I mentioned the Hawaiian theme, but I could not think of a way to tie it in to the Pro-Am, and the best Hawaiian foods are fresh fruits and freshly caught fish, neither of which are likely to be served in Nashua.
I hope to send out an email to Pros by the end of the weekend. I plan to emphasize three things: the bracketed pairs, the pleasure of playing with “advancing players” (unless you are married to one), and a wager that Sue and I have made as to whether more pros or ams will attend. I will send it to you and Denise for approval.
I had a few positive responses to the first email. One person asked if the pros could play for free. I matched up one pro with an am.
I did not mention that if she had told me that I would not be able to do my own marketing, I would never have agreed to manage this process in the first place. For the last couple of years I have submitted my emails for the Connecticut Bridge Association to the unit’s Communications Committee. The only negative comments were from Esther Watstein, and they always encourage more “WOW!”
The email that I proposed was ready to go on May 26. Denise, whom I hardly knew at all, kept it a few days and then sent it back to me with much of it rewritten. I was frankly insulted. Who did she think she was? I have written scores of emails promoting bridge. No one has ever tried to rewrite one. One of her complaints was that it was redundant. Nothing was internally redundant. Did she mean that it repeated information that was available elsewhere? It certainly did, but is that wrong? Of course not.
I replied as follows: “This is lifeless.”
She replied:
I am not sure what you are stating. Most of your email has remained. The lei insinuations have to be taken out. Some of our members would be offended. Pls consider a happy medium and let me read another draft. I have offered to help. I am at the partnership desk every morning and during the break between games. I would be happy to discuss this.
She left her phone number. The last thing that I wanted to do was to “discuss this” with her over the telephone. I would be trying to persuade her that I had much more experience and knowledge about how to persuade bridge players than she did. What do you think were the chances of being able to do that?
I wrote the following: “I am not going to argue about this. Send whatever you want, but leave my name off of the bottom.”
What they did send, a few days later was the following image with no text whatever:
Please note that it does not say anywhere where this will be held or the date. The email address on it was mine, but the reply-to address was not. Every inquiry that I received asked where and when it was. I had to apologize to them that that information had not been included.
I would never have sent an email that used the word “kahuna” to refer to a bridge event. Since the word has religious connotations, I probably would have avoided it entirely. Also, I noticed that the definitions of the three categories had changed from what Sue Miguel had told me previously. I had relayed the (suddenly erroneous) information to a few people who had asked about the event. All of this made me pretty angry because it made me look stupid or incompetent.
I decided to compose my own email and send it using my free MailChimp account. I made sure to make it clear that it was my personal requests, and I used my personal database and account. It did not violate the dictum: “the only person who is authorized to send out emails on behalf/for [sic] the District is Neil Montegue [sic].” On June 7 I sent it to all Life Masters in New England with more than 750 masterpoints. It is posted here.
910 people (68.3 percent of the addressees) opened this email, an astonishingly high number. I received many very positive responses. Some people volunteered to be Pros. Others said that they would have volunteered if they were going to be at the tournament on Friday.
On Monday June 10 I received an extremely disconcerting email from the ACBL. I scanned it and decided not to let it ruin my tournament. I postponed dealing with it when we returned from Nashua. The email and my response are discussed in the section below.
Sue and I divided the partnership task into two parts—making sure that everyone knew about the event and matching up “Pros” with “Ams”. Before the tournament we primarily used email to achieve the first goal. At the tournament we primarily relied on word-of-mouth. Sue also was asked to give an impromptu speech at one of the “”Fest” events.
I decided that we should use index cards to keep track of the people who wanted to play. There may be other ways of organizing a Pro-Am. If anyone had ever documented the process, I was unaware of it. I bought a pack of 100 at Target for the astounding price of $.80. According to the rules that Sue Miguel published, there would actually be three categories. Group 1 was composed of all non-Life Masters. Life Masters with over 750 masterpoints were in Group 3. Group 2 was the other Life Masters. In actual fact the only player in the middle category who contacted me was John Lloyd. He played with an Am.
We filled out a card for each player. I bought a Sharpie with a very wide nib. On each card we placed a very prominent P, A, or 2 to designate the category that the play was in. I waited until June 7 to do this so that I could use the most up-to-date rosters for the ranks and masterpoints.
If both a Pro and an Am contacted me, I sent an email to the Pro and asked him/her/them to contact the Am. Only one Pro told me that “it was not a good fit”. Every other Pro contracted the Am in question and both agreed to play. By the time that the tournament started we had matched up enough Pros with Ams that we were fairly certain of at least a four-table game. I used a paper clip to keep the matched-up pairs together.
I had also heard from several Pros who reportedly were not only coming but were actively working to increase attendance. I expected to discover a lot of activity concerning the event in Nashua. When we left on Tuesday afternoon I was projecting ten or so tables, a very respectable turnout that would mean that we could have a standard Mitchell movement.
Sue had a different idea about contacting people. She asked me to provide her with a database of Ams that she could manipulate on her ancient Hewlett-Packard laptop. She had somehow obtained a copy of Word and Excel, but she had almost no idea how to use them. I made a CSV file for her, put it on a flash drive, and gave it to her. I then showed her how to upload it into Excel. She spent several days working on this, and I had to be available for technical support for this entire period to teach her the control keys, how to select a large number of cells rapidly, and the vagaries of sorting.
She planned to contact people whom she knew personally, but she apparently ran out of time. As far as I know, she only talked with one or two people and received no commitments. Still, she invested a great deal of time, at least as much as I did.
This poster was attached to the mirror behind our table when I arrived on Thursday morning.
On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings I arrived at a table in the information/partnership area of the hotel at 9am. I brought with me a resealable plastic bag that contained all of the index cards and the Sharpy. On all three mornings I got a cup of coffee and, except on the morning that Sue and I ate breakfast together, a bagel or roll from the concession area that was right across the hall from our table. No one ever approached the table to inquire about the Pro-Am game. It was a complete waste of time.
A better strategy would have been: 1) create handouts that explained the essence of the events and 2) wear something that identified me as the Pro-Am guy. I should then have gone out at 9:10 and 9:40, milled about with the players seated at the tables, distribute handouts, and inquire about interest and questions. This might have gotten a few more Ams interested in playing and would have made me feel less like an idiot for sitting idly at the table.
Meanwhile my wife never made it downstairs before the games started at 10. I was never sure what she did all day long while the rest of us were playing, but later discovered evidence that she had tried to put together her own list of who was going to play with whom on Friday evening.
Friday was different. By that time I had four or five unmatched Pros lined up and no Ams to pair them with. I abandoned the card system and instead kept two lists—one of unmatched Pros (memorized) and one of unmatched Ams (written). As soon as I learned of an Am, I chased down a Pro and tried to create a match. By Friday evening I still had a few matches to make. I was not too surprised when four or five pros came to the event unannounced. They were all friends of mine or friends of friends. I matched up as many as I could. In the end we had thirty-three pairs.
Even though someone allowed a pair of Pros to play together to avoid a sitout, I still had to send away a handful of unmatched Pros. The dismissal that bothered me the most was John Berry, a New Yorker who often attends events in New England. He had contacted me earlier in the week. I had given him a card with the name, email address, and phone number of an Am2 who had contracted me just before we left for Nashua. John tried both methods of communication, but he received no replies.
Three or four times I encountered an unmatched Am in the few minutes before the game I immediately sought out John Berry. On every occasion I could not find him in the chaos, and instead I placed them with the first unmatched Pro that I encountered. When I saw John on Saturday I apologized to him.
The Pro-Am game was a seventeen-table Mitchell. We played nine two-board rounds. Sue and I sat at table #2 North-South.
Every few rounds Sue Miguel interrupted play to present Hawaii-oriented door prizes to people. One went to the oldest player (99); one went to people who had been to Hawaii since the pandemic. I don’t remember the others.
The winning pair consisted of two guys from New Hampshire, Dan Maguire (one of the very first Pros to tell me that he would attend) and Graham Woerner. Note: When putting the finishing touches on this entry I tried to use the index page for the winners boards on NEBridge.org to find a photo of Dan. It had been deleted without warning.
I brought my camera, but I never felt like taking any photos. I didn’t feel like playing either, but I had committed to do so.
The “hospitality” consisted of two items. I tried the pizza that contained chunks of cheese and pineapple after the event when it was quite cold. I found it abominable. The other was chicken wings kept in a metallic semi-cylinder that clanged shut with a very large bang several times during the event. Neither Sue nor I tried the wings, but Sue noted that someone sitting South who had played the cards that she received must have. Her cards were sticky.
There was no coffee. I asked Sally Kirtley, the Tournament Manager, about this. She said that she thought that she had ordered it.
A renowned party-pooper, I found the interruptions and the theme-oriented food quite annoying. However, I must admit that everyone else seemed to be having a good time.
Here is the email that I received on June 10 from Gwynn Garthright, who identified herself as a “Marketing Specialist at the ACBL”:
Dear Mr. Wavada,
We have been informed of a recent communication you distributed to members of District 25 regarding an upcoming bridge event, which appears to have been sent on behalf of a club.
As stipulated in our Terms of Use, clubs are only permitted to use the personal contact information of members who have played at that specific club. We have received complaints from members who have not played at this club but nonetheless received your email.
Furthermore, while you are member of the District 25 Board of Directors, only district officers are authorized to use this list to promote a sanctioned bridge event. According to our records, you are listed as a teacher, and any communications you send to this list should be restricted to matters related to learning bridge.
Please remember that privacy laws regarding email marketing are very strict. When a member joins the ACBL, they only consent to what is outlined in the privacy policy and terms of use. Violations of these policies may result in disciplinary action by the ACBL, as per the ACBL’s Code of Disciplinary Regulations, and could potentially lead to civil lawsuits.
Note that merely having an unsubscribe option does not suffice. The policy explicitly prohibits contacting members who have not played at your club.
Any further violation of the ACBL’s Terms of Use may be reported to the ACBL’s Ethics Department.
Thank you for your attention in this matter.
I deliberately postponed researching an answer to this email until after the tournament. I did not want to spoil my concentration, and I did not want it to make me so angry that I was unable to enjoy anything about the experience.
I checked the “Terms of Use” that are currently posted on the “My ACBL” website that allowed me to download roster. Sure enough, the version dated September 2023 stipulated that only officers of districts and units could send out emails and that club owners/managers could only send emails to people who had already played at the club.
I sent this email in response:
It is hard for me to respond to this email since I do not know who you are. What does a Marketing Specialist do? I find it surprising that you would be involved in suppressing marketing.
Let me introduce myself. I have been a member of the ACBL for over twenty years. I belong to two clubs. I am on the Board of Trustees of the Hartford Bridge Club, which is the oldest in North America and the largest in New England. The other club is the Simsbury Bridge Club, an informal group that tries to scrape together a game on Wednesday evenings. I have been on the Board of Unit 126 for at least a decade. I am also on the Board of Delegates and the Executive Committee, the governing organizations for District 25, and have been so for several years. Prior to 2023 I spent ten years as the webmaster, database manager, communications chairman, and bulletin writer for the district. I also served as the email marketing director for the Summer NABC in Providence, RI. I have been on the ACBL’s Goodwill Committee for about a decade.
I apologize for the delay in responding to this email. For the last week I have been in Nashua, NH, at the regional tournament. My wife and I organized and promoted the Friday evening Pro-Am game, which attracted seventeen tables.
Over the last decade I have sent well over one million emails promoting bridge events in New England on behalf of both clubs, the unit, and the district. I think that it is fair to say that I actually invented email marketing for bridge events. Before I began downloading rosters in 2013 I read the Terms of Use very carefully and consulted with the officers of the district and unit to make sure that what I was doing was within what was allowed. I have never made a penny on any of these projects. Incidentally I have received hundreds of complimentary comments about my email projects. NO ONE has ever complained to me about them except for two people who thought that I should not have mentioned the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian companion, Tonto, in one of them.
I am not really a teacher. For two years I volunteered to teach bridge at two middle schools in Springfield, MA, with the late Bob Derrah. I received no pay, but they did honor us as the Volunteers of the year in the Springfield school district. I have mentored many newer bridge players over the decades officially as part of the HBC’s mentoring program and unofficially because I love the game. I am NOT a professional teacher, and I have never received a penny for my efforts in that area.
I have sent no emails for the unit in the last year or so. The only emails that I have sent for the district were to promote the Pro-Am game described above. I probably will never send another email for the district. It took over a year to find people who were willing and able to do what I had done for a decade, but they are now handling those areas. I sometimes advise them on technical matters, but they make the marketing decisions.
That leaves the clubs. I have promoted two events for the HBC. The first was a set of limited sectionals that were held at the club’s building. These one-day events were wildly successful, drawing 57, 35, and 50 tables of non-Life Masters. The other was to promote the beginner lessons that were conducted by one of the club’s teachers. I wrote to players within fifty miles of Hartford asking them if they knew anyone who would be interested in taking these lessons. Unfortunately, the response was less than we hoped to achieve.
So, I must assume that the complaint is about my emails to potential players at the Simsbury Bridge Club. I have no access to any list of players at the club, which struggles to attract more than three or four tables to its weekly games. So, I have sent invitations to players in the area. Does the ACBL really want me to stop doing this? I have received dozens of replies from people who received them. Nearly all expressed thanks. A few people asked me to take them off the list (which they could have done themselves with one click). I, of course, promptly complied in every case.
The SBC has only one game per week on Wednesday evenings. No club within driving distance conducts games at that time. No one could conceivably have been materially injured. Could you please provide me with the name of the coward who contacted you about this? In America people are allowed to confront their accusers. I can hardly believe that someone would take legal action about something as innocuous as inviting people to play bridge on Wednesday evenings. If he or she had contacted me in person–nearly all bridge players in the area know me–I am sure that I could have addressed their concerns. If they wanted help with their own marketing, I probably would have helped. I have done it several times.
I must say that the rule that clubs can only contact people who have already played in their games is profoundly stupid. How in the world does the ACBL expect existing clubs to attract enough people to sustain the game if they cannot use direct marketing? Moreover, what if I wanted to start a new club? I have been asked to do so in my home town of Enfield, CT, many times. Are you telling me that I would not be able to use my email marketing skills and experience to promote it? If your specialty really is marketing, can you not realize how inane this is?
If the ACBL decides to take civil action against me, I should warn you that it will not be lucrative. I have never received any income whatever from any of my efforts.
Emails like yours infuriate volunteers like me and often impel us to wash our hands of the bureaucratic nonsense that has caused appreciation of our beautiful game to to deteriorate over time.
I copied Bronia Jenkins, the ACBL’s Executive Director, Regional Director Mark Aquino, Donna Feir, Sally Kirtley, and Peter Marcus3.
The only one who replied was Peter. His harangue included an accusation that I was hostile to Hawaiians because I made fun of poi.
In the end I told Gwynn that I would never do any marketing for the district and that I would only send emails to members of the clubs to which I belong. Only the second bothered me; I had no plans to volunteer for anything at the district level ever again. The restriction on club mailing will, in my opinion, probably lead to the demise of the Simsbury Bridge Club. It may also have a severe effect on the success of the HBC’s limited sectionals.
Nobody with whom I have talked thinks that the concern about privacy is a reasonable justification for the ACBL’s restrictions on direct marketing.
This whole affair left me depressed about the state of bridge. I had a hard time convincing myself to get out of bed in the morning.
1. This was a mistake. I should have remembered the admonition from my drill sergeant on the very first day of basic training: “Never volunteer for anything.” Of course, he amended that a few minutes later, as described here.
2. Suresh Subramanian, of Action, PA, attended the tournament and received .55 masterpoints. I do not understand why he did not return John’s calls and messages. I searched through the results to try to figure out what event(s) he played in, but I was unsuccessful.
3. At first I thought that this might have been about weekly emails that I sent for the Simsbury Bridge Club. However, Peter’s vituperative response made me think that it was actually prompted by my “personal” email about the Pro-Am. Sue Miguel probably talked with Peter about it and the emails that I sent out promoting the Hartford Bridge Club’s fantastically successful non-Life Master Sectionals (documented here). I could be wrong, but it now seems clear to me that she and Peter ratted me out to the ACBL. She was probably upset that I bypassed the “protocols” for emails that she invented, and he still felt enmity about the humiliation that resulted from the brouhaha about Tonto. They both were, in my opinion, bullies.
By the end of 2023 I was thoroughly disgusted with the state of affairs in the district. The new president, Susan Miguel, and vice-president, Denise Bahosh, had ideas about running the district that were drastically different from the ones that Bob Bertoni and the people who had called the shots prior to the pandemic had promulgated. The new people insisted that every tournament should have a party atmosphere. They also seemed to think that the only way to induce new players to attend was to bribe them.
The final tournament of 2023 in Marlborough, MA (described here) included a meeting of the Executive Committee. One of the last things discussed was how to attract people to the evening games. In the closing minutes I suggested trying a Pro-Am pairs game in which each pair must have at least one non-Life Master. I remembered that we had attracted two sections of players to such an event before the pandemic. Susan asked if I would agree to tun it. Thinking that she meant at the next tournament in February in Southbridge and that I would be able to market it the way that I wanted, I agreed. The complete story of the 2024 Pro-Am is posted here.
Playbook NLM Regional in Mansfield, MA
The first event of 2024 sponsored by District 25 was called the Playbook NLM Regional. It ran from Tuesday through Friday, February 6-9. The site was the enVision Hotel and Conference Center in Mansfield, MA., that was formerly a Holiday Inn. The Harvest Regionals had been held there for a few years before the pandemic. The all-weekday schedule was, as I recall, devised because the hotel was not available on weekends. In late 2029 the Executive Committee, of which I was a member, held an email vote whether the Tournament Scheduling Committee, run by Denise and Susan after Mark Oettinger was forced out, should continue to “investigate the feasibility” of a gathering that included an open sectional and a limited regional for non-Life Masters with less than 750 masterpoints. The event was placed on the calendar without a subsequent vote.So much for democracy in D25.
The Gold Rush events drew nine or ten tables per day. The sectional drew more than twice as many people, but the five-day event drew approximately the same number per day as the sectional in Watertown, MA, in February 2023. Neither my wife Sue nor I attended. The tournament broke even financially.
The Executive Committee met on Thursday evening. I attended via Zoom. As usual for the previous three years I went away both disgusted and frustrated. The only good news that I heard was that Joe Brouillard had somehow been able to report that the district had over $147,000 in liquid assets. The next tournament would be a five-day (April 17-21) affair in the Wellsworth Hotel in Southbridge, MA. This hotel was once headquarters for American Optical Company and served as the previous site for tournaments under a different name.
For some reason the Executive Committee did not meet in Southbridge, but there was a Zoom meeting on April 2. Among other things this virtual gathering revealed the incredible news that New England will probably never again be allowed to host an NABC. That meant that the district now had roughly $150,000 in liquid assets and no fixed expenses whatever!
My overall reaction to the meeting was uniformly negative. We talked about everything but tournaments. The district’s leadership seemed to be getting distracted by all kinds of extraneous stuff from the role of running good tournaments for our players. I let off steam with a long email to CBA president, Bill Segraves.
I am so exasperated with the attitudes of the people on the Executive Committee that I cannot sleep. I think that I must resign for my own mental health. My wife was subjected to an hour or so of ranting after this painful 2.5 hour meeting. If I had my way, the word “fabulous” would be removed from the dictionary. I am so sick of hearing how fabulous and fun everything is in an activity that I see as falling apart.
Prior to Covid I played every day in nearly every regional. Up until 2016 D25 ran six regional tournaments, one hybrid event for I/N called the Rainbow weekend, and face-to-face qualifying events in both the NAP and GNT. Here it is April, and the only open event we have held since the crappy Halloween tournament was a sectional. The only thing scheduled before June is a “right-sized” tournament in Southbridge that has been (in my opinion) poorly promoted.
Bob Bertoni, our former District Director who died in 2021, implemented the philosophy of holding outstanding tournaments through a combination of good schedules, good sites, and good marketing. Since his demise we have lost our way. In my opinion the purpose of the NEBC should be to present as many good events as possible. Online events do not qualify for many reasons. As I have written before, the online game resembles bridge in some ways, but it is not bridge any more than softball is the same game as baseball. In fact the online game is, I am quite convinced, rapidly destroying the game that I and thousands of others loved before the pandemic.
I voted against moving the GNT and NAP to online in 2021, but no one else on the ExComm did. The decision was called a no-brainer by the acting District Director. I played in one online GNT qualifier and absolutely hated it. Now we learn that we are having a difficult time attracting players to the online qualifiers, and, even though the president admitted that “the bloom is off the rose”, the best that the ExComm can do is put together a subcommittee to come up with a suggestion. To me the solution is obvious. Bring back the Rainbow Weekend (or its successor, the Gold Mine) for the Flight C GNT and hold the others at tournaments. No one even mentioned this as a possibility. Maybe we would lose a little money. So be it. The context of all of this is that we have the incredible sum of $137,000 available, and it is “99% certain” that we will be deprived of the opportunity to use it for an NABC event in New England.
To me nearly every bit of the discussion at the meeting was away from the two critical topics — online bridge and really good tournaments. Maybe we cannot do much about the ACBL’s pact with the online devil, which will apparently be expanded, not eliminated. I cannot brook the way that the Executive Committee management now seems to be focused on so many distractions from its primary purpose of putting on good tournaments. We do not need committees and brainstorming sessions to find out how to do this. Good tournaments have good sites, good schedules, and good promotion. Maybe we will lose money if we go back to this formula, but if we put on really good tournaments, I suspect that the world will come to them. If I am wrong, then at least we went down trying to do what we were supposed to do.
On another subject: The CBA board needs to be notified immediately about the massive increase in the STaC charge. I don’t think that many board members will want to accept such a large increase in the amount the CBA spends on the few clubs who run these games. Certainly not Cindy. As I said, if the HBC has to pay the table fees, I think that it might no longer participate in the STaCs, at least in the open games.
Your proposal to give scholarships to people organizing bridge clubs in college may be a good idea, but where is the evidence that there would be a lasting effect? From what I heard, as soon as the enthusiastic organizer leaves, the program generally dissolves. That is what always seemed to happen in the world of intercollegiate debate with which I am rather familiar. I don’t have any evidence about bridge clubs, but it seems to me that if we are to invest in college bridge, the money might be better spent in subsidizing the clubs themselves rather than the charismatic leaders. Also, I think that it makes more sense for this to be proposed to the ACBL educational fund rather than the NEBC, the mandate of which is to put on tournaments.
I am serious about all of this. I am tired of being the lonely vox clamantis in deserto. I cannot stand what has happened to bridge in New England during the last few years. Maybe I should just spend my efforts trying to help the Hartford Bridge Club survive. The perspective of the people there seem to accord better with my world view.
Thanks for listening.
Bill responded to my email. We exchanged views on a few of the things that I mentioned.
Spectacle Regional in Southbridge, MA
A five-day regional was scheduled for Southbridge, MA, on April 17-21 (Wednesday-Sunday). I decided to play for three days starting on Thursday. On Thursday my partner in the Open Swiss was Abhi Dutta. On Friday I played with Eric Vogel in the 0-4,000 knockout, a two-day event. Our teammates were Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider. I commuted all three days. My wife Sue did not attend.
My experience with lunches in Southbridge had not been positive. I therefore made myself a sandwich before leaving on Thursday. I also brought a package of diced peaches and a bag of potato chips. On my way to Southbridge I made my usual stop at McDonald’s in West Stafford for my usual sandwich. It was very slow, expensive, and they added erroneously cheese to my sausage biscuit with egg, thereby ruining McD’s best sandwich. I resolved to try a different approach to breakfast on Friday.
I located my teammates. Mike and Jim played North-South. We lost our first round by 19 points. The second round was even worse, a by 21 point shellacking by Michael and Ulla Sattinger’s team. One of the swings was our teammates’ fault. On the other one I opened 1♥. Abhi raised. I had twelve points that consisted of three kings and three jacks. We were vulnerable, and so I did not want to pass up a potential game. However, when I counted my losers, I was astounded at the result—9! I passed and then took eleven tricks. Michael must have been more aggressive. They bid the game. He was right, but Losing Trick Count, which I always consult in non-competitive auctions when we have a fit in a suit, had never let me down so dramatically.
So, we were assigned to the second three-way. We won both of those rounds, one by seven and one by one. At lunch I ate my sandwich and some of the chips that I had brought. I bought a can of Diet Pepsi for $3. I did not eat my peaches because I forgot to bring a spoon. I put them back in my cold pack.
After lunch we won the fifth round by 14. We should have won the sixth round, too, but Abhi made a lead-directing double that diverted me from leading correctly after I took my only defensive trick. We won the final round by only two imps, and we needed an eleven-imp swing on the last hand to achieve it. One of our teammates’ opponents got mixed up and bid an impossible slam. They say that it is better to be lucky than good.
It seemed as if we had been playing badly, and I did not think that we had played any really good opponents. Nevertheless, we somehow ended up third in the Y strat and won 3.93 gold points even though our score of 63 victory points was 10 percent less than average.
On Friday morning I varied my routine slightly. I stopped at the McDonald’s in Scitico. The sandwich was very good and no more expensive, and the service was excellent. I also stopped at Big Y and bought a chicken Caesar wrap for lunch. I had also brought chips and the unopened container of peaches.
Eric was my partner for the Swiss that determined the four qualifiers for Saturday’s knockout. Fifteen teams competed in the 0-4,000 flight and eight in the top flight. In the old days our flight would have been split into three five-team brackets or at least an eight- and a seven-. They did not do it that way in Southbridge.
We won our first match by 17. We then lost to John Lloyd’s team by 5 because out teammates failed to bid a routine notrump game. We also lost the the third round when Eric did not look for slam after I opened 1NT. We would have lost that round anyway due to errors at the other table. We also lost the fourth round to Eli Jolley’s team. He and Judy McNutt had been our teammates in Marlboro in 2023. So, at the lunch break, which we ate with our tails between our legs, we were 1-3 and in twelfth place out of fifteen. We had almost no chance of qualifying.
At lunch Susan Miguel made a peculiar announcement. She said that there were actually two brackets hidden in the 0-4,000 Swiss. A total of eight teams, not four, would qualify. This certainly sounded illegal to me. Who ever heard of changing the rules at the halfway point of an event? Susan characterized it as “exciting news.”
In any case it did not help us. With more than 9,000 points we were surely in the top group. We would still need to pass eight teams in the three rounds after lunch. It seemed hopeless, but in actual fact we did better than that. We faced three teams that were in the lower “bracket”, and we defeated them by 19, 6 (Abhi’s team), and 19 imps. That brought our total victory points to 77.99. I did not think that that would be enough to qualify, but in fact only three teams had more, and one of them was in the lower bracket.
Tim Hill, the director, cut a deck of cards to determine the matches in the semifinals. We drew the Sattingers, who were the top seed. That was fine with me.
On Saturday morning I repeated the routine that I had established on Friday. This time I remembered to bring a spoon so that I could eat my peaches. I also bought a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke at Big Y.
Writing about the semifinal is very painful. Mike and Jim played against the Sattingers. We played against Lew and Linda Millenbach, who were friends of the Sattingers. Both couples lived in the Albany area. In our room it was a very friendly match, although Linda upbraided Lew several times for not following their conventions.
Eric and I played very well in the first set. On the very first hand he bid and made a slam that netted us 13 imps. Our lead at the break was 14.
I had great cards at the beginning of the second set, and I made the most of them. In the first five boards I bid and made two slams. They were also bid and made by Michael S. in the other room. However, on the sixth board Eric made the inexplicable play of ducking the setting trick in a game contract. That exactly erased the 12 imps that we had gained on the first and fourth hands. We lost 11 more on two hands in the second group of six, but we still had a three-imp lead in the match going into the very last hand, on which the Millenbachs made an overtrick on a strictly routine game contract that somehow Mike and Jim failed to find. We lost by four. I was absolutely crushed. I could not possibly have played any better, and Eric was also at the top of his game in the second set except for that one play.
The consolation match was against Richard Underwood and Joanne Schlang, whom I had never previously met. They lived in Voorheesville, NY, which is west of Albany. I was wearing the Michigan sweatshirt that I bought on Etsy.
Joanne announced that she had attended U-M between 1966 and 1970. I responded, “So did I.” She then told how she had been the absolutely last freshman admitted in 1966. I had nothing to add to that story. When they asked me what I studied, I admitted to “not much of anything.” That was the truth. She announced that she never attended a U-M football game. I told the story of how I only missed the very last one, one of the greatest victories in Michigan history, the upset of the team from Ohio State that had not lost in two years.
I got terrible cards for the entire match. I kept my attention up, but the disappointing results from the other room outweighed the mistakes made by our opponents, and—once again!—Eric and I lost both head-to-head matches in a knockout in Southbridge. Eric told me that he did not want to play with Mike and Jim any more (but he changed his mind later).
I felt like quitting bridge. If we did not play with Mike and Jim, with whom would we play? I had experienced great difficulty in finding partners and teammates since the pandemic. I was in a miserable mood for the entire drive home.
Sue went to a movie somewhere in southern Connecticut on Saturday evening. I bought a bag of fried chicken at Big Y and devoured a thigh and two legs while I watched Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks (an unpleasant experience). The chicken must have been under the heat lamp all day. It was not very good.
Granite State Regional in Nashua, NH
I could find no one who wished to play with me in the regional held in Nashua, NH, June 11-16. A few weeks before the tournament I asked Sally Kirtley, the D25 Tournament Manager, if she would be able to play. She said that she could certainly play on Saturday. I agreed to that and filled out Google forms for the other five days to indicate that I needed partners. Denise set me up with a man named Steve Banwarth, a resident of Nashua, for Wednesday. He only had 1716 points, which meant that he would have been better off with a partner who could play in the so-called Gold Rush Graduate (up to 2250 masterpoints) events, but our styles seemed quite compatible. We not only agreed to play on Wednesday, but on Thursday and Friday as well, assuming that everything went well on Wednesday.
My wife Sue came with me to Nashua, but she did not arrange for any partners. She exhibited a rather foul demeanor before and during most of the trip. Part of her attitude was attributable to her frustration about the Pro-Am, which has been documented in another entry.
Sue had a dental appointment on Tuesday, June 11. When that was over we packed up1 and left for Nashua at about 4 p.m. The drive was devoid of the horrendous delays that often occurred on I-495. Google Maps advised us to go through Worcester on I-290. We also evaded the interchange between I-495 and Route 3 by going through side streets in Westford, MA.
When we arrived at the Sheraton Nashua I dropped off all of our luggage at the hotel’s door. I then circled around and parked my Honda in the handicapped space closest to the main door. Meanwhile Sue went inside the hotel to acquire a luggage cart. We needed to check in together because, although I had made the reservation using my Schwab American Express card, the paperwork was for some reason associated with Sue’s Marriott account.
After we had gotten settled in to room #361, we dined (at my suggestion) at the Mexican restaurant that I had visited while participating in a tournament before the pandemic. It took us only a few minutes to arrive at La Hacienda del Rio on the Daniel Webster Highway.
I ordered a combo plate that contained a beef taco and a beef burrito. I washed them down with a margarita. I forgot to tell the waitress that I wanted the frozen version of my beverage, but otherwise I really enjoyed the meal. The service was good, everything was tasty, and the price was reasonable.
As usual, Sue ordered much more than she could eat. This time it was three flautas. Two were chicken and one pork. She complained that she could barely tell the difference between the two. She also had a margarita. That surprised me because she almost never drinks any more.
Our room was almost as far away from the elevators as possible. We were also on the opposite end of the building from the playing area, and so the stairs were not an option. Sue called the front desk and asked if we could move to a closer room. The staff eventually offered room #324, which was within a few yards of the elevator. However, by that time Sue had unpacked. I did not care one way or the other, but Sue had no energy left for the task of repacking and moving.
The hotel had been a Radisson on my previous visits. Now it had reverted to its original branding as a Sheraton, which had been purchased by Marriott International in 2016. We noted four significant problems with the rooms:
There were no microwaves outside of the lobby.
The refrigerators were tiny and difficult to open.
Getting in and out of the shower was difficult and dangerous for septuagenarians like us. Worst of all, the closet was in the bathroom.
This bizarre arrangement disrupted the normal protocol that Sue and I have used in hotels for years. It inconvenienced both of us.
I slept pretty well on Tuesday night. At one point I was awakened by the cacophony produced by the blower on the air conditioner, Sue’s oxygen unit, the CPAP machine, and the television set that she had left on. I located my earplugs and was able to get back to sleep within an hour or so.
I spent the hour before game time at a table near the partnership table in order to interact with people who wanted to sign up for the Pro-Am game on Friday evening. Only two signs were on the table at which I sat. One advertised signing up for the Bracketed Pairs (not possible yet); the other incorrectly announced the date of the Board of Delegates meeting as Saturday. There was no signage about the Pro-Am game.
Sue never arrived until after the game had started.
I sat at the table from 9 until 10 every morning. Eventually a very nice sign was affixed to the mirror behind the table at which I sat. A few Pros told me that they would play “if I needed them.” I matched one or two up with Ams who had contacted me directly or through someone else.
Steve appeared at the table at about 9:40. I called Petko Petkov, the only person for whom there was a card at the partnership table indicating a desire for teammates for Wednesday’s Open Swiss. It happened that he was just entering the building. He called me back, and Steve and I ended up teaming up with him and Bunny Brogdon after Petko verified that we would be a C team. Petko and Bunny had driven down together from Maine. We bought the entry and took our seats for the first round.
Our first opponents were another C team. We beat them by 20 imps. I suppressed my excitement. Sometimes it is not a good idea for a C team to win its first match easily. We were forced to play the team captained by Ethan Wood. Steve and I faced Adam Grossack and a client. Evidently the North-South pair at the other table made some reckless bids that Petko doubled. At our table we had a misunderstanding on one hand. I opened 1♦. They bid 2♦, which showed hearts and spades. Steve bid 2♠. We were playing Unusual over Unusual. We had not talked about the details, but the commonly used meaning of that bid was that he had at least invitational values and diamond support. Since I had seven diamonds headed by the AKJ, I jumped to 5♦. The client bid 5♥ and went down four. Steve actually had five spades and only one diamond. Adam called the director, Bob Neuhart, but he let the result stand. We won the match by seven imps.
The third match was the low point of the morning. We lost by two imps to a C team captained by Ann Johnson. I teamed up with her and her partner, Chris Pettingell, in the bracketed pairs game on Sunday. The margin was all on one hand on in which we defeated 3♥ by three, but Ann and Chris made 3NT. Either Steve or I should have doubled. If we had, we would have won by seven or eight imps.
The highlight of the whole event (in fact, the whole tournament) was the fourth round. We defeated Tom Gerchman’s team, which included Linda Starr and Bob and Ann Hughes. At the lunch break we were in second place, one victory point behind Ethan Wood’s team.
One of the best parts of playing in teams games is that occasionally your team finishes early, and there is time for conversation. I had given my calling cards to the other players. During a break Steve asked me what the designation “papal scholar” on my card meant. I bragged that I knew a lot about the popes—all of them. He disclosed that his first name was actually Cletus. He wondered if I knew anything about one of the very early popes, whose name was Cletus. I explained that Cletus had been removed from the list of popes at some point in the twentieth century. Apparently he and Anacletus, who for centuries had been listed after Clement I, were actually the same person. The current list showed Anacletus as the third pope after Peter and Linus. I wrote about this in Chapter 1 of Stupid Pope Tricks.
Then Petko made the mistake of asking how I got interested in Popology. I explained how I had listened to A.J. Jacobs talking on the radio about the famous trial of Pope Formosus (as I have related in this entry). Petko was rather familiar with the history of Eastern Europe. He verified that Prince Boris of Bulgaria tried to determine whether the Greek or Roman flavor of Christianity would best suit his country.
At lunch I bought a so-called Caesar salad (no anchovies) and a Diet Pepsi. I paid for both, but I left my can of soda on the counter. I went back after finishing the salad, and the man running the cashless cash register handed me the Diet Pepsi. The salad was edible, but the price was obscene. From my perspective it fulfilled the requirement of keeping my digestive system busy without supplying soporific carbohydrates.
We won both the fifth and sixth rounds after lunch. We were bumping along in second place. Unfortunately we got undressed by Greg Klinker’s team in the seventh round. At our table Cilla Borras and Alex Taylor bid and made three slams in the eight hands. Two were cold, but we could have set one of them if I had played my honors in a side suit differently. Our teammates only bid one of the slams.
We won the last round. We ended up third in A, second in B, and first in C. We had beaten both of the teams ahead of us. We won 4.73 gold masterpoints. What a great start for a new partnership!
In the evening I ate a roast beef sandwich from Sue’s grocery stash and potato chips from a bag that I had brought from home. I drank half of the water in the free bottle that came with the room. By the time that I had finished my little supper and dealt with my emails it was pretty late.
On Thursday morning Sue and I drove to the Dream Diner for breakfast. When we entered the restaurant only one woman was on duty waiting tables, but more arrived presently. I ordered a ham and Swiss omelette. Sue had hash and eggs. It was a pleasant listening to the pre-Beatles music while we ate.
We saw Al Votolato and Grace Charron sitting in a nearby booth and greeted them as we exited. I had played against them many times over the years.
On Thursday Steve and I played in the Open Pairs. Nothing else was available except the knockouts, to which our new friends from Maine had committed to play. The Open Pairs had a very large field of 31 tables that included several big names.
Steve and I scored a 55 percent game in the morning. That put us in fourteenth place (out of sixty-two) and sixth in B. The highlight was getting to play against Michael Dworetsky, one of my principal partners a decade or so earlier, and Joe DeGaetano, who was splitting his time between Florida and New Hampshire. The low point was the very last hand, in which I made an embarrassing defensive error against two of the very best players, John Hrones and Bob Lurie. They finished the session with a 70 percent game.
Our afternoon game was even better. We were East-West and followed the two newest members of the Hartford Bridge Club, Bart Bramley and Kitty Cooper2, two experts who had recently moved to Avon, CT. I remember two of the rounds. In one we played against Jane Verdrager, who runs a club in New Hampshire. She and Steve made arrangements to play together on Sunday. The other round was against Jori Grossack, mother of the two great professional players from Newton, MA. She thanked me for what I had done for bridge over the years.
We ended up in tenth place, fifth in B. That was worth 3.39 gold points. Lurie and Hrones won the event, a result that did not surprise me a bit.
Sue and I should have eaten supper together on Thursday evening, but she did not want to.
On Friday Steve and I played in the very first occurrence of an experimental event, the Bracketed Pairs. We were assigned to bracket #2, which consisted of nine tables that included a large number of players whom I knew very well. Steve and I played very well. I circled only one hand in each session. We had a 55.65 percent game, which tied us for third place.
We played the same direction in the second session as the leaders. After the last hand the BridgeMate reported that we had a 61 percent game and first North-South. So, we definitely had picked up some ground on the leaders. When the “final” results were posted, we were listed as the overall winners. However, an hour or so later a new score was poster, and we were second. The margin was 1.5 points, much less than one percentage point. We were happy with the 11.74 gold points that we earned, but first place paid an incredible 15.65 points.
After the game I talked with Steve about future tournaments. He said that he might play in the Ocean State Regional in Warwick because his son lives in Providence. I certainly hoped that we could arrange something. He said, however, that he does not like to stay in hotels, and he does not drive at night. Those are very limiting factors.
Sue and I played together in the Pro-Am on Friday evening. We did not do well.
We should have gone to breakfast on Saturday morning, but Sue could not get moving in time. I received a phone call from long-time friend and former partner, Judy Hyde. She and Ann Hudson (another former partner) had finished second in Bracket 2 of the knockout, and they wanted to team up with Sally and me on Saturday. I promptly agreed. Even if we did not do well, it would certainly be a pleasure to play with them.
We won our first match by 3 imps and lost the second one by 5 to a strong B team. In the third round we were hammered by Ethan Wood’s team, but we came back to win the fourth round. We were only a little below average, but we found ourselves in a three-way for the first two rounds after lunch. We were pummeled in both matches. We won the seventh round over Joe Brouilliard’s team. We also won the last match. Sally and I played against Eli Jolley and Judy McNutt. So, our foursome won four out of eight matches, but we finished way out of the money. We could hardly complain; we played against none of the best teams.
At some point on Saturday morning Sue hooked up with Shirley Wagner, a very nice person from Central Mass with whom I had worked on the Executive Committee. They did not do well in the morning session, but they improved in the afternoon after Shirley advised Sue to concentrate on “restraint”.
The Executive Committee meeting was painful. I was Connecticut’s only representative. Bill Segraves attended for a few minutes by Zoom. Denise served soda and cheese and crackers. The district has $158,000 in cash, but it can no longer afford to buy supper for the committee. Moreover, they expect the attendees to play in the evening games after the meetings.
Sue Miguel passed out a list of items that she and Denise had accomplished. She highlighted a new committee of unit presidents. They reportedly had a “fabulous” meeting on Thursday evening. This group is precisely identical to the Executive Committee minus Joe, Carolyn, Brenda Montague, and me, the four people whom she cannot count on for unthinking support.
Mark Aquino talked about his research on the previous sites of NABC tournaments. Because of his position on a committee he thinks that he might be able to salvage an NABC in Providence at some point in the future. It sounded quixotic to me
Sunday morning’s BoD meeting was more of the same. A lot of people from Connecticut were in attendance. At the very end I tried to draw people’s attention to the district’s huge pile of cash and emphasized that, in my opinion, some of this should go to supporting clubs. I didn’t think that anyone was listening. After the meeting I learned from the owner of a club that the drive from his house to the club’s site was not as long as the half hour that Steve claimed.
I learned that the Fall tournament will be at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT. The district had never held an event there. All three flights of the district’s NAP qualifying events will also be held there.
My partner on Sunday was Paul Burnham. We had sat at the same table at the BoD meeting and agreed on a convention card for the Bracketed Swiss. We met Ann Johnson and Chris Pettingell at the partnership table. I totaled up the points and bought an entry using four different credit cards. We were in the lowest bracket, but there was some pretty tough competition there. Evidently the less experienced players had not learned the lesson that the best way to get gold points was in bracketed events.
The bridge is mostly a blur. I remember that on the first hand I opened 1NT with only one small club. I was still discombobulated from the meeting and the chaos at the registration table. One of my spades was sorted next to the singleton club. I only went down one in an impossible 3NT contract, but miscues at the other table caused us to lose this and three of our other four matches.
At lunch Paul and I sat with Ann, Chris, and some other woman. The conversation was extremely tiresome. At no point did I have anything to contribute. Eventually Paul stood up and announced that he wanted to “take a walk.”
The only round that I remember rather clearly was the fifth, which we played against Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider. I quickly explained the WavaDONT defense to Paul. I needed to take at least a half hour because, believe it or not, they opened 1♣ three times in eight hands. On the first occasion I overcalled 2♦, which meant that I had diamonds and a higher suit. I had a seven-loser hand, which is my standard for this bid, but I had no time to explain that to Paul. After Jim bid 3♣, Paul, who had four cards in both majors, bid 3♥, which Mike doubled. I corrected to 3♠, which Mike also doubled. I went down four for -1100. Disasters ensued on several other hands. On the last hand I tried a 6♥ slam3, which also went down. It was the only slam bid my me or any of my partners during eleven sessions of play.
We won the last round to salvage a little respect. Our opponents were from Connecticut. Paul and I played against Marie-Jose Babouder-Matta and her husband Nadim. At the other table were Rick Seaburg and Gayle Stevens. They were shocked that, despite the fact that they had won only two matches, they were assigned to play against Paul and me.
The drive home was not too bad. Sue, who had played in one session of the Gold Rush Pairs, wanted to stop for supper. We could not think of a good place anywhere on the way back to Enfield. We ended up at the Longhorn Steakhouse, where we spent $100 on a lackluster meal that we ate while shivering in a booth in which the temperature was at most sixty degrees.
This was the best tournament, in my opinion, since the pandemic, but I still felt sad and somewhat bitter about the meetings.
Ocean State Regional in Warwick RI
I was hoping to use my large collection of IHG4 Rewards points to pay for my attendance at the district’s most popular tournament, the Ocean State Regional. The tournament was held annually at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Warwick, RI. It was usually held before Labor Day, but in 2024 it was scheduled for Tuesday, September 3, through Sunday, September 8. Unfortunately, although I tried to do so more than a month in advance of the tournament, I was unable to score even one free room. I immediately turned my attention to the November tournament in Norwich. I used points to buy four nights. IHG threw in the fifth night for free.
As I was I looking up the dates for the Norwich tournament, I was surprised to learn that the schedule (which can be viewed here) was a throwback to the simplistic schedules of 2021. I resolved to find out at the Executive Committee meeting whether this was a deliberate move by the people who design the schedules. I hoped that the dominance of open events was a temporary measure, and a real schedule would be forthcoming.
Jim Osofsky asked me and Judy Hyde to play with him and Mike Heider on four of the six days. Jim and Mike did not want to play on Tuesday, and they had already arranged to play with another pair on Saturday. I had not played with Judy since 2017. We agreed to play the card that she customarily used. We played together at one online game sponsored by the Northampton Bridge Club and did pretty well. We later cleared up via email and a phone call a few matters concerning the convention card that I had created and sent to her.
I received a bizarre email from Sue Miguel about the use of paper by the district. It stated that the Secretary of the Executive Committee would no longer hand out reports to attendees. Pdf files would be sent by email, and each member would be required to print his/her/their own copies. She also wanted to eliminate as much paper as possible at tournaments as well. This was supposedly going to create a greener ecology. In my opinion the best way to save paper would be to buy scoresheets with room for results of pairs games on both sides. The other side of the ones that they distribute currently have blank convention cards, which are almost seldom needed by tournament players.
Before I left for Warwick I made sure that all of the household bills were paid and that the invitational email for the game at the Simsbury Bridge Club was scheduled on MailChimp for release on Friday morning.
I consulted Google Maps to determine how long the drive to the Crowne Plaza would take. Its answer was one hour and forty minutes. I was ready to leave at 7:15 on Wednesday morning. I wanted to give myself some time to consult with Judy before the first round.
I went in to the bedroom to ask Sue where she had put my laptop. On my way I noticed that two HP laptops were on the table that she had been using for paperwork in what was at one time our dining room. She was using my laptop in bed. I loaded the rest of the stuff in the car while she finished what she was doing and powered it down. I had to wait a few minutes for her to complete this task. As usual, she could not make the program she was using do what she wanted and was cursing at it.
I left at 7:30. The remote for the garage-door opener in my car successfully opened the door but failed to close it. I had to turn the car off, use the button on the wall inside Sue’s garage to close the door, unlock the door that led from the garage to the house, walk through the house, exit by the door that faced Hamilton Court, lock it, return to the car, and start it. I then tried to engage Google Maps on my cellphone. It reported that Maps was “not responding”. I was pretty sure that I knew the route, or at least all but the very end. I finally hit the road at 7:45.
I had forgotten how unpleasant it was to drive east on sunny mornings at this time of the year. The sun was directly in my eyes for most of the trip. I wore my flip-down sunglasses, and I deployed the car’s visor, but on several occasions I was blinded for a second or two. Part of the problem was that the front window was smudged enough to diffract the sunbeam.
While driving on Route 190 I found my car stuck behind several trucks in Somers and three school buses in Stafford. One of the buses made several stops to pick up students. While waiting for its flashing red light to be turned off, I tried Maps again, and this time it connected. I later ran into a delay for construction on Route 74 in Connecticut.
I arrived at the hotel at 9:35. I had intended to stop at McDonald’s for my customary breakfast sandwich, but there was not enough time. After I had parked the car near the playing area I was unable to find my car keys. I looked everywhere in the vicinity of the driver’s seat. When I stuck my hand between the seat and the console I bruised my right hand in several places. I also checked on the floor in the back seat and on the passenger seat. I tried to start the car. That worked, which meant that the key fob was still inside the car. I walked to the back of the car, where I had set down my backpack and portfolio. I dumped everything from the backpack. No keys.
It suddenly occurred to me that it was pretty warm out. I remembered that I had worn my jacket when I left because the temperature was in the forties. After.it warmed up I had doffed it and cast it onto the carpet in front of the empty passenger’s seat. I went back inside the car and quickly found the missing keys n the jacket’s right pocket. I gathered my gear, locked the car, and went inside.
I was still pretty frazzled when I entered the playing area in the hotel and found Judy sitting by herself at a table. She had paid for my share of the entry. I promised to pay for both of us on Thursday. I got a cup of free coffee at the concession stand and then discussed with Judy a few items on our convention card. I realized that the card that I had inserted into my blue convention card holder was obsolete. However, i was able to locate the correct one in the portfolio that I had brought in from the car.
Twenty teams played in the Open Swiss. The field included many good players, but most of the pros and other stars were playing in the contemporaneous second day of the knockout. Our team won all four of its matches before lunch. None of the wins was decisive.
Sue had made a sandwich for me. I sat by myself and ate it with a handful of Utz potato chips from a bag that I had placed in my backpack. I also bought a 12 oz. can of Diet Coke for $2 at the concession stand and drank it. Cindy Lyall and her mother, Sandy DeMartino, came to my table, seated themselves, and asked me how the unitwide games worked in Connecticut before the pandemic. I explained them as thoroughly as my seventy-six-year-old memory could muster.
We also won the first three rounds after lunch, but we were only tied for second place behind a team that we had already beaten—the one that Cindy and Sandy played on. However, we had already played most of the A teams. We had a good eighth round against a so-so opponent, and we actually finished first overall. It was the very first victory in an open event at a regional tournament for me and (I think) the other members of my team.
Room #644 was was the second window from the right in the wing on the right.
I left the playing area before the final results were posted. I drove my car to a spot closer to the hotel’s main entrance. I then retrieved my suitcase from the trunk, went inside, and registered. They assigned me room #644, which may be the highest number that they had. It was at the far west end of the building. There were rooms beyond mine, but I don’t think that they rented them out. The Housekeeping headquarters was directly across the hall from #644 and beyond it was a small lobby that contained an elevator and a microwave oven.
I unpacked and then called my wife Sue. She previously had informed me that she would “probably” drive up to Warwick on Wednesday, but it did not surprise me in the least that she had not left yet. She described her encounter with a musician friend of hers who was living in upstate New York. Sue had offered to let him house-sit while we were at the tournament.5 She also said that she did not want to drive during the traffic of the morning rush. She would “probably” leave for Warwick at about 4 a.m.
Sue was duly impressed when I told her that we had won all of our rounds. I then spent a few minutes trying to get her to hang up so that I could meet up with my teammates in the hotel lobby. We planned to drive to the Bertucci’s near the airport for a celebratory dinner. We all ordered drinks. Mine was a Guinness. Jim, Mike, and I ordered small pizzas. Judy asked us to share a piece with her. I gave her one willingly, as did Mike. I don’t think that Jim did. Judy announced that two pieces was just right for her.
I asked Jim what he had done when he worked in advertising. He said quite a few words, but he never quite answered the question. I concluded that he had been an account rep, but he might also have been involved in planning. He said that he was quite good at helping clients launch new products.
On the return drive to the hotel I asked Judy what she had done in real life. She related that she had taught English for a while. She got married when she was very young (and later to Tom Hyde). She described both of her husbands as very quiet men. Somehow she got into social work, where she concentrated on dealing with parental abuse of children. On one occasion a man shot his own child in her office. It was a traumatic event for Judy. Recently she has become closely involved with the prevention of enslavement of children worldwide. This affirmed what I have always said: “Nearly everyone in bridge has an interesting backstory.”6
In my room I watched episode 5 of season 3 of the spectacular German television series, Babylon Berlin, on the MHz Choice website on my laptop. I had already seen it, but in the previous week I had discovered that I had accidentally skipped episode 2. So, I watched episode 2 over the previous weekend, and I had rewatched episodes 3, 4, and now 5. They made much more sense the second time.
I got this from the HBC’s library.
I took a shower and then read a chapter or so of Gene Wolfe’s Pirate Freedom. I had no trouble sleeping until about 6am. I then went down to the playing area, grabbed a bagel and coffee and sat with Jim. It wasn’t much of a breakfast, but it was free.
On Thursday our foursome was scheduled to play in the knockout. We found ourselves in the second bracket, which was our hope. We would have expected to get clobbered in the top bracket, which had only six teams.
Seven teams were assigned to our bracket. Many of them were familiar foes. We played in three three-way matches. We comfortably won the first two rounds, which gave us ten wins in a row. We were also in the lead in the two half-matches before lunch.
I retreated to my room and ate the second sandwich that Sue had made for me and some more potato chips. I drank tap water upstairs and purchased a Diet Coke to consume in the afternoon matches.
At some point I realized that I did not have my cellphone. In a panic I went back down the elevator to the playing area and searched around the table at which we had sat all morning. There was no sign of it. In the end I found it in my backpack. I can not imagine why or when I had placed it there.
This is the mechanical pencil that I brought in from the car. The rubber grip was mushy and eventually fell off. A month or so after that the metal tip broke off while I was using it. I guess that the grip was holding the pencil together.
I returned to room #644 to brush my teeth. This time I realized that I was missing the mechanical pencil that I had been using for at least five years. I never found it, but I remembered that two similar pencils had been in the console in my car for months. So, I retrieved a blue one that was sort of gummy and used it for the rest of the tournament.
We won the second half of both half-matches. However, our winning streak of twelve consecutive matches was ended in the last three-way. We were decisively defeated by Susan Mullin’s team, but we won the other match. That made us the top seed of the four teams that qualified for the knockout portion on Friday.
I paid for our entry, but I let Mike Heider pick our opponent in the semifinal round.7 He decided that we would play against Susan Liincoln’s team that we had defeated in the first round rather than Susan Mullin’s team that had brutally vanquished us in the three-way.
Sue arrived at the tournament at some point after lunch. She was miserable because she had totally missed the morning session. She blamed Google Maps for sending her in the wrong direction on a detour. While wandering around southeast Rhode Island she had been talking over the phone with her partner, Nadine Harris. When she came to our table I gave Sue a room key so that she could could bring her stuff up to the room.
Judy had other plans, but Mike and Jim asked me to go to a restaurant for supper with them. I said that I would let them know after I talked with Sue. She was very upset about life in general, but she was also an extremely sociable person. So, we decided to join Jim and Mike. We all drove to the Hibachi Grill & Supreme Buffet in Warwick. It was a pleasant and stress-free change. I had won ton soup and a plateful of other Chinese items. Despite all of her trials and tribulations Sue was her usual cheerful self.
On Friday Sue and Nadine decided to play in the experimental event, the Bracketed Pairs, in order to try to get some gold points.
On Thursday I noticed that Debbie Prince, whom I knew from the HBC and the Board of Governors of the CBA, was in attendance. Before going downstairs I placed my copies of The Book of Evidence and The Sea by John Banville in my backpack. On my way to get coffee I saw Debbie and gave the books to her. She was very happy that I did so. I did not know it at the time, but this was the best moment of my day.
Our team played the semifinal of the knockout. As Judy and I sat down to play against Steve Kolkhorst and Carl Wikstrom in the hallway just outside of the main ballroom, Sue came over to me and asked for the key to the room. I could tell that she was almost in tears.
The first set of the match was a disaster. Over the course of only three hands we lost a total of twenty-five imps. The other nine were OK, but we faced a deficit of twenty-one imps when we resumed play.
In the second through fourth hands of this match I had the following distributions: six hearts and zero diamonds, six hearts and zero diamonds, and six hearts and one diamond. These were “shuffle-and-deal” hands shuffled by three different players, one of whom was myself. I will try to remember this for times in which someone at the table claims that computer-generated deals are not random.
We came roaring back in the first half of the second set. Our opponents made a series of big mistakes, including missing a very easy grand slam. Unfortunately, Jim and Mike did not bid it either. Even so, we erased all but five points of the lead. However, they won most of that back in the last six hands, which were poorly played by our teammates. I made a costly mistake on the last hand as well. So, we lost and had to play in the consolation match in the afternoon.
The tournament’s concession stand is famous for offering hot meals at lunch. My favorite has long been the sausage, peppers, and onion grinder. I bought one and brought it up to my room to eat with the potato chips. I drank water from the faucet.
I was mostly a spectator in the consolation round against our old nemesis, the Sattinger team from the Albany area. I played what I called a D&D match—defense and dummy. I declared only three hands. We won five imps on those three, but we surrendered enough on the other twenty-one so that we once again lost.
As I was searching for Sue I encountered Sally Kirtley in the hotel’s lobby. She asked me if I was going to the Executive Committee meeting. The materials that I brought with me said that it was on Saturday, but her reminder made me realize that that designation had been corrected in a subsequent email. I had looked for a sign about it in the area of the partnership desk, but there was none there. There was a sign near the main entrance, but I did not look there.
The meeting was called to order by Denise Bahosh because Sue Miguel was busy with one of her dozen or so responsibilities. The only food served was cake for Sue’s birthday. Her Majesty arrived fashionably late literally shouting her own praises.
A vote was taken on whether the Executive Committee would support some amendments to the bylaws. Everyone supported the changes, which appeared to be trivial.
Mark Aquino, after a few minutes paying tribute to how fabulous things were, announced that he wanted to go easier on alleged online cheaters because the number of members of the ACBL was decreasing! The problem was that people are “flagged” by a faceless algorithm and then offered unappetizing choices. They are often choosing to give up their membership.
Sue did not answer my questions about Norwich schedule. Instead she complained that the ACBL would not let her run the events that she wanted to run or to advertise them the way that she wanted. Meanwhile I had to look at Sue’s bare foot on the chair that separated us. I felt very sad and frustrated.
The meeting ended with Sue Miguel ordering everyone to play in the night game without eating supper. However, she did not say, “Let them eat cake.”
My wife Sue and I ignored her instructions and ate.supper at the noisy Texas Road House. I could not use my ear plugs because Sue’s voice does not carry at all. I liked the baby back ribs but not the atmosphere.
Burt Saxon.
On Saturday we were in Bracket 2 of the Bracketed Pairs. We did very poorly. There were only two high points. The first came at the very beginning. I got to talk with Burt Saxon and his partner, Steve Emerson from Pennsylvania. Burt formerly was a columnist on the CBA’s bridge newsletter, The Kibitzer. I wrote to him once when he asked for experiences people had had with the Flannery convention. He published my note and responded to it. He also wrote often about his games online and in person with Steve. We also played against Burt and Steve at the very last table. I should have given him my calling card, but I forgot.
The other enjoyable moment came just before lunch. I noticed that Jill Marshall, who had appeared on the cover of the September Bridge Bulletin, was sitting near us. After the last hand I retrieved my copy and asked her to sign. She did so, and she told me that I had made her day. She even went up to one of the directors and borrowed a Sharpie to make the signature memorable.
Sue also had a terrible day in the Bracketed Pairs. She was in a very low bracket but still did poorly.
Sue and I ate supper at Chelo’s on Route 1. I had a Reuben sandwich and a tall Narragansett. Sue had some kind of seafood that she rated as below average. Sue took three boxes and a small cup of chowder back to the hotel. The refrigerator in the room was already full before she crammed her leftovers in.
I was not a bit surprised to discover that Texas creamed the reigning national champions at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. Evidently the game was not even as close as the lopsided score indicated. I watched a bit of Iowa State’s comeback against Iowa. Then I turned the television off and watched episode 6 of Babylon Berlin on my laptop.
On Sunday morning I woke up at 3 a.m. I went into the bathroom and wrote up notes for this journal entry. The last three words were “Sick of life.”
I fell back asleep at about 4:30 and did not arise for several hours. At 8:00 I packed, got ready, walked with my luggage to my car, and then went to the playing area. Sue’s plans at that point were unclear. She had apparently put in a request for a partner, but she did not get any responses.
The event was held in the hotel’s “pavilion”, which was actually a huge tent with rather easy access from the hotel. It was constructed about forty feet from the first floor of the hotel. Access was pretty easy.
One thing that the pavilion was missing was restrooms. The closest one was next to the hotel’s restaurant. That was quite a hike. Two rooms were also left open and reserved for players to use. They each had only one toilet. So, unisex lines formed there. This was not a popular arrangement.
The other problem was that it was quite breezy that day. One side of the tent was left open, and the tables near there, where Judy and I played the last round, were quite chilly. I zippered up my nylon jacket, and I was still cold.
Paula before she became proud of her white hair.
Before the bridge started I reminisced with Paula Najarian, who was my teammate in a similar event the last time that the tournament used the pavilion on the last day. I think that it was in 2009 or maybe 2010. My partner was Steve Smith, and she was playing with Marcia West. In the last round we faced Ron Briggs’s team. They were in first place; we were close behind. On the last hand Steve had bid a risky major-suit game that was impossible to make. He was slowly leading out cards in a side suit in hopes of getting an idea. I noticed that Ron had revoked on the ninth or tenth trick. So, Steve in fact made the bid, and, in fact, we won the match and the entire event! I have always used this as an example of great dummy play. Marcia and Paula were shocked and elated by their victory.
In 2024 our team was assigned to the third bracket of the Round Robin. Seven teams were in our bracket; so, we played six rounds of eight boards each. We won our first two matches, but then we lost two. We also split the last two. The only saving grace was that in the last round we soundly defeated the HBC team of Sally, Donna Feir, and the Hugheses.
Other things made me miserable, but I enjoyed playing with Judy. She indicated that she also liked sitting across from me. I asked her if she would be available to play in the regional scheduled for Norwich, CT, in November.
The drive home was even more brutal than the one on Tuesday morning. The traffic was not a problem, but the setting sun was awful.
One of the first things that I did after arriving home was to send to all members of the Executive Committee an email explaining my attitude about the schedule for the Norwich Tournament. Here is the text:
I don’t think that in the ExComm meeting I explained my concerns about the schedule for Norwich schedule very well. Here, for reference, is the schedule for the five-day event in Mansfield, the last time that the NAPs were held in conjunction with a tournament.
On Wed. there was a 2-2 schedule. Thursday started a knockout. Sunday had a three-flighted Swiss. Was this schedule illegal?
The Norwich schedule for the first four days is the following:
Monday seems to have a 2-1 schedule, Tuesday a 2-2 schedule (assuming the practice counts as a flight), Wednesday a 1-1 schedule (assuming the NAP does not count as a flight), and Thursday a 1-2 schedule (assuming the NAP does not count as a flight).
My questions are: 1) Is it not possible to have 2-2 or 3-1 schedules on one or more of these days? 2) Is it not possible to schedule a knockout?
Her reply struck me as nonsensical, but I knew from all my experience as a debater that it was foolish to get into an argument with the person doing the judging.
I hear what you’re saying and agree whole-heartedly if this were a normal, traditional tournament.
We need to realize it’s just not 2019 anymore. Not only that, this is a new tournament, in a totally new city/state on a new date AND new days of the week. Each of these changes tends to drop attendance, never mind having them all at once. Not only that, it’s the week before Thanksgiving. That gives us an potential problem on steroids.
To mitigate the potential damage and maximize our chance for success, we decided to go with a streamlined, simple schedule – focus on getting people out for the NAPs – and keeping them for the other events. This way the events will be bigger. We can’t afford to slice a small pie into tiny pieces.
We also can’t run mid-flight/GR events when we are sending people into NAP B/C. An encouraging the C to also play in the B and the B to also play in the A.
As a result, this isn’t your normal tournament.
It’s all about encouraging people to come ready for NAP, NAP, NAP! And stay for the rest. Let’s concentrate on making this fun, challenging and create buzz for next year. Once we live through the experience, we can expand our offerings where it make sense on non-NAP days. Not to mention, we’ll be on a more traditional Tues-Sun and well away from holiday schedule.
Hope that enlightens.
It didn’t. The remark about not being 2019 any more really frosted me. It is not 2021 any more either. I think that an organization with over $150,000 in liquid assets owes it to its members to provide a quality product.
A few weeks after this exchange it occurred to me that in previous years schedules developed by the Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for upcoming tournaments were presented to the Executive Committee by the vice-president, whose primary duty was chairing the TSC. That had not been happening recently. The schedule for Norwich would not have even been mentioned if I had not brought it up.
I dug up my copy of the bylaws and the proposed changes. One of the revisions was to eliminate the concept of a “standing committee”, which presumably persists from one regime to the next. One of these committees was the TSC.
I had resigned from the TSC during the lockdown because the meeting times conflicted with my only evening activity, the bridge game in Simsbury. I asked Sally Kirtley if the TSC meetings had been occurring in 2024. She replied that they had not.
It occurred to me that perhaps the bylaw revisions were devised, at least in part, to provide legal cover for the dissolution of the TSC. I wrote to Lois DeBlois, a past president of the New England Bridge Conference about the meaning of the term “standing” and how it pertained to the responsibilities of the TSC. Most of what she wrote back I already knew. She also sent me a copy of the bylaws, which, of course I already had. However, the one thing that really struck me about her reply was that the TSC was a really big thing in her day.
For a while I considered making a crusade of restoring the TSC to its historical function. I thought that that would be a good idea, if only to provide some kind of buffer against the kind of schedule proposed for Norwich.
I gave up on the idea because, in the first place, I did not like the notion of being the initiator of conflict. Furthermore, I was uncertain of the audience . The vote would presumably be taken by the Board of Delegates at a meeting of the Board of Delegates in Norwich. The last such meeting was attended mostly by people from CT. However, there was no guarantee that that would be the case. Furthermore, I would have to contact people and explain my positions. Why was the committee important? I could think of a few reasons, but none was exactly compelling.
I won’t be wearing this badge any more.
So, I decided not to pursue the matter. In fact, I decided to resign both from the Executive Committee and the Board of Delegates. Even though this essentially meant that I was abandoning my quest to save regional bridge from the demographic and technological tendencies that threaten it, I just could not face dealing with the current administration any more.
The Harvest regional was scheduled to be held from November 18-23 (Monday through Saturday) at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT, a hotel that had never been used for a regional tournament before. As mentioned above, I used my IHG hotel points to reserve a room for all five nights.
I had difficulty finding partners for the event. Eventually I put together a schedule that had me playing with Abhi Dutta for three days and with John Lloyd, Xenia Coulter, and Eric Vogel for one each. Our teammates for four Swiss events were scheduled to be Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider.
However, I was ill all day on Sunday, November 17. I eventually ended up cancelling my entire schedule for the tournament. The details have been posted here.
I had heard that the attendance at the tournament was well below expectations. I did not check before I started writing this portion of the entry. I was shocked to discover just how bad it was. The finals for the three NAP flights had 9 (A), 13 (B), and 4 (C) tables. The turnout for flight C was scandalously low. For as long as I have been associated with the district, we have never had such poor attendance at these qualifiers. So, the approach of a vanilla schedule did not help the NAP attendance.
The attendance at the regular events was hardly any better. Even the two bracketed events had only five brackets between them. It occurred to me that if I had attended, I probably would not have enjoyed it much.
1. Sue brought an unbelievable amount of stuff to New Hampshire. Her huge blue suitcase was filled to the brim. She also brought her oxygen unit, her CPAP machine, two canes, and at least three shopping bags filled with food, utensils, and all kinds of other stuff.
2. Bart and Kitty won more masterpoints than anyone in the tournament.
3. This slam was a move prompted by desperation. I figured that we were probably going to lose by a wide margin, probably a blitz. Unfortunately, our auction made it impossible for me to get much information about the possibility of success. I opened 2♣ to indicate a very strong hand. We played that his response showed “controls”. He bid 2♥, which betokened an ace or two kings. Since I had all four kings, I knew that he had an ace. I had two of them, and so I knew that we had only one certain loser. I also had six hearts headed by the AK, but only one outside jack. I needed to know about his queens and jacks, but there was no way to get that information. So, I just bid 6♥ and hoped for the best.
4. The InterContinental Hotels Group owns the Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels, as well as many other. I had a Chase credit card that provided reward points that could be used for free rooms at those hotels.
5. If this sounds incredible to you, you do not know Sue.Taking in strays is one of the primary aspects of her personality. Many of our pets were strays. Most of the rest were gifts from people who were desperate to get rid of them. I have often thought that Sue took me in when I was a stray. I certainly was different socially from the other actuaries with whom we worked.
6. Maybe not actuaries.
7. This was, rather incredibly, the fourth time in less than three years that I had been in the position of selecting an opponent for the semifinal of a knockout. Twice we had lost both the semifinal and final matches, but at the 2023 tournament in Warwick we won both matches.
My notes from 2022 are rather comprehensive. Tournament bridge finally started again in that year. My experiences at the sectional tournaments in New England have been recounted here. The events sponsored by District 25 (D25) are described here.
I decided to organize this blog entry chronologically. Several other major events that occurred during the year received their own entries. Links to those entries can be found in the appropriate month.
I was looking forward to 2022 with hope of a return to some degree of normalcy. Both of the bridge clubs in which I played regularly seemed to be doing fairly well, and tournaments were scheduled nearby at the unit (state), district (New England), and national level. Furthermore my wife Sue, my friend Tom Corcoran, and I had an exciting trip planned for May. Finally, although the U-M football team lost its last game of 2021 badly, it was a gigantic improvement over the team that won only two games in the first year of the Pandemic.
January: On New Year’s Day the temperature reached 50 degrees. I walked five miles outdoors with only one stop. I also found René Conrad’s (introduced here) LinkedIn page.
Ohio State was lucky to beat Utah 48-45 in the Rose Bowl. Both teams had great offenses and terrible defenses.
On the next day I received an email from René. I wrote back to her, but there was no further interaction.
On January 3 I brought the car into Lia Honda because the windshield washers were not squirting. The service guy told me that mice had chewed a hole in the hose. He put in a new one and advised me to put traps in the garage in which the car was stored.
On the morning of the 4th I used the Dealer4 machine at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) for the Wednesday evening game at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). I encountered no problems that I could not immediately resolve. On the way home from bridge I bought some mouse traps.
At the Zoom meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) the big news was that Linda Starr, the director who had sent out so many clever emails during the shutdown via MailChimp, was resigning from communication duties. I thought about volunteering, but at that point I was still busy with my work for D25.
On January 6 I caught a mouse in a trap that I had set near the wooden chest on the northern wall in the garage.
I suspected that I might be charged by the BoT with finding and/or training a replacement for Linda. So, I asked for and received copies of Linda’s write-ups of what she did in MailChimp. It was certainly nice (and unusual) to work with someone who had thoroughly documented her responsibilities.
The traps for the first two mice were set just to the left of this chest.
On January 7 I caught a second mouse in a trap set in the same spot.
I had ordered a blue sweatshirt with Michigan spelled out in yellow (actually maize) from someone on Espy. I received it on January 8. I already had on that I liked a lot, but the collar and the cuffs were quite frayed, and it was a little too big. The color was right and it seemed comfortable, but the letters were not precisely yellow. They had blue specks in them. I decided that it was close enough, and I did not send it back.1
On the 10th I caught a third mouse. By then Bob (the cat) seemed to have moved into the new bedroom with Sue. Bob and our other pet for 2022, Giacomo, were black cats. They were both introduced here.
The plain old mousetrap of decades gone by still worked perfectly well.
I cooked carne asada tacos using a seasoning packet that Sue had purchased, but I did not think much of them. In the national championship game Georgia beat Alabama with s fourth-quarter rally. U-M finished third in the final voting, the highest that they have been since the shared national championship of 1997-98.
On January 11 a fourth mouse was executed for illegal residency in the garage.
The computer in the office at the HBC was on the fritz. I had to make the the boards for the SBC game on Wednesday manually. John Calderbank and I somehow finished first out of twelve pairs.
On the next day I trapped mouse #5. In the morning game at the HBC the boards did not match the hand records. Somebody messed up when making the boards
I caught no more mice in the garage, but on the fourteenth I trapped one in the kitchen. They can run but they love cheese too much to hide.
On January 18 Giacomo had trouble getting to his feet. That was also day on which I learned that after the latest rebooking of the cruise for May, Tom was not on the same flights as Sue and I. Tom remembered that we had paid extra to be on the same flights.
Linda had made .pbn files on Tuesday evening for me to use when making the boards. On Wednesday the 18th at 9 am I made boards for the Simsbury game. We had four tables at the SBC.
On the 20th Giacomo was frantic when he could not get to his feet, but he finally made it. He could get around OK after that. Obviously his 19th year is going to be a difficult one for him. He had never been ill or injured. Occasionally he coughed up a hair ball, but that affliction is common to almost all long-haired cats.
On the next day I made a MailChimp “audience” (the MailChimp word for contact list) for the HBC using my laptop. I had to reuse the audience that I had previously created for emails from the president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) that welcomed new members.
Not a litter box.
On January 22 Sue’s cat Bob had for some reason spent the last three nights in the bathtub in which I take a shower every evening. This morning he left behind a turd when he departed. I did not thank him for it.
Tom negotiated with Viking and got us all on the same flights: SwissAir to Budapest and British on the return.
On January 23 I walked nine laps (five miles) wearing a mask in the Enfield Square mall to investigate using it as an option for exercising in foul weather. What a sad place! Hardly anyone was shopping in the few stores that were open. The two restaurants each had one table occupied. No one seemed to be in the movie theater. I encountered a dozen or so walkers, some with dogs! An obese guy in a white strapped undershirt with a shopping cart full of stuff was at the Asnuntuck kiosk. He had plugged in some kind of weird machine. This trip inspired me to keep a rather complete log of my subsequent walks. It has been posted here.
On the next day my left lower back was sore in the morning, but it did not prevent me from walking another five miles.
On January 25 both sides of my lower back were sore when I woke up. If I did not know better, I might conclude that I was getting old.
The Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) scheduled another meeting for Wednesday night, the only time all week that I cannot attend! This infuriate me. I complained, but I did not know whom to be angry at.
I learned that Unit 126 (Connecticut) was facing the possibility of holding two major face-to-face STaC2 games a week apart.
On the 26th I could barely walk with the pain in my left lower back. For some reason lying down made it worse. I immediately took an ibuprofen tablet. It helped a lot.
On the next day I spent an hour and a half on the rowing machine; the back felt OK.
On January 28 a “bomb cyclone” was predicted to arrive at about 10 pm. I forgot to pay the bill for the Chase credit card because Sue was “checking” the charges. I received a nice email from Rick Cernech. He was living in Florida and was either working as or had worked as a cruise planner.
There was plenty of snow on January 29. I decided while using the rowing machine that the creaking sound that I could hear in my bedroom was really coming from the shelves in the basement directly below it.
Joe Brouillard, a co-chair of the committee that was running the event, reported that the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) had finally posted the schedule for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) that was scheduled for July. The preparatory work that Joe and his team (of which I was in charge of email publicity) did for the NABC has been documented here.
On the last day of the month I decided to try to bleed as many of the radiators in the old section of the house as I could. Since boxes, bags and furniture were virtually everywhere, this was not an easy task. One that I was able to get at in the living room started pissing after I bled it. It was extremely difficult to get the screw back all the way in. The hot water burnt my hands pretty badly, but I finally prevailed.
I watched episode 1 of season 2 of the series “Resident Alien.”3 It didn’t seem as good.as the first season, but I still enjoyed it.
February: On Groundhog Day only five pairs registered for the evening bridge game at the SBC. I had to cancel the game. Eric and I were first at 68% in the morning game at the HBC. In the afternoon game online Sue by tied for first. Her partner was John Willoughby.
In the evening I went to see Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Cinemark in Enfield Square. About ten people were in attendance. I thought all of the performances were quite good, especially Rosa Feola’s portrayal of a more Gilda who was more mature than usual. However, I hated the production decisions in the last act.
On February 5 I sent 20,000 emails for the NABC. I played pretty well but got a bad result at the HBC game with Peter Katz. I realized that I had forgotten to send the invitational email to SBC players on Friday. I set Outlook up to remind me to do so on Fridays and Mondays.
On February 8 I received the toner that I had ordered from Ink Technologies LLC.
February 11 was astoundingly warm—55 degrees. I walked 3.5 miles outside. Sue’s left big toe was very sore from gout.
The next day was 60 degrees! I finished the blog entry on Enfield Square, but I planned to update it as stores closed and (hopefully) opened.
On February 13 I received a mysterious email from Floyd Smith in response to my query about the name of his boss at Stage Stores (introduced here). It said “Sure. She is also on Facebook. Good luck and great to hear from you!”
Two inches of snow appeared on the grass, but the surfaces were clear. I drove Sue to the Urgent Care place on the north side of Hazard Ave. for her toe. They prescribed some drugs for her.
On the next day Sue’s toe was much better. I drove her to heart doctor. The appointment was for 10:15. I made sure that she was awake by 7:45. Nevertheless, it was 10:50 by the time we reached 1699 King St., which is just north of East Windsor. They would not see her. We were home at 11:30. The temperature only reached 20 degrees, which made it one of the coldest days of a very mild winter.
On February 15 I received this email from Floyd: “Suire is her last name. Sorry about that; spell check changed it last time. “
That evening the HBC’s Planning Committee held a Zoom meeting. Earlier I had committed to playing in the Swiss game at the HBC on February 27 with Ken Leopold, Y. L. Shiue, and Frank Blachowski. Frank and Y.L were very good players with a lot of masterpoints.
On the 17th the temperature reached 60 degrees, but it was very windy.
At a Zoom Meeting the D25 Executive Committee (EC) approved the Gala tournament on May 19-22 (coinciding with the dates that I planned to be in Europe on the cruise). The plan was to charge full price for events with lots of hospitality. I abstained; the other representative from Unit 126 (U126), Sonja Smith, did not attend. She may have already moved to North Carolina.
On February 18 the temperature hit 55 degrees in the morning but it fell throughout the day. I had to return the toner to Ink Technologies. I ordered the wrong thing. The company gave me a partial refund of $31 out of the original charge of $78.
On February 21 Russia sent troops into breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. I walked four miles outdoors in the rather warm 52 degrees. Rob Stillman and Y. C. Hsu agreed to play as the third pair for the Wednesday evening game in Simsbury. Sue will play with Maria Van der Ree.
On February 23 it was 72 degrees when I left the HBC after winning the open pairs game with Eric in morning. An email at 3:00 from Judy Larkin informed me that Ida Coulter could not play. Minutes later Renee Janow and Lucie Fradet asked to play. Sue was too tired to play, and so Judy ended up playing with Maria. I played terribly. I was stressed out from juggling the schedule.
On February 24 Russia invaded Ukraine. I walked nine laps in the mall.
In the Swiss on the 26th we lost our first two matches on flukes. We came back to win the last three by 18, 18, and 20 victory points to finish second out of twelve. YC made 6NT after he underled his ♠A.
March: For Sue’s birthday party on March 2 at the SBC she brought cupcakes for everybody. There were only 3 tables, but we had a good time.
On the next evening Sue and I went to supper with Tom at the Puerto Vallarta Mexican restaurant. The tacos al carbon were not as good as I remembered them. Tom ordered his usual gigantic bowl, which was no longer on the menu. I don’t remember what it was called.
On March 6 I walked 5 miles outside. The temperature was 62 degrees, but I needed to circumvent many puddles from the snow melting.
On March 9 about two inches of snow was on the lawn. The streets had been cleared, but Eno Hall was closed, and so the SBC could not hold a game.
By March 10 I had read the following books from the Enfield Public Library: T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk; Max Barry’s The 22 Murders of Madison May and Lexicon. I liked Lexicon the best, but they were all good.
On March 18 the temperature hit 76 degrees, a new all-time record for the date. I walked five miles in a tee shirt. I learned that the Xiaos (aged 10 and 13) won the 0-10K Swiss at the NABC in Reno. The two youngsters
On March 20 Sue and I played in the “8 is enough” Swiss with Mayank and Aarati Mehta. Finished in the middle because of a hand in which Rob Stillman and Ronit Shoham bid 4♥ against Sue and me, but the Mehtas let Y. C. play 3♦.
On March 27 there was no pee or poop in the litter box. I brought the box upstairs, and Giacomo took a pee and then lounged in the box. He had never done this before. It was not a good sign.
On March 30 Ken and I won a five-table STaC game at the SBC. Sue and I could not find Giacomo when we returned to Enfield.
The cat’s door as seen from the back yard.
On the next morning I found Giacomo’s body lying in the back yard just outside of the cat door. He had not gone outside in weeks, maybe months, and he had not been downstairs for days. Nevertheless, he must have used up all of his remaining strength to descend the stairs, walk over to the ramp, climb up the ramp to the cat door, and exit through that door.
He was a wonderful cat. I really mourned for him, and I still miss having him on my lap while I watch television. More details about long relationship with Giacomo before the Pandemic can be found here.
In the last few years of Giacomo’s life I apparently became allergic to something about him. Several times I had rather severe outbreaks of hives, and I got the sniffles when he sat on my lap. After he died these symptoms disappeared.
I did the income taxes using FreeTaxesUSA.com. My federal tax was $0, and I received a refund of over $900 from Connecticut.
A lot of other things happened on the last day of March. An oil bill for $780.52 arrived. I brought the litter box, which now is officially Bob’s, back downstairs. While I was doing so, I fell into some empty boxes and bruised my left hand. It hurt, but it was not fatal. The Sony audio recorder that I ordered for the cruise arrived. I played with it enough to feel fairly comfortable using it.
April: On the 2nd of the month M&T Bank took over our previous bank, Peoples United Bank, which had a few years earlier purchased United Bank. United had purchased Rockville Bank, from which I negotiated our final mortgage, as documented here. This changeover seemed to go rather smoothly, and I like the new website slightly better than the old one.
Bob has found the litter box. Thank goodness.
Peter and I won the six-table STaC game at the HBC. On consecutive hands grand slams could be made in hearts. We only bid one of them, but no one else took all the tricks on the other one.
On April 6 the switch for the lights in the basement did not work. Two days later I got it to work, but it was difficult. Eventually this problem disappeared or maybe I just adjusted to the toggle.
On April 11 I received the second booster shot at a pharmacy in Springfield. Sue had already gotten hers
On April 15 I downloaded the VeriFly app that Viking had recommended for my phone and eventually got it to work. This was a complete waste of time, and it stressed me out. It was never needed or, for that matter, useful on the entire trip.
On April18 Ken and I learned that we had been dumped as teammates for the upcoming Grand National Teams (GNT) online qualification tournament by Felix Springer and Trevor Reeves again. Details can be found here. I was not looking forward to the online part again, but I thought that we would have a pretty good chance of qualifying. Playing in the GNT in Providence in July had been my goal for many months, and I had avoided accumulating masterpoints throughout the Pandemic in order to maintain my eligibility. I ordinarily do not hold grudges, but I still feel bitter about this more than a year and a half later.
On April 29 Peter Katz and I won the last Saturday game at the HBC before it went on hiatus. There were only three tables. I faked out Y. L with a terrible overcall.
The huge hump of hair on Bob’s back was an embarrassment to all of us.
May: Something incredible happened on May 2. Sue took Bob to the veterinarian. She learned that the big clump that had been on his back for years was just hair. The vet shaved it off, and it never grew back. How can this be? He would not let us touch it; why was it so sensitive? What cat has that much hair? What made it keep growing for such a long time? Sue said that the vet said that it was just bad grooming. He also said that Bob was at least thirteen years old.
That cat never ceased to amaze me. After his haircut he suddenly liked to be petted, he also became more friendly to me. One untoward result was that I developed very small bumps around my ankles that were itchy and a little painful. I must have been allergic to him or at least his dander.
I downloaded the Uber app for possible use in Vienna to get back to the ship from the opera. The rest of the bizarre preparation for the European cruise has been catalogued in some detail here.
I learned that thirty staff members of Henry Barnard School have Covid-18! I did not realize that the school even had that many employees. The state of Connecticut was showing a 9.4% positivity rate. The good news was that Germany’s level, which I had been following closely, was down by quite a bit. The other three countries on our itinerary were also improving.
The European cruise trip began on May 5. The incredible story of that day and the rest of the journey is well documented here. One thing that is not related there is the fact that the little bumps on my ankles cleared up while I was in Europe. The ones on my right ankle began to reappear in June or July.
On May 23 I mowed the lawn, which had by then become a jungle. While doing so I realized that I had to attack the poison ivy, which was much more prevalent than in 2021. I ordered some Roundup that could be sprayed on the plants from Amazon.
Only five pairs had registered for the Wednesday night game in Simsbury, but I had not yet heard from Lori Leopold. She could usually find a partner on short notice.
The next morning brought another frustrating bridge game. When I got back to the house I needed to cancel the Wednesday evening game at the SBC because only five pairs had registered.
I brought to the Verizon office on Hazard Ave. the Pixel 2 cellphone that had failed me on the cruise. The tech guy at Verizon showed me that the phone was considerably thicker in the middle than on the edges. He explained that this was a symptom of overheating. So, the phone was officially dead. In retrospect I concluded that the transformer in the cable that connected the phone to the outlet in my cabin must have failed to convert the current to 110 at least once on the cruise, and the European current fried the battery or something. I kept the phone plugged in virtually all of the time that I was in my cabin.
We planned on eating at the Kebab House before entering the Cinemark at Enfield Square to see the opera, but it was not open. We watched the rust-belt production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The character of the priest just did not work. Otherwise, the first two acts were very moving, but the third act was a total mess until Javier Camarena’s outstanding performance near the end. The many interviews during the breaks. were insipid. Sue and I settled for popcorn for supper. Incredibly she stayed awake throughout the performance.
On May 25 I discovered that our mortgage on the house was completely paid off! I was not expecting this news for several months.
June: At some point in June Sue purchased for me a new (well, new to me) cellphone. This one was a Samsung Galaxy S7. It was similar to Sue’s, and so she could sometimes help me with it. A year and a half later I still hated it, but not as much as I loathed the Pixel 2. The Samsung had not ordered any pizzas for me, but, then again, I had not downloaded the Slice app. I could almost never figure out where the app that I wanted to use was hiding, and it randomly plays YouTube videos and other stuff from the Internet. I figured out how to answer the phone in a minute or two, but it took me eighteen months to figure out how to hang up.
On the 1st I learned that Sally Kirtley, the director at the SBC, had tested positive for Covid-19. Ken had to direct at the Wednesday night . Ken and I won easily.
On the very next day Sally came to the ACBL’s walk-through in Providence. I very much enjoyed talking with old friends like Paula Najarian.
On June 13 I received two bottles of Roundup that I had ordered from Amazon. I immediately went outside and sprayed the poison ivy that was growing along the fence on the north side of the yard. Two days later I sprayed the poison ivy again. I wore a mask during both sprayings, and I was careful not to get any on my skin or clothes.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat the serious inflation that began after the country reopened. Any moron could see that the main culprit had been pent-up demand from the shutdown, and the secondary cause was shipping holdups. Nevertheless, I had to peel a sticker off of a gas pump at Costco that claimed that “Biden caused this.”
I met Mike Barke, a geography professor at the Northumbria University, and his wife Vivienne on the cruise. Mike had recently published a book entitled Newcastle upon Tyne: Mapping the City. As soon as I got back to the U.S. I ordered a copy. It finally arrived on June 17. It was both beautiful and interesting. It made me want to visit the Tyneside area.
The Longest Day game on June 21 at HBC very annoying. There was much too much noise. Donna Feir pressed everyone to play faster and then canceled the last round because the pizza had arrived. This turned out to be a super-spreader event for Covid-19.
From an email from Cindy Lyall, the treasurer of the CBA, I earned that U126 lost $4,000 on the tournament in Orange. Ouch!
On June 23 Mary Whittemore reported that her name was missing from the “Top 200 List” on the CTBridge.org website. I asked the CBA board members if anyone knew why. Don Stiegler sent me a correct list. It showed that many names were missing from the one on the website. Evidently no one knew how that page got updated on the website. Bob Bertoni, who died in 2021, set up the website and, because the unit had no webmaster at the time, did all of the updating.
Graham Van Keuren.
On June 29 Sue and I attended a potluck supper at Sue’s church, the Somersville Congregational Church. I always feel very uncomfortable at these religious gatherings, but this one was tolerable. After supper we listened to Graham Van Keuren’s presentation on his vacation with his spouse Eric in Israel. I recorded it on my audio recorder. It was a good presentation, but it certainly did not make me want to visit what I considered to be an apartheid country.
On June 30 Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he had Covid-19 for the second time. This news astounded me. Did he take no precautions? The Pandemic was finally running rampant at the HBC. Only five tables were occupied on Tuesday morning, and the evening game was canceled. Only three tables appeared on Wednesday, and the Simsbury game was canceled. Both of the games at the HBC on Thursday were canceled.
July: The big event of the month was the Providence NABC. I attended most of the event, but Sue decided not to go. I kept notes on my laptop and wrote them up a little later. They have been posted here and here. It was good to see some familiar faces, but the bridge games were not much fun.
The tournament was another super-spreader of Covid-19. Almost everyone with whom I played or associated caught the virus. I almost ripped the driver’s side mirror off of my car, and the hotel rooms were never cleaned. However, I avoided getting the disease. So, in a period of about two and a half months I had survived three super-spreader events—the cruise, bridge at the HBC, and the NABC. I credited my collection of free N95 masks that I had amassed from giveaways at various retailers.
August: I was hoping to have a party at the SBC to celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday. Not enough people were able to attend on the 17th. Instead, I decided that the SBC would have a Christmas party on August 24. Twenty people attended, and so we had five tables and lots of food. The players gave me a $100 Amazon card and $20 in cash. I was a little upset that Sue and I arrived so late because she, as usual, was not ready on time. I had made beef Stroganoff that needed to be heated up in the slow cooker. I crawled under the table and plugged in the pot, but I neglected to turn it on.
On August 26 the refrigerator stopped working. Panic set in. Sue and I resolved to deal with it the next morning. By then it had resumed functioning. If we ever figured out the cause of the outage, I made no note of it.
Throughout the period from my arrival back in Enfield after the cruise up to the end of August the weather had been hot, and I had spent every spare minute working on the journal for the Grand European Tour. On August 28 I finally finished it and sent an email to quite a few people announcing that the journal had been posted on Wavada.org. I was quite pleased to hear back from both the Barkes and the family from Saskatchewan.
A Big Y Express replaced the Shell station.
I noticed that the Shell station on Hazard Ave., which had been operational since we moved to Enfield in the late eighties, was closed.
On August 29 I received a long email from Tom Caputo, whom I had worked with at both Lord & Taylor (described here) and Saks Fifth Avenue (here). He was looking for a job at the age of 60. He asked me if I knew about anything being available. Since he knew very well that I had had nothing to do with retail for at least eight years, he must have been desperate. Maybe he thought that I had kept in touch with people more than I had.
I also received an email from Mike and Vivienne Barke.
August closed with an incredibly disappointing Ocean State Regional tournament in Warwick, RI. I had a rotten time, the attendance was abysmal, and the district lost money. The details have been posted here.
September: On September 13 Bob decided to take over Giacomo’s old position atop the back of the couch in the living room. On the next evening he lost his balance (something that Giacomo had never done in eighteen years) and tumbled off the back. He was in a panic and tried unsuccessfully to climb up the drapes to regain his perch.
On the following evening Bob had clambered back into Giacomo’s old spot. When I seated myself in my chair a few feet away, he obviously wanted to come join me, but he was evidently afraid to land on the pillows that were arrayed on the couch’s cushions. I moved them out of his way. He then descended to the sitting level and, after executing calculations in his walnut-sized brain, made the “mighty leap” to the armrest of my chair. He sat peacefully on my lap for a few minutes. Then he got nervous, peed on me, descended frantically to the floor, and did his “breakdance.” Much more has been written here about the misadventures of this very strange feline.
After sleeping comfortably for a month or more on beds in hotels and cruise ships, I judged that I needed a new mattress. The one that I had been sleeping on was more than thirty years old and was a little too short for me. Sue selected one for me as a late birthday present. It arrived on September 14. The delivery people set it up and took away the old one. Sue, of course, kept the obsolete pieces that held it off the floor. I found them leaning against the bookcase in the hallway. The new mattress was considerably better than the old one, but I still woke up with a backache more often than not.
On September 16 I talked with someone from the town of Enfield about the tax bill that I had received that day. It contained a significant interest charge because I did not pay the July installment. The simple reason for my delinquency was that I had never received a bill. It turned out that the mortgage holder, Peoples United Bank, had payed the portion due in January. The mortgage schedule indicated that five payments were remaining when the bank declared that it was fully paid. I was sent a notice of this, but I was never apprised of the bill from the town that the bank must have received. The lady with whom I talked refused to waive the interest charge. Since the bank that held the mortgage at the time that the bill was sent no longer existed, I did not have any recourse except to pay.
On the same day using my free MailChimp account, I sent an email that I had previously composed to try to improve the attendance of the players with less than 500 masterpoints at the upcoming sectional tournament in Orange.
The bookshelf fell onto the bed in 2023. The light is now attached to a screw in the wall.
On September 17 two items that I had ordered from Amazon were delivered. The first was a reading light that I would be able to clamp to the bookshelf above the new bed. The second was a book by Daryl Gregory entitled We are All Completely Fine. I liked this book much less than the one by Gregory that I had read on the cruise, The Spoonbenders.
Bob had mysteriously disappeared on September 16. He returned two days later and spent all day and night by the stove. Something was apparently wrong with him, but we were not too concerned. His behavior had always been eccentric.
Eric, Motoko Oinaga, John Debaggis, and I finish second out of ten in the Swiss event held at the HBC on September 18. We were the #8 seed. Eric and I bid and made slams on two of the last three hands to win the round by 24. We lost only to the winners—Lesley Meyers, Laurie Robbins, Felix, and Trevor.
Sue made an appointment at the vet for Bob on September 20. I heard him at some point after 4 a.m. on the 19th. At 5:45 I brought the litter box upstairs and shut the door to the basement, but when Sue woke up Bob was nowhere to be found. I opened the door to the basement. He came in about 9:30, and I shut the door to the basement again.
Before my bridge game on September 20 I placed Bob in the cat carrier, but at some point he somehow escaped. Sue was able to get him back in and took him to his 12:30 appointment. We found out that he had a tumor in his mouth or throat. There was not much hope for him, but the doctor gave Sue some medicine for him. Sue gave him the drops when I got back from bridge and could hold him. He needed them twice a day. I was so involved that I forgot about my Zoom meeting of the HBC Planning Committee.
We probably should have put Bob down when we heard about the tumor. He had always been Sue’s pet. She had to make the decision, and she could not do it.
On the last day of the month I sent a second email for the CBA.
October: On October 3 Sue started giving Bob antibiotics and steroids. He started eating a little better. Sue took him to the vet again on the 18th. He was still not eating much even though Sue was diligent about preparing meals that were both nutritious and easy to swallow.
Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.
The October 19 Simsbury game was canceled. I drove Sally to Southbridge to check out the hotel that we would be using for the tournament in October, which was named the Spectacle Regional because the hotel was the administration building of the defunct American Optical Company. The ground floor was very modern, but the the playing area not very large. The restaurant, which was called Visions, was not open except for groups.
On the same day Sue’s cousin Robby Davis was found dead in his apartment.
On October 21 I had breakfast with Sue and Mark Davis. Mark was very involved in a gigantic project involving his ancestry. For some reason I have almost no interest in exploring mine. Someone from the Spokane branch of the Wavada sent my dad a lot of research that she had done. Sue got it from him and put it somewhere. I have never seen it.
On October 22 there was no game at the HBC. I went by myself to see Cherubini’s Medea at Cinemark at the Enfield Square. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an outstanding performance in an opera that had not been performed since Maria Callas played the title character. A carnival was set up in the mall parking lot.
On October 24 I drove to the mall for a walk. I forgot my little blue mp3 player, and I wore the wrong shoes. I had to drive back home and start over.. A girl in a red suit made of balloons and a small backpack was walking stiff-legged around the mall. I think that she was supposed to look like an astronaut.
November: The first week of the month was unseasonably warm. On the 7th it was 67 degrees at 5 a.m. and 80 as I drove through Hartford at 1 p.m. after playing with Nancy Calderbank for the first time in the mentorship program. She had asked me to teach her 2/1.
On November 8 I finished writing the Bulletin for Southbridge and sent it to Sally for printing.
In the mid-term elections the Republicans, as expected, won the House of Representatives, but the Democrats held onto the Senate after Senator Warnock won another runoff.
I received a bill from Somers Oil for $798.86!
The hilarious postscript to the Grand European Tour occurred on November 8, almost six months after I departed. Sue and I were in the living room when we heard the unmistakable sound of claws shredding paper. Sue rose from her chain, hurried into the kitchen, and yelled, “Bob, what have you gotten into now?” She snatched a paper bag from beneath his claws. When she looked inside she found the passport for which she had searched for several days back in early May. She should have just asked Bob where it was.
11/23 Sue and I spent Thanksgiving alone. I sent the following email to the Barkes and Steve Flamman:
I hope that you are all doing well.
I thought that you might be interested in this. Two weeks ago my wife Sue and I were watching TV in our living room in the evening when we heard the unmistakable sound of our cat Bob shredding something made of paper in the kitchen. Sue sprang from her chair to prevent further damage. She found that Bob had somehow discovered a small paper sack and had pulled it out onto the floor. Sue retrieved it from him and discovered her current and expired passports as well as a few other items that had been missing for over two years.
Incidentally, I included two photos of Sue unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a deal with Viking on the Day 0 page of my journal and one that she took of Bob on Day 12.
Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is hard to find things to be thankful for lately, but I am definitely thankful for the friends that I made on the cruise in May.
I had more to be thankful for three days later. Michigan defeated Ohio State 45-23 at the Horseshoe in Columbus to win the eastern division of the Big 10 for the second year in a row. They did it without the Big 10’s best running back, Blake Corum. Donovan Edwards filled in for Corum very well. The Wolverines finished the regular season 12-0.
December: A week later the Wolverines beat Purdue in the Big 10 title game 43-21. They have qualified for the four-team College Football Playoff for the second year in a row.
December 8 was the tenth anniversary of our wedding ceremony. Sue and I are about as unhappy as we have ever been. Sue blames her health and various inanimate objects. I blame the house.
Curtis Barton, the president of D25, sent an email to members of the Executive Committee indicating that all senior employees of the ACBL had been fired. He then sent a correction that said that, according to Mark Aquino, who as Regional Director should know, “fired” is not the right word.
On December 9 Sue suddenly screamed, “I hate my life!” I was thinking that I hated our house, which was a pigsty. I also resented that almost whenever I needed something I must ask her where it was. Usually she did not know and said that she would look for it. In addition, we had so much junk everywhere that every time I that I went to get something I must remove four or five other items and then replace them in the right order. The refrigerator, for example, was always full to overflowing. THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF US!
However, as always, I said nothing because I did not want to trigger a tearful reaction or a panic attack.
December 12 brought the first snow of the season.
At 5 a.m. on the next day the weatherman on WTIC AM reported that it was 8 degrees in Granby and 19 in neighboring East Granby.
On December 17 I bought a rib roast. Sue forgot about Tyesha’s confirmation. Then she also bought a rib roast because she forgot her shopping list, and my phone was off because I forgot to turn it back on after bridge.5 I discovered that for weeks she had been leaving me voicemail messages that I did not know about. We have become two incompetent old farts.
On December 21 we had five tables at the SBC game. Sue and I arrived too late for the holiday party because Sue went to the store at 4:30 p.m. to buy the fruit that she had promised to bring. The players gave me $130.
On December 23 very strong winds uprooted the pine tree in the front yard. I heard a loud crashing sound at about 5 a.m. The tree fell straight towards our house, but there was no damage at all because the top section landed harmlessly on the patio between the old section of the house and Sue’s garage.
The high temperature the next day was only 19. I got a letter from ConnectiCare. The premium for my dental policy went down from $79 to $56.
We did nothing special on Christmas day. Sue may have watched It’s a Wonderful Life,6 but I didn’t.
Crystal Lake Construction, the company that cleared the snow from our driveway and sidewalks chopped up and removed most of the fallen tree. They came back later for the stump.
On the same day I received an email from Mark Aquino about the new training required for directors at sectionals, On the 27th I met with the HBC directors after the bridge game. Peter Marcus, who generally knew these things, had reported that the new rules applied only to events with masterpoint limits in excess of 500.
On the last day of the year Michigan lost to TCU 51-45. Early in the game J. J. McCarthy threw two interceptions that were returned for touchdowns. It was a wretched end to an awful year.
A week later TCU got clobbered by Georgia in the championship game. U-M would have done better, but they probably would have lost.
1. By the fall of 2023 a small spot had appeared on the front of the sweatshirt. It looked like a grease stain, but on closer inspection it was obvious that the exterior had worn thin. I could hide the blemish with ink from a Sharpie pen, but that was not a good permanent solution.
2. STaC stands for “sectional tournament at clubs”. These were games held at clubs that awarded more points, and the overalls included all of the participating clubs. Regular STaCs paid silver points. The points in Royal STaCs were evenly split between black, red, gold, and silver points.
3. “Resident Alien” was originally shown on the Syfy channel. Sue and I watched season 1 and season 2 on the streaming service called Peacock. At the time it was free on Cox cable. Eventually they wanted people to buy monthly subscriptions and restricted the free option so much as to make it worthless.
4. Apparently Peoples United Bank wanted our mortgage off of its books when it was taken over by M&T bank. The five mortgage payments that I saved by this action more than covered the cost of the July tax bill, but someone should have told me that that amount would be due.
5. I did not learn how to put the Samsung cellphone on “vibrate” until much later. It was easy to do but not a bit intuitive.
6. All year long Sue watched TCM during every waking (and many sleeping) moment.
In 2023 the lights are always out at the Red Lion in Cromwell.
Presidential Regional: District 25, the New England states, had traditionally held its first major1 regional tournament of the year in February. The site had been in Cromwell CT for as long as I had been playing. However, the demise of the Red Lion Hotel forced it to be moved to Sturbridge MA in 2020. The name of the last four or five events had been the Presidential Regional, because it ended on the weekend of Presidents Day. The name was maintained in 2023 even the the tournament was scheduled for February 7-11, the week before its usual appearance. The site was the Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center, which had also been used for the Spectacle Regional in the previous November, as described here. The 2023 Presidential was was scaled-down tournament of only five days designed to minimize the number of directors needed.
The Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.
I was not excited about the schedule. There were no team games at all on Tuesday or Friday; if I played. I would be in the top flight. Wednesday featured a two-day knockout. Saturday had a three-flighted Swiss. I tried to get a partner from the pairing person, Denise Bahosh, but she could not find anyone for me. Eventually, one of my regular partners, Eric Vogel, agreed to play with me in the knockout. Our teammates were Jeanne Striefler and Jim Macomber from the Hartford Bridge Club.
I had played every day at every regional tournament for quite a few years. However, I decided not to play on Tuesday, Friday, or Saturday of this one. The drive to the hotel was not likely to be difficult as long as the weather cooperated. So, I decided to commute back and forth on Wednesday and Thursday. I also needed to be at the hotel for the meeting of the Executive Committee on Friday evening. I planned to drive then as well.
Jim Macomber and Jeanne Striefler.
The weather was fine. On both days I stopped at McDonald’s in Stafford for my usual sausage biscuit with egg sandwich. Our team had just the right amount of points. We were the top-seeded team in the second bracket. Nine teams were in our bracket. We had to play an eight-round Round Robin, which we easily won. That gave us the right to choose which of the third and fourth teams we would play on Thursday. I chose to play the Sattinger team rather than the team from Vermont. Those two teams had finished with the same number of victory points, and we had defeated them both by the same margin. One of the pairs from Vermont played Precision3. I worried that if Jim and Jeanne faced them, they might have difficulty handling a radically different bidding system.
Our morning round of twenty-four hands was against Michael and Ulla Sattinger of Slingerlands, NY, a team that I have played against many times over the years. Eric and I were East-West. On the very first hand I made an overly aggressive bid that turned out to be costly. Eric also made a fairly serious mistake on a different hand. However, things must have gone better in the other room. At lunch we were ahead by twelve points, which was a reasonably comfortable margin.
Eric Vogel.
Eric and I played better in the second half, but North-South held better cards on most of the hands. Ulla and Michael bid and made a few game contracts, but the hands seemed rather straightforward. I did not see any hands on which swings were likely. I was wrong. Jim and Jeanne did not bid several of those games and settled for setting their opponents in undoubled partial scores.
This was very upsetting to me. I had expected us to play as well as on the previous day. My record in knockout matches in the past was quite good, and I was convinced that things were lined up favorably for us. In retrospect I suspect that Jim and Jeanne might have gotten tired. Neither of them had played in any tournaments since the pandemic, and they had played in far fewer of them than I had before that. They were basically club players, and they had seldom played two sessions in one day, much less on two consecutive days.
After lunch we had to play against a team captained by Abhi (AH vee) Dutta, with whom I had played in a few tournaments. They had the second-best record in the Round Robin, but they had lost to the Vermonters in the semifinal. So, this match would determine who finished third. Eric and I were East-West against Abhi and Paul Johnson, a player from Connecticut with less than 750 masterpoints. Abhi had always been a deliberate player, and, at least in this match, Paul was at times unbearably slow—taking several minutes to make some decisions. At the half they were ahead by six points.
I told Jim and Jeanne that they would switch to East-West to face Abhi and Paul in the second set of twelve boards. Eric and I played against Liv Carroll and Louis DiOrio. Since they came from different corners of the district; they probably had been paired up by the Partnership Desk. We had a very pleasant match with them. Eric and I did not make any serious errors, but neither did they. It was hard to say if we had made up the deficit.
We had been waiting thirty minutes for the other match to finish when Eric announced that he had to leave to go to a meeting. This would ordinarily not have been a big deal, but it turned out that we won the second half by six points, and so our match ended in a tie. Jeanne tried to reach Eric by phone, but he was miles away and unwilling to return to play in a four-board playoff. So, we had to concede. It was the perfect ending to an awful day.
I drove back on Friday for the meeting of the Executive Committee. According to Curtis Barton, the President of the New England Bridge Conference, everything was “fabulous”. Attendance was better than at the 2022 tournaments, and some headway seemed to be being made, but it did not seem fabulous to me. The tournament was better than nothing, but it still seemed rinky-dink to me. To me the most amazing thing was how much money the district still had after a string of disastrous tournaments. The person most responsible was unquestionably Joe Brouillard, the treasurer.
The most hilarious moment occurred after Joe proposed eliminating the stipend to the secretary (Carolyn Weiser) and treasurer (himself) at tournaments. After some bizarre discussion there was a secret ballot. The motion failed 12-1. Everyone thought that Joe and Carolyn were worth every penny. The other important argument was that, heaven forbid, we were faced with replacing them, we needed to have every incentive available.
Granite State Getaway: I could not find partners for the six-day tournament in June in Nashua, NH. That was too bad; I would have liked to play in the knockouts; I even had teammates lined up for one of them.
Sue and I drove up on the morning of Saturday, June 24. The first half of the trip was in the rain, which was particularly heavy on the Mass Pike. By the time that we reached the hotel it was sunny.
I played with Sally Kirtley, the tournament manager, in the A/X pairs. We were badly overmatched. Sue also played in a pairs game and did not do very well.
At the Executive Committee meeting we learned that this was probably the last time that a District 25 regional will be held at the Sheraton. The hotel wants to increase the rate dramatically. Sally solicited and received a large number of suggestions for places with large spaces that were not directly associated with hotels. Joe emphasized that something needed to be done to strengthen the Grass Roots Fund. Before the pandemic most units specified one of their days as Grass Roots days. The district received funds from those games.
There was some discussion about doing the GNT qualifying in person, but I was the only person who felt strongly that it was a huge mistake to award gold points for online play.
No food was served at the meeting. Sue and I ate supper at Lui Lui. I had a delicious pizza and a beer. I questioned the waitress about on of the cartoonish paintings plainly captioned in Spanish, not Italian. She said that she knew nothing about it.
On Sunday morning at the meeting of the Board of Delegates we again heard about how fabulous things were. Only four people represented Connecticut—Peter Marcus, Paul Burnham, Sue, and me. At the end I took a couple of minutes to describe the Weiss-Bertoni award (introduced here) and to present it to Joe Bertoni. He was pretty choked up about receiving it, but, in my opinion, he definitely deserved it. I just hope that he continues the tradition of presenting it to other worthy recipients.
I scheduled an email to go out at 10AM to announce the winner.
The traffic on the return trip was awful. We arrived home more than a half hour later than we expected. It felt weird not to wonder whether the cats were all right.
If it were not for the presentation of the Weiss-Bertoni aware, I would have considered the trip a complete waste of time, gasoline, and money.
Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky.
Ocean State Regional: For some reason that I do not understand the tournament in Warwick, RI, on the Labor Day weekend was scheduled for only five days beginning on Tuesday, August 29. Knockouts were scheduled for Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday. I was fortunate to learn that Jim Osofsky’s regular partner, Mike Heider, would be in Germany with his sons that week. So, Jim agreed to play as my partner for both of the knockouts. He arranged for Abhi and Paul Johnson to be our teammates in the one starting on Thursday. In the first knockout Denise Bahosh, the Partnership Chairman arranged for us to team up with Mike Baker and Susan Swope, two players from Florida who had roughly the same number of masterpoints as Jim and I.
I had decided to play four days, attend the Executive Committee meeting on Friday evening, and skip Saturday. I was able to use my IHG Rewards points to pay for my three nights at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick.
Jim and Mike H. played Precision, but Jim played 2/1 in club games. He lived in Deerfield, MA, and Mike H. lived in southern CT. So, they only played together at tournaments. I had played against them innumerable times.Jim and I had exchanged emails about bidding issues, and we had come to pretty good agreement about the convention card. Still, there were a few issues to be ironed out. So we agreed to meet at the hotel at 9:00 on Tuesday morning.
Judy and Sue.
Sue also wanted to attend the tournament, but, as usual, she did not get any partners until the last minute. On Monday evening she had arranged to play with her friend and long-time partner, Judy Cavagnaro in the Gold Rush pairs. Sue needed gold points to become a Life Master. When I went to bed she had not decided whether she would ride with me or take her own car. I planned to leave at 7:15.
Google Maps recommended taking the back roads to the Crowne Plaza. It took a little over an hour and 45 minutes, but I stopped at McDonald’s.
At 6:30 on Tuesday morning Sue informed me that we would ride together, but she wanted to take her car. Her plan was to provide for the possibility that she might want to come home early. When I asked how I was supposed to get home, she answered that she would drive to Warwick (a trip of at least an hour and forty-five minutes) to pick me up at 7PM on Friday after the meeting of the Executive Committee. I considered this to be ridiculous, but I was wise enough not to press that opinion.
At 7:03 Sue informed me that I should leave at 7:15 by myself. She would drive her own car. I decided not to stop at McDonald’s in Stafford. Instead I set as my destination on Google Maps the McDonald’s on Route 2 in Warwick. I picked up my sandwich there and arrived at the hotel at precisely 9AM.
Jim was already there, talking on his cellphone. His mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, was receiving memory care at a place very close to the Crowne Plaza. He was negotiating whether she needed a private nurse. I got a coffee and ate my breakfast.
At 9:30 we met our teammates, Mike and Susan. We had enough time to converse a little. Mike had a house in Rhode Island. Susan lived in Florida throughout the year.
For some reason the official schedule called the event in which we were playing the “Premier Knockout”. It was limited to players with 4,000 or less masterpoints4. Sixteen teams registered. The directors split it into two eight-team sections. Four of the eight teams in the top bracket had more total points than we did.
Jim and I played pretty well throughout the seven matches. We lost two close matches, including the last one to Abhi’s team, but our total of 91 victory points was much higher than that of any other team.
As in February I was allowed to choose our opponent in the semifinal on Wednesday from the third and fourth teams. This whole scene was eerily similar to what had occurred in Southbridge. On this occasion, however, we had blitzed the fourth-place team Mullin), and the other team included an extremely talented young player named Ethan Wood. It seemed like an easy call to pick Mullin.
Meanwhile Judy and Sue had done very well in the Gold Rush Pairs. They finished fourth out of thirty-six pairs and won 2.32 gold and 0.65 red masterpoints. Sue decided to accept the invitation from Sally Kirtley to play in the evening side game. Apparently she was having a great time and did not want it to end. Also, she seldom turned down an invitation to anything.
You pick up orders at that little red area.
I drove to KFC and picked up an eight-piece family meal. I ordered a large Diet Coke as well, but for some reason the person who took the order and got everything else right, did not include the drink. I had to pay $3.50 for a 10-oz. bottle at the hotel. We were also annoyed to discover that they had neglected to include any napkins or sporks. In my suitcase I discovered some napkins and silverware from a previous trip. Sue ate a chicken wing before the side game started.
While she was gone I ate supper and watched the ninth (penultimate) episode of the first season of Sneaky Pete on Freevee. I loved the show, but the plot was so complicated. I was dying of curiosity to find out the resolution in episode 10, but watching it on the hotel’s free Wi-Fi was almost intolerable. It kept timing out, and I needed to restart it.
After taking a shower I read a chapter of Holy Orders, the sixth of the quasi-mysteries written by Benjamin Black. Black’s style5 is exceptionally good. The plots are intricate, but they do not follow any of the traditional forms for crime fiction. The central character, an Irish pathologist named Quirke does not solve the mysteries. His friend, a police detective who is more Inspector Plodder than Sherlock Holmes, explains the situation at the end.
I went to sleep early. Although I was wearing my eye-mask and earplugs, I was still awakened when Sue returned to the room. I managed to get back to sleep, however, and I was well-rested in the morning.
We went to the Jefferson Diner for breakfast. I had a ham and Swiss omelette. It was good, and the home fries were better than they looked.
The Jefferson Diner.
The Mullin team consisted of a pair of ladies, Susan Mullin and Sheila Middleton, and two men, Steven Colman and Mark Sunderlin. Although Sheila, Steven, and Mark were all from Massachusetts, neither Jim nor I had previously played against any of them. They had the most points of any team. So, they must have been playing for a very long time in club games. We were not impressed by the ladies’ performance in the match in the previous day’s event. The two men were apparently long-time partners. They both lived on Cape Cod.
They opted to switch their chairs so that Jim and I played against the men. They announced that they were playing Precision. I had invented a defense against strong club systems. I called it WavaDONT. I had to explain it first to Jim and then to the opponents:
Overcalls of the 1♣ bid at the one and three-levels were natural—showing five and seven pieces respectively.
With a six-piece suit bid 1NT, which is a relay to 2♣ to be passed or corrected.
With a two-suited overcall bid the lower suit as in DONT.
With a very strong hand double.
Our opponents called the director, Tim Hill, to ask whether it was legal for us to use such a complicated (?) defense against their system in a game at “this level”. Tim said that he was “99.9 percent certain” that we could use whatever defense that we wanted. It turned out to be immaterial. In twenty-four hands they never opened 1♣!
The two guys seemed much better than the ladies. In the first half there were two consecutive swing hands. On the first one our teammates made 3NT. Our opponents went down in 4♠. In the other I went down in 3♠. At the other table our teammates did not defend well and let them make 4♠. In total we had a flimsy lead of one imp.
I thought that we had won the second half easily. One of our opponents had revoked on a vulnerable hand that he might have made or gone down one. However, in the first six hands we found ourselves down by six imps. It was a great relief when we won the last six by eleven. So, we won the match by six imps.
In the finals we played Ethan Wood’s team. His partner was not very good, and we easily won both halves. So, we won the premier Premier Knockout and 20.13 gold points. The Mullin team won third place over a team of guys from Maine.
Jim, Sue, and I decided to eat at the Crow’s Nest, a seafood place that was only a few minutes south of the hotel. Sue and Jim, both from New England, consumed some kind of water-dwelling insects. I tried “The Burger”. which was described in the menu as “1⁄2 lb of all-natural free-range beef topped with cheddar, lettuce, pickles, secret sauce, brioche bun, fries.” The secret sauce tasted a lot like the sauce on a Big Mac, which must have been the intent. The problem was that there was so much slippery stuff that the meat kept falling out the bottom of the buns, and when I did get a taste of meat, it was overwhelmed by the other ingredients.
All in all, we had a good time. After winning a knockout I probably would have had a good time if they served me dog food, and I got ptomaine poisoning.
The drive back to Route 1 featured a body of water on the right. We did not even notice it on the way there, but on the return trip the road was pretty severely flooded. The discussion in the car concerned what has the biggest effect on tides. I was even asked my opinion. As a native of Kansas I had none.
On Thursday morning I ate a piece of leftover chicken, and Sue consumed one of her spherical “crab cakes” for breakfast. I consumed one of the coffee pods in the Keurig and secreted one in my suitcase in hope that the cleaning person (who only came on Tuesday and Thursday)6 might refill the empty slots in the pod holder.
Steve Lister.
Sue had obtained a partner for Thursday’s Gold Rush Pairs game at the partnership desk. His name was Steve Lister. I found a photo of him that was taken at the 2019 event in Warwick when he won a couple if 299er pairs games.
I was not too sanguine about our chances in the Thursday-Friday Knockout, which had the same format as the one that we won. Our team had about 3,000 less points than our victorious foursome. Nevertheless, we were the fifth-seeded team in bracket #1 again. This time there were only seven teams per bracket. We therefore played six rounds of eight boards.
We did not do very well. We barely avoided last place. We got clobbered in the last two rounds by the team that won the event and the team that was in last place. I was slightly upset about the last result. Our teammates missed bidding two slams. On one they settled for a game and made seven. On the other they let the other team play in hearts.
The first of those hands was a comedy of errors at our table. The North-South team was Ulla and Michael. Ulla opened 1[suite x=’H’]. Michael bid 2NT to show a game-going hand with four pieces. Ulla rebid 3♠, which was supposed to show a singleton or void in spades—she actually had a doubleton. Michael cued the club suit; Ulla cued diamonds; Michael bid 4NT, asking for key cards. Ulla showed two of the five key cards (four aces and the king of trumps) without the queen. Michael bid 7♥ even though he knew—or at least should have known—that they were off a key card. If it was an ace, as certainly was likely, the contract was impossible. If it was a 50% play. In short, it was a terrible bid.
Ulla could not believe that he went to seven with only two key cards, but the one that they were missing was the Jim’s king of trumps, which could easily be finessed. So they made it. This was the first hand of the match. I knew that we were doomed. My play during the next five hands was uninspired.
So, on Friday we had to play in the Open Swiss or a pairs game. We decided to play in the Swiss.
Sue and I went out to eat with three people from the Northampton, MA, Yan Drabek, Rich McClure, and Allison Ryan. I really needed to get away from Jim O. for a while. He talks during every break between the hands, and I grew tired of listening to him. I was also down on Abhi and Paul after the last two rounds.
The parking lot was full when we visited The Shanty.
Our destination for supper was the Shanty, a small restaurant on Route 1 not very far south of the Crow’s Nest. It was another seafood place. We had two appetizers, yam fries and sweet soy chicken wings. The service was slow and Yan was very hungry. Everyone else liked them a lot. I thought that they were OK, but I would have preferred the wings without the sauce.
I ordered the baby back ribs, which were described as “honey glazed ribs, patatas bravas, corn, sriracha mayo, Parmesan, cilantro.” The last four were all mixed together and also covered with the glaze. I must say that this was the first time that I have ever been disappointed with the way that a restaurant prepared baby back ribs. I ate all the meat, but I barely touched the other stuff. I also had a beer.
The conversation, however, was great. I really perked up when Rich first asked about how to defend against Precision and then how to bid when the opponents play a Weak 1NT system. Everyone also laughed at my impression of Jim explaining things. He was a nice guy and a good player, but he just talked and talked. Yan, Allison, and Rich know him well; they all play in the Northampton Bridge Club.
The most amazing thing about this meal was that the other three participants seemed to have no idea how to split a check. I had to step in and do the arithmetic for them.
I went to sleep shortly after we arrived back at the hotel. I awakened at 3:30, and I never did get back to sleep. I finished up the chicken for breakfast. The rest of the day I stayed awake by imbibing caffeine.
Sue decided that she would not play on Friday. Steve L. was required to be home to celebrate his birthday. If he had been willing to play, she probably would have stayed. Her plan was to use the pool after all of the bridge players were busy playing and then check out of the hotel.
I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep. This happened to me on a fairly regular basis. By the time of the first round I had been up for 6.5 hours. I had consumed plenty of caffeine in the interim, but I was still groggy in the first round. I failed to recognize a splinter and identified it as a weak bid. This resulted in a big swing that cost us the first match. I righted the ship after that shocking mistake.
We bumped around in the middle for most of the day, but we had a couple of big wins. We lost the last match on a hand on which I opened 1NT with a flat 15 and everyone passed. I went down one. Somehow our teammates lost 200 points even though neither side was vulnerable. I did not even ask how they did it.
I rushed off to the Executive Committee meeting with out checking our results. It turned out that we had 84 victory points, which was good enough for fourth in B and 2.66 gold points.
Hardly anyone was there when the Executive Committee meeting was schedule to begin. Someone decided that we should have food again, but we had to order from the sandwich menu. My Reuben sandwich was on the counter with a silver cover that bore my name on a tag. The French fries were surprisingly good. but the sandwich was cold. The sodas were brought in halfway through the meeting.
Curtis.
Curtis Barton, the president, called the meeting to order and, as usual, announce how fabulous everything was. He mentioned the fact that Mark Oettinger had resigned as vice-president, and he had appointed Sue Miguel as temporary vice-president.
Mark Aquino, the Regional Director, said that Bridge Base Online (BBO) was sold to a French company with no concern for the state of bridge. They were only interested in money. The ACBL’s contract runs out in 2025.
The table rate for youth players was set, as was a new rate for online NAP and GNT games. This was done to help boost the balance in the Grass Roots Fund.
I suggested that the Tournament Scheduling Committee should consider offering the Pro-Am game in the evening. After some cajoling I volunteered to manage it for the tournament scheduled for Southbridge in February of 20247.
I took a can of Diet Coke and consumed it on the drive home. I arrived at exactly 9 PM, and the miles-per-gallon read 40.1, but I have long suspected that it overstates the car’s actual mileage by about 5 percent.
The last tournament of the year, which was called “The Return of the Gala“, was held in Marlborough8, MA, from October 31 through November 5. The original Gala was held at the same site in May of 2022. I missed it because I was on the European cruise that was described here.
I planned on playing for five of the six days, but I had a very difficult time finding partners and teammates. I was fortunate that Eric Vogel agreed to play as my partner in the two knockouts held the first four days, but he could not play on Saturday. More than a month before the tournament started I submitted electronic forms to the partnership person, Denise Bahosh, for teammates for the knockouts and for a partner for Saturday. I had to pretend that I wanted to play in the open pairs on Saturday. If I could find a partner, I would try to convince him/her to switch to the Swiss.
The playing area was on the ground floor on the far right.
Sue Miguel had sent an email in early September that claimed that the hotel, a Best Western (BW) property called the Royal Plaza Hotel and Trade Center, was only recognizing the tournament rate until the end of September.9 So, I made reservations for one double room for four days.I planned to drive home after the Executive Committee meeting on Saturday evening. I had forgotten that there would be a meeting of the Board of Delegates on Sunday, and I was unaware that the Executive Committee meeting had been scheduled for Friday.
Denise tried to match Eric and me up with Alan Godes (introduced here) and an unknown teammate. I was somewhat reluctant to commit us to join up with them, but it turned out not to matter. Alan did not respond to my email for some time. In the interim Denise proposed that we play with Carol Seager and Michelle Blanchard (introduced here) in the first KO. I had played with them before and had a reasonably good experience. So, I agreed to teaming up, and so did they.
Meanwhile Alan wrote me to say that he had teammates for the Thursday-Friday KO, but he needed to find someone for the first one. I explained that we had just found teammates for that event. I don’t think that Alan ever found teammates.
Just before the tournament Denise informed me that she could not find a partner for me for Saturday. So, on the eve of the tournament I had big gaps in my dance card.
Sue could not find partners either. She wanted to attend the Board of Delegates meeting on Sunday, but it did not make much sense for her to drive up just to attend. It would be about a seventy-five-minute drive even on a Sunday morning.
On the morning of Tuesday, October 31, I set off in my Honda for Marlborough by myself. The drive was relatively easy. The only problem was that the first leg of the journey was due west on Route 190. In a few places the sun was directly in my eyes. I had my sunglasses on, but even so it was blinding. Still, even though I made my customary stop at McDonald’s in West Stafford, I made excellent time. I arrived at about 8:45, much earlier than I expected.
The only difficult part of the drive was finding the hotel. On I-495 the exit for the hotel was labeled Route 20 west. The street’s local name was Boston Post Road.
The hotel was located on a road that went north from the Post Road called “Royal Plaza Drive”, which was really more like a driveway. There was no street sign that I could see. Later I noticed a large “Best Western” sign, but on my first pass I was searching for a street sign, not a sign with five or six logos on it. Because the Post Road had a median I had to continue to the next stoplight and then make two U-turns to return to the spot where Google Maps had told me to turn.
I definitely did notice the sign for the Hampton Inn, which was located right on the Post Road. I definitely took mental not of the fact that the Hampton and a lot of other more modern hotels were quite close to the BW.
The road to the hotel had one striking feature—an oversized speed bump that was quite jarring if taken at more than 5 mph. The hotel’s parking lot was gigantic. It was mostly empty when I arrived, but at night a large number of big trucks parked there. I don’t know whether the hotel charged them for this privilege.
I parked on the right near the door to the exhibition center. Many of the people who were already there had on costumes. Gary Peterson (introduced here) had by far the most elaborate one. He was dressed as the King of Hearts, complete with crown and mace. One woman wore a long bathrobe; I think that she intended to be a geisha. I thought that all of the costumes seemed creepy. I had on my black trousers and shirt and my Halloween tie. The neck on my shirt must have shrunk. It had become too small for me. I was uncomfortable all day.
Sally Kirtley was wearing some kind of semi-costume, but what caught my attention was the fact that she had on her Tournament Manager badge. That reminded me that I had accidentally left my Goodwill pin and Executive Committee name tag at home. I remembered getting them out of my backpack. What I did not remember was that I had also put them back in the pack. Later I decided that I did not need to bring the pack.
When I arrived the playing area was very cold. For the first half hour or forty-five minutes there was no coffee. I sat by myself and shivered even though I was wearing the jacket that I had bought (and almost never needed) for my European cruise eighteen months earlier. A few people dropped by to say hello to me.
At about 9:30 I located Carol and Michelle. I expected Eric to be there at any minute. He was still missing ten minutes later, and, in fact, there were very few people around the table where they sold entries for the two knockout events. Carol gave me her credit card, and I used mine for Eric and me when I bought the entry. Our preliminary number was 102, which meant that only one other entry had been sold.
I had my phone in my hand to call Eric at about 9:50, but I saw him before I could find his name in the contacts. He reported that he had arrived early, and the hotel let him check in. So, this was my first clue that our group constituted the vast majority of the hotel’s guests.
Unused knockout enty.
I asked the director, David Metcalf, how many entries they had sold. He replied that four teams were in the top bracket and four in the 0-4,000. Carol insisted that we drop out and play in the pairs, and I agreed. Two of the original four teams played in the open KO and were given handicaps.
Eric and I won some points in both sessions of the open pairs, but we did not set the world on fire. There were about twenty-two tables in each session. None of the hands stood out for me.
I am not sure why so few people chose to play in the knockouts.
The lunch break was more than an hour. After I ate my roast beef sandwich and chips, I checked in and went to the room that I had been assigned, #263. I discovered when I opened my shaving kit that I had forgotten my toothbrush. I used one end of a Q-tip to paint my teeth with toothpaste. I also used a proxabrush and floss.
Eli had a beard in Marlborough.
I sent an email to Eli Jolley, who had filled out a card looking for teammates for the Thursday-Friday KO. He had 3,000 masterpoints, and his partner had 2,000. A few minutes later he replied that he would like to team up. I said that I would be around the partnership desk at 9:30 on Thursday morning, and many people would know me.
In the second session we played two hands against a couple who played the Polish Club, which has a three-way 1♣, Kris and Dorota Jarosz. I decided that we would play the defense that I had devised against what I called faux club systems. It involved using a 1♦ bid to make a two-suited overcall. We did well against them.
Sue Miguel kept interrupting the bridge to give awards for costumes. There were also gift cards given as door prizes. She must have used the word “fabulous” ten times. I was ready to puke.
Eric and I got points in both lackluster sessions. If I had had my druthers, I would have just driven home after we found out that there would be no KO.
When I got back to the room after the second session I phoned my wife Sue at home to tell her about the fiasco in the KO.
On Tuesday evening Eric, who is a vegetarian who sometimes eats fish, and I went out for supper. He wanted to try a place called Atlantic Poké. He tried to figure out how to get there from a map that was available near the welcome desk. We finally found it, but it was just a small place that seemed to specialize in takeout. The accent on the “e” made me think that it was probably sushi, the one thing that I have always refused to eat.
So, Eric said that the Longhorn Steakhouse was acceptable. I dialed it up on Google Maps, and we found it rather quickly in the corner of a strip mall. Eric had salmon, and I ate the baby back ribs. We talked about our careers. I learned that after Eric had been laid off from Pratt & Whitney he went to CPI and learned to program. He spent the rest of his career in IT at insurance companies.
I also learned that Eric had done quite a bit of work on Y2K. The part that he did sounded ugly indeed. He also mentioned that it was impossible to get Fortran programs converted to COBOL because they had different rounding mechanisms. He probably would have liked working at TSI, and I would have liked to have him.
I tried to watch an episode of The Bridge on my laptop, but I couldn’t get interested in it. I also tried to read from the book that I had picked up at the Hartford Bridge Club, Mexico Days by Robert Roper, but the light in the room was so dim that I gave up after about one page.
When I went to get into the shower the tub had water in it. I slipped and fell on my back on the floor of the bathroom. I was not seriously injured but I smashed my right hand against the baseboard. I put bacitracin on the small cut after the bleeding stopped. By the way, there was a handle outside of the tub, and I did grasp it as I entered the tub. Nevertheless, I could not stop the fall.
To get the water out of the tub I needed to shove a plastic Bic razor that I always brought for emergencies between the stopper and the lip of the drain.
I did not think much of my room. However, it did have a refrigerator into which I placed the two bottles of water that the desk clerk gave me when I checked in. There was also a microwave, but I did not use it. The bed was quite comfortable, and the heat worked without a problem.
Breakfast was free. I met Eric in the restaurant (which only served supper on Fridays and Saturdays) at 8:15 on Wednesday morning. They served pretty much the same thing every morning: scrambled eggs (plain and with something added), meat (sausage or bacon), French toast sticks with syrup, fruit, and yogurt. Juice and coffee were available from extremely old machines. The sausage that they served on Wednesday and Friday was much better than Thursday’s overcooked bacon. The French toast was much too chewy.
Afterwards we played with Michelle and Carol in the open Swiss. There were only twelve teams. In the first round I played 3NT two hands in a row. The first one was routine. On the second one I had eight tricks. There was also some potential for more in some suits. The problem was spades, where the dummy had only a doubleton, and I held Kx. Sure enough, the lead was a low spade. I played a card from dummy. Then the player on my right pulled two cards from her hand, the queen and ten of spades, and dropped them on the table. We called the director.
Tim Hill came to the table and explained that she could play either card. The other would be a “major penalty card”. She chose to play the queen. I scored my king. Now I only needed one trick. I crossed to the dummy in hearts and took a finesse in clubs. It lost, but I was allowed to tell the left-hand opponent not to lead a spade. In the end I was able to win ten tricks before they got their spades. If she had dropped the cards on the table, I could never have made it.
When we returned to our teammates’ table, I said that unfortunately we had probably used up all of our luck for the day in the first round. They thought that they had done badly, and they had, but the gain from my lucky 3NT game was enough for us to claim victory.
The celebration was short. We played against Mark Aquino’s team in the second round and got blitzed. That was the first of four consecutive blitzes that we endured. This was even worse than the performance in the Swiss at the NABC in Boston (described here).
I played none of the thirty-two hands in the four blitz rounds. One hand in the middle of the blitzkrieg deserved emphasis. I held KQJ10 and three little clubs, a singleton diamond, Ax in hearts and Kxx in spades. Eric opened 1♣! I wasted no time and bid 4♦, which asked him how many aces he had. His answer indicated all three! I thought for only a few seconds before bidding 6♣.
Eric had to play it. I could tell from the look on his face that it was going to be difficult, and it was. He won only my seven clubs, the three outside aces, and the ♠K. At the time I thought that it was due to an unlucky lay of the cards, but I should have known better.
Eric’s opening bid indicated that he had either three clubs or more clubs than diamonds. In any case he had four or fewer hearts and spades. Unless he had precisely one diamond and four in the other suits, he had less than 15 points. If he had had 15-17 points with a balanced hand, he would have bid 1NT. So, he was very unlikely to have either of the missing kings. I was essentially gambling that he had the ♠Q! It was possible, but not very likely.
I should have just responded 2♣ to set the trump suit. We would then bid stoppers up the line. When I was certain of stoppers in every suit, I should have signed off in thee lowest available notrump bid.
In the sixth and last round we played against Alan Godes’s team. The match ended in a tie. Somehow it seemed fitting.
At that point I considered it to have been an unspeakably bad tournament. It got a little better at supper, which we ate with Ben and Ginny Bishop. At the time Ben was the president of the HBC. One of Ben’s sons had recommended a restaurant called Welly’s in the neighboring town of Hudson.
I found a shortcut!
For some reason we took two cars. Ben knew where it was. I was confident that I had programmed Google Maps to report the directions to Welly’s Restaurant in Hudson (there was also a Welly’s in Marlborough).
Somehow I got the directions for Willy’s Steakhouse in Shrewsbury, MA. So I turned a fifteen-minute trip into one that took much more than half an hour. Ben and Ginny had to wait for us.
I don’t think that I spoiled the evening. I had a Reuben sandwich, which was pretty good. The stars of the meal from my perspective, however, were the tall glass of Guinness and the onion rings. The latter were both delicious and plentiful.
We got to learn a little about Ginny’s career in nursing. The rest of the evening was spent with Ben, Eric, and I swapping war stories about working with computers. They were both pretty impressed to learn that I had personally installed thirty-six AdDept systems.
Ben also told us about his two sons. They both had worked for the MITRE Corporation. I had never heard of a non-profit that worked with the federal government.
We found our way back to the hotel without any problem.
On Thursday morning I learned that Eli was a relatively young pro from Auburn, AL. I already knew his partner, Judy McNutt from western Massachusetts. She was wheelchair-bound.
Judy McNutt.
This time there were two brackets of eight teams in the 0-4,000 KO. We were the top-seeded team in the upper bracket. We won our first three matches rather easily. I decided to spend the break in my room resting and dining on the gifts that the lady at the front desk gave me when I checked in—a bag of chips, an energy bar, and water in a bottle. When I returned to the playing area I bought a can of Diet Coke.
Our streak continued after lunch We won the first two matches. At this point we had pretty much clinched a spot in the knockout on Friday. However, we were blitzed in the sixth round, which allowed the team that beat us to pull even with us. Both teams won blitzes in the last round. We were awarded first place based on the fractional victory point score that was in effect.
Eli asked me if I cared about whom we played. I told him that it was a difficult choice. The two teams, Page and Clay, were only one victory point apart, and we had defeated both of them in the Swiss by small margins. I picked to play the Page team because the other team seemed to me to have a stronger East-West pair. I hoped to protect Judy, who was definitely our weak link.
Eric and I ate supper with Donna Feir, the manager of the HBC, and Sally Kirtley. At my suggestion we went to Evviva, a casual Italian restaurant. Two HBC players, Tom Gerchman and Dan Finn were already seated nearby. They were going over the hands from the pairs game. I ordered the Bolognese (at Evviva they put the bowl in Bolognese) and a glass of Montepulciano.
Donna Feir.
The conversation at supper was not extremely memorable, but I enjoyed it. It was the first time in my fifteen years as a member of the HBC that I had been in a social situation with Donna. I did learn that the tournament in February would be the combination sectional and regional, and it would be held in Mansfield. The Presidential Regional had been assassinated. The tournament in Southbridge would be in April.
After we drove back to the hotel Donna and Sally played in the side game. I went to my room and watched part of the football game between TCU and Texas Tech. Texas Tech was ahead 20-7 when I turned it off at the half, and the Red Raiders held on for the victory.
I got the bright idea of dragging the pole lamp over to the side of the bed. I cocked the shade so that it produced enough light to read by. I read a chapter or so before I took a shower and then went to bed.
At 3:00 I awakened and spent an hour and spent about an hour working out the combinatorial probabilities of that slam hand that failed. I only went to sleep when I realized that it was almost impossible for Eric to have either missing king.
I wore an N95 mask the first three days. Less than 10 percent of the other players did so. However, the rigidity of the mask bothered the bridge of my nose, and I had deep gouges in the side of my face. Since I would only be at the same table as four others, I decided to leave it in room 263.
Mark Oettinger.
After breakfast on Friday I went over to the table occupied by Steve Ackerman and Sue Collinson from Vermont. I asked them if they knew what the backstory was for Mark Oettinger’s sudden and—to me, at least—shocking resignation. Steve said that Peter Marcus had called Mark and insisted that he should resign. Steve said that it was “pretty nasty”. Later that morning I met up with Joe Brouillard. I asked him if he knew what had happened. He said that he had been surprised by it and knew no details.
I thought back to an email that I had received from Sandy DeMartino asking me about Mark’s performance. I explained that he seemed OK to me, but my interaction with him had been limited by the fact that I was unable to attend three consecutive meetings of the Tournament Scheduling Committee, at which the strategy for recovery from the Pandemic was decided. I had then resigned from the committee because I was spending so much time on the HBC, the CBA, and this project.
Sandy DeMartino.
Sandy said that Peter Marcus had telephoned her and asked her to support Sue Miguel as the next president of D25. Sandy declined to do so. I think that this must have been before the call to Mark.
I found all of this to be deeply disconcerting. At the close of my conversation with Steve and Sue I asked them if they thought that I should make a stink about this at the Executive Committee meeting on Friday evening. Steve advised against it. Sue was silent.
We lost the match against the Page team. All of the swings in the first set were in the first six boards that Eric and I played. I did not think that we had played badly. We won the second set by eight, but that was not nearly enough.
I bought a salad, which was barely edible, and a Diet Coke for lunch. I ate by myself and had a hard time keeping the Oettinger affair out of my head.
I checked the cards on the partnership desk. I could scarcely believe that no one was looking for partners for Saturday’s open pairs game. I don’t know what I would have done if I had not canceled my hotel reservation.
The first set of the consolation game after lunch was easy to analyze. We did not bid three games that our opponents did. Two of those were my decisions. The games came home because on both hands Eric and I had a secondary fit in the diamond suit that, because of aggressive interference by the opponents, neither of us got a chance to show the other.
Wee came back strong again in the second set. However, we lost ten imps because Eric opened a flat hand with a 12-count, something that I would never do. I had nineteen points. I responded 2NT, which for us showed 12-14 or 18-19 points. Eric bid 3NT, which indicated that he had no short suits. I bid 3NT, which went down. If Eric had had the thirteen points that I expected, I would have made the bid, and we would have won the match. If he had opened a minor with the hand that he had, we would have fallen a few imps short.
I was pretty sure that I had ordered a roast beef sandwich for the box lunch that the hotel provided for the Executive Committee meeting. However, there was nothing but turkey and tuna. I certainly did not order tuna. So I took a turkey sandwich that had a lot of dry meat and bread. I can’t complain. An apple and a bag of chips were also provided.
Mark Aquino.
The main topic of conversation was whether we should worry about scheduling regionals the same weekend as the regional in Lancaster, PA. Mark Aquino said that he had gotten an earful from the president of District 24. Peter Marcus and Sue Miguel were adamant that the “500-mile rule” that D24 cited did not exist. Evidently they hoped to draw more pros from New York City.
The schedule for the tournament in Southbridge in February, which because it was near the Super Bowl, would have a football theme. I didn’t plan to go unless someone really wanted to play with me. I would not be eligible for the regional events, and the sectional events did not include any bracketed events. Maybe they will change that.
The meeting closed with a long lecture by Sue Miguel about how we all needed to get off of our butts and to participate in her many programs to recruit people to rejoin the ACBL and play in our tournaments. I found much of this offensive and wrong-headed, but she and Peter will not brook any opposition.
I am also convinced that the basic analysis is wrong. To me the problem was not the pandemic so much as the ACBL’s reliance on online bridge as a source of money. Maybe it was necessary for the ACBL to survive, but it has now ruined some of the tools that we had used to put on attractive tournaments that made money. The current D25 administration has abandoned most of the aspects that I judged made the events compelling. No one seemed to want to hear this. Instead we have been treating our players like kids in junior high. Costume contests, door prizes, unsharpened pencils with “Day of the dead” figures on them: give me a break! All of the incentives were provided to new players. I saw no effort at transitioning anyone into the games that the district sponsors.
Also, I was supposed to represent Connecticut. There have been no regional tournaments in Connecticut since 2021, and none have been planned. We were told that there were no hotels. Is that possible?
I came away from the meeting with a very bleak outlook. For ten years I have loved to attend regional tournaments. At this point I could barely tolerated them, and they were expensive.
The drive back to Enfield was uneventful. The Honda entered the garage at 9 p.m.
1. Until 2016 there had been an Individual Regional in Newton, MA. It was discontinued because it was unprofitable. My report from the last such event was posted here.
2. The Red Lion was the last name of the hotel in Cromwell, CT, that hosted District 25’s regional tournament in February. In 2020—just days before the Presidential Regional—the state of CT closed down the hotel for failure to pay taxes. It never reopened. The tournament was moved to the Sturbridge Host for that one year.
3. Precision is a bidding system in which the strongest opening bid is at the lowest level—1♣. The Wikipedia article about it is here.
4. I had played in the previous 0-4000 Knockout at least five years earlier. It was a fiasco. Only five teams participated. We played all day in two five-way sessions to eliminate one team. One team had much less experience than the other four; they did not do well. Our team lost in the semifinals and was relegated to the Single-session Swiss.
5. Benjamin Black was the pen name assumed by award-winning novelist John Banville when he began writing genre fiction late in his career.
6. On my previous two visits to this hotel in 2022 no cleaning service was provided at all.
7. I learned months later that there would not be a tournament in Southbridge in 2022. This is explained in the Marlborough section.
8. The name of the Massachusetts town is officially Marlborough. There is a “hamlet” named Marlboro. The town in New Jersey with the same name shortened it to eliminate the “ugh” at the end, but the one in Massachusetts did not. Nevertheless, the highway signs mostly use the short version.
9. The hotel was not actually filled to anything approaching its capacity. I had to wonder it the hotel really enforced or even announced this policy.
