The Larry Weiss Award (introduced here) was an engraved silver tray that was presented by the New England Bridge Conference a total of twenty-three times over the period of its existence—1982-2022. The history of the award, including its original criteria and evolution in 2023, is documented here.
The Larry Weiss award.
In 2017 I won the award. I was very proud of this, but I also pledged to myself that I would make sure that it was given to someone else the next year. The committee that I formed in 2018 voted for Bob Bertoni, who was the District Director. That responsibility left him little or no time to organize a committee to manage the process of selecting the next recipient in 2019. Then came the pandemic, and to make matters wors Bob developed cancer and died in July of 2021.
It did not make sense to try to give out the award in 2021. No regional tournaments were held in New England the entire year. In 2022 I argued in the Executive Committee’s Zoom meetings that the award should again be given out in 2023, and I volunteered to chair the committee again. There was no opposition. The president, Curtis Barton, told me to go for it.
A few months later I discovered that no one knew where the Larry Weiss trophy was. I was not about to call Bob’s widow, Beth, and quiz her about it. Besides, there was only room enough on the tray to squeeze in one more name. So, the EC voted that the award committee should decide on a new award, name it, set up the criteria, buy it, and present it..
When Natalie Bassil won an event in 2015, she asked me to post this photo of her. She hasn’t changed a bit.
I selected committee members in much the same way as I did in 2018. I wanted people who had participated in the post-pandemic tournaments, and I insisted that at least one person be from each district. A few people turned me down or never responded. In the end two EMBA players agreed to be on the committee, Natalie Bassil and Dan Jablonski. The others were Michelle Blanchard, Chris Soares, Lucia Carlisle, Sue Collinson, Dan Morgenstern, and Judy Hyde.
The protocol was similar to what I used in 2018. All of the communication among members would be via email. Nominations would be submitted by the players throughout New England. Two sets of votes would be held. In the first one committee members would be allowed to name three (or fewer) nominees who they thought were worthy of the honor. Then each person would vote for one person from the reduced list.
Dan Jablonski.
The first step was to come up with a name and a set of criteria. I proposed the name Weiss-Bertoni Award and added one criterion to the three listed on the Larry Weiss document. “Extraordinary service to promote face-to-face bridge at all levels in New England.” The one thing that I was most adamant about was the phrase “face-to-face”. I felt that online bridge, championed by the ACBL both during the pandemic and afterwards, was destroying the face-to-face game.
I sent an email to each committee member with my proposal and asked them to suggest improvements. The proposal that I attached has been posted here. A few members suggested that two proposals would make more sense. Since I had only been authorized to award one trophy, I did not put those ideas to a vote. Chris Soares was the only person who made a constructive suggestion:
Chris Soares.
Thank you for a thoughtful and concise revision.
In new Section 4 I’d suggest that
“It would seem to make sense for the committee selecting the current nominee to include the current winner…”
be changed to
“It seems sensible for the committee selecting the current nominee to include the current winner, if possible…”
A bit cleaner and addresses the unfortunate reality of death
I liked her suggestion. Since I could not imagine anyone objecting to it, I did not put it to a vote. So, we now had a name and some good criteria.
Gary Peterson.
Nominations: I asked the new webmaster, Gary Peterson to post an item on the main page of the district’s website to solicit nominations. Players were asked to send nominations with the reasons for their choices to my email account. At the same time I sent an email to all active players in D25. It is posted here.
The response was almost overwhelming. In the end I received ninety-nine emails nominating forty-one players. I nominated five people: Felix Springer, Trevor Reeves, Donna Feir, Linda Starr, and Joe Brouillard. I disqualified two of the nominees. Two people told be that I should be nominated. I told them that I was not eligible because I had won in 2017. One person nominated a woman who lived in New Jersey who, as far as I could tell, had never played in a tournament in New England. Chris Soares nominated someone who had recently died. Since he had been alive for most of the time since the last award was given, I allowed it.
Sue Collinson.
I wrote php code for a webpage on Wavada.org to allow the members of the committee to read what players had said about the people that they had nominated. A link to the webpage is here. I left the nominations open until March 17.
On March 18 I sent the following email to the committee members:
The nomination process is now finished. The last nomination–and it was for a player who had not previously been nominated–came in at 11:53 last night. I was very impressed by the response. I am quite sure that no previous nominating process sparked anything comparable.
I only disqualified two nominations. One was for a player who lives in New Jersey and never seems to have played in New England. The other was for a previous winner of the Weiss award.
I have created a word-processing document for each nominee. Every document contains all the supporting material that was provided by nominators. I will create a pdf file from each of these and post them where each of you can read them. I have written a program that will make it easy to find and open them. I will send the link to this program as soon as all of the pdf files have been checked. I want to make sure that nothing was lost in the transition.
I hope for the evaluation phase to start on Monday. Since I am playing f2f today and tomorrow, it may be a day or so later. During that phase you will be provided time to read all the materials and, if you wish, to send me your thoughts (attributed or anonymous) to add to the pdf files before we start voting. I will provide more details when I send the link.
Judy Hyde.
I made two mistakes in posting the nominations. I accidentally left off Ed Rothman, who Chris Soares had nominated. When she complained about it, I apologized, added him, and made sure that everyone knew about the mistake. I also left off Linda Starr, whom I nominated. I did not discover that until later.
The email containing the link and instructions for reading the nominating emails was sent on March 20:
It is time to start evaluating the cases for the forty players who have been nominated for the Weiss-Bertoni award. The official web page for this award is at https://nebridge.org/pages/481/. You can review the criteria there.
I have posted the text of all of the nominations on my website. You can view them through the alphabetical index at http://wavada.org/BAN001.php. When you get to that page click on the button at the bottom labeled “Generate HTML”. A list of the nominees, their units, ranks, and current masterpoints will appear. Beneath each nominee is a list of the people who nominated him/her. To read the text of the nominations just click on the underlined name of the nominee.
I did not edit the nominations except to leave out “thank you” and similar messages. I copied and pasted (as text) all of the messages. So, every message is in one uniform font without bolding, colors, emojis, or other flourishes.
The next step is to record your reactions and send them to me. You can specify that you want the message to be anonymous if you like. Otherwise, I will attribute it to the sender. I will either add the reactions to the bottom of the appropriate document or create a new document for reactions. I have not decided which to do. In either case you will be allowed to read them through the above link on my web site.
After everyone has a chance to digest the nominations and reactions, we will have a preliminary vote. In 2018 everyone was allowed to select three nominees whom they would be comfortable with as the winner. The people who appeared on at least five of these nine lists were considered finalists. The final voting was to select one of the finalists as the winner. Unless someone has a better idea, we will probably do it the same way this time.
Dan Morgenstern has agreed to be on the “subcommittee” that selects and purchases the physical award. If you have strong feelings about it (I don’t), you can contact him directly at dmdockayak@aol.com.
Please let me know that you received this email. I will send it again later in the week to anyone who doesn’t respond.
Dan Morgenstern.
Discussion phase: On March 30 I sent an email to begin the “discussion phase”:
The nominating process for the Weiss-Bertoni award has ended. Before taking votes I want to solicit information and opinions from the committee members. I know a dozen or so nominees very well and another dozen or so well enough so to greet at a tournament. The people whom I know well live fairly close to me or have served with me on committees, boards, or projects. I would like to know what committee members with different backgrounds and locations think. I am also eager to share some of the “insider” experiences that I have had.
To that end I would like the other members of the committee to—if they want to—send me their anecdotes, thoughts, and feelings about any of the nominees that they know fairly well. I will create a pdf file for each nominee who receives comments from members and post them on the list. Each comment will be attributed to the sender unless it was specified that it was to be considered anonymous. For each nominee the word “Comments” will appear in red beneath the list of nominators if any comments have been received and posted. Clicking on “Comments” will produce a pdf file with all the comments for that nominee. I should have this portion of the web page working by Monday, April 3.
We can then start voting when everyone has had a chance to comment and digest the comments of others. I think that we should be able to do so near the end of April. It’s been five years since the last award; we should take as much time as we need.
Please let me know when you receive this message. I am sending the emails one at a time to try to avoid spam filters.
I was disappointed with the response to the request for additional comments. Perhaps it was a surprise to people that there were so many nominations to read. I read them all. Almost all of them were very short. Hardly anyone listed any details. I added my own comments to quite a few, but only one or two other people on the committee expressed their opinions.
This was, I suspect, another unexpected result of the pandemic. People had not been playing in very many different places. So, they were unfamiliar with the people who were working hard in other parts of New England. I know that I was.
Voting: The first round of voting began on May 1;
The participation in the “discussion phase” by the members of the Weiss-Bertoni committee was somewhat disappointing to me. The discussion phase in 2018 was more lively. Several committee members this time said that they were not very familiar with any of the nominees. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the isolation imposed over the previous three years.
It is May now, and we should start voting. Please send me a list of up to three of the nominees. They should be people whom you would be most comfortable with as the first recipient of the Weiss-Bertoni award. The criteria have been posted at https://nebridge.org/pages/481/. The list of nominees, including descriptions by the nominators and comments by committee member is stall available at http://wavada.org/BAN001.php. A few additional comments were added over this last weekend.
Please try to send your list to me this week, if possible. I will tabulate all of the votes and come up with a short list of finalists. I still expect to present the award at the Board of Delegates meeting in June.
The following people received at least one vote in the first round of voting: Karen Barrett, Joe Brouillard, Lois DeBlois, Yan Drabek, Donna Feir, Bob Gaudet, Kim Gilman, Tim Hill, David Metcalf, Sue Miguel, Ed Rothman, Bob Sagor, and Caroly Weiser. Sue Miguel and Joe Brouillard received more votes than the others.
This email for the final vote was sent on May 9:
Thank you very much for participating in the process of selecting the first winner of the Weiss-Bertoni award. Thirteen nominees received at least one vote in the elimination round. Two candidates received more than the others. So, the final choice is between Joe Brouillard and Sue Miguel. Please send me your choice of one or the other.
If you wish to review the nomination materials or comments, they are still available at http://wavada.org/BAN001.php.
The final vote was very close. It was 4-4 as I awaited the final vote, which finally arrived on May 18.
The new trophy: My original idea was to procure a tray that resembled the original Larry Weiss trophy as closely as possible. It was round and silver-plated. There was enough space on it for the name of the award, a phrase that described it, and twenty-four name-date combinations. If we gave it out every year, I would be 98 when it was full, and no one would ask me about it.
I spent many hours on the Internet looking for such a thing. I was pretty sure that the original, which was in my possession for an entire year, was at least eighteen inches in diameter. I found nothing that exceeded sixteen inches, and those trays all had ornamentation on them that would have greatly reduced the available space.
I asked for some time at the Executive Committee meeting. Of course, I was last on the agenda. I asked for a budget and/or help in choosing the new trophy. People were very eager to end the meeting. In the chaos of the last few seconds Sue Miguel, Peter Marcus, and (I could be wrong about her) Carolyn Weiser agreed to “take it offline”, which I interpreted to mean that they would form a subcommittee and take care of it.
I asked for a volunteer from the awards committee to join them, and Dan Morgenstern said that he would. I did not forget about the trophy, but I stopped researching. I received the following email from Dan on April 8:
I am out of the country until 4/25…I won’t be able to comment .
Also, none of the folks who volunteered to come up with a gift have been in touch…I am thinking a small individual plaque rather than an engraved plate.
Hope you are well!
This was what he wrote when he returned on April 28:
I have been away in the South Pacific for the past month, little or no internet.
Anyway,sorry about the slow response.
I haven’t heard from Peter Marcus ( I think he was going to lead the trophy choice team).
If we chose individual plaques, I would think they would be the same from year to year…no decisions needed.
I am a bit surprised at the lack of comments, other than yours…you might think the nominators would want to post…
I know most of the top players, other than Mark Aquino, I don’t know that most of them have done much to popularize bridge. I will look more closely at the list…
I resumed my research. I discovered that, depending on what we wanted, we could spend less than $100 or more than $1,000. I needed a budget. I wrote this email to Curtis on April 25:
As I mentioned before, I have little confidence that the subcommittee that volunteered at the end of the last EC meeting is doing anything to procure the physical Weiss-Bertoni award. Can you tell me what I need to do to get a budget for purchasing the trophy?
Here is what he replied:
Curtis Barton.
We’ll discuss it at he next EC meeting (Saturday PM). If you have an idea what a suitable trophy would cost, that would help.
When I told him that we were in the process of voting, and I intended to award the trophy at the Board of Delegates meeting on the morning after the EC meeting, he told me just to get what I thought was appropriate.
I then asked Sue to help me with the project. She spent even more time on the Internet. As I did, she gave up on getting an appropriate tray. She did, however find a trophy with places for attaching a pretty large number of small engravings for winners and one big one for the name of the trophy. I liked it, and she negotiated a very reasonable price of about $150 including the shipping and engraving costs.
The vendor was Crown Awards. All of the engraving was done perfectly, and Sue assembled everything. I thought that it was very classy.
Presentation: The Board of Delegates met on June 25. Between twenty and thirty people were assembled. As always, I was last on the agenda. I made the presentation from my seat in which I was surrounded by the only other participants from Connecticut—Paul Burnham, Peter, and Sue.
I described the process that I used to select the nine committee members. I told everyone how pleased I was with the enthusiastic response to the solicitation for nominations. I held up the trophy for everyone to see. I told them that Sue had done most of the work in acquiring it. I said that if they liked it, they should compliment her. If not, they should keep their opinions to themselves. Then I read the name on the trophy: “Joe Brouillard”.
Joe was clearly stunned, but he wasn’t speechless. He gave a short acceptance speech. I was so happy for him.
General announcements: I had scheduled an email to go our to all active members of D25 at 10:30 while Sue and I were battling the traffic back to Enfield. It was short enough to post here:
Three members of the awards committee told me that they had enjoyed the experience and liked the trophy.
I also asked the webmaster to post a blurb that I wrote about it, and he did.
After the Covid-19 vaccinations became readily available in the late spring of 2021 competitive bridge1 started a very slow return in New England. The Hartford Bridge Club reopened in August of 2021, but attendance was disappointing. The Simsbury Bridge Club’s first game was a five-table gathering on September 18. The only sectional held in New England in the entire year was an EMBA event in Watertown on December 10-12. It drew 133 tables, exactly half of the attendance at the equivalent tournament in 2019.
The Executive Committee (EC) of District 25 planned to hold a tournament in Warwick, RI, at the end of August. I had publicized it rather heavily.2 However, it—and every other regional event scheduled for August—was canceled by the ACBL. A regional tournament that was also planned for November in Mansfield, MA, was canceled by a vote at a Zoom meeting of the EC.
District 25’s Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) held a couple of Zoom meetings in late 2021 in which it decided to change the 2022 schedule drastically. Peter Marcus, the district’s Director-in-Chief, had been arguing—with some degree of seriousness—that the district should schedule no tournaments at all for 2022 rather than play by the ACBL’s rules. Instead the TSC decided to shelve the plans for three events:
The Presidential Regional that had traditionally been held in February in Connecticut.
The intermediate/novice event scheduled for April that had been called the Rainbow Weekend or Gold Mine.
The Senior Regional/Cape Cod Sectional that was also planned for April.
Although I was a voting member of both committees, I was unable to attend either Zoom meeting and was shocked when the TSC proposed this at the Zoom meeting of the EC in early 2022. I voted loudly against the recommendations, but no one else did.
Instead, a four-day tournament called the Gala Regional was scheduled for May 19-22 in Marlborough3, MA, in a hotel that had never before been used for a tournament. The flyer for the event has been posted here. I had a long streak of attendance at regional events, but I could not attend this one because of a European cruise that had been scheduled many months earlier (for a period in which D25 had never run a tournament) and had already been postponed twice. That adventure has been described here.
On April 14 I sent out the first promotional email for the Gala to over 2,000 players in Districts 3, 24, and 25 who had less than 300 master points. A copy is posted here. 61% of the recipients opened the email, but only 51 of them clicked on the link to the flyer.
On the same day I sent a slightly different version to the players in the same districts with between 300 and 750 masterpoints. A copy is posted here. This group was about half the size of the previous one. Again, about 61 percent opened the email; 48 clicked on the link to the flyer.
The third version was sent to “Gold Rush Grads”, those with 750-2000 masterpoints, about 1,000 players. A copy was posted here. 58.2 percent opened it, and 46 clicked on the link.
The fourth version went to players with over 2,000 masterpoints. A copy was posted here. 56+ percent opened it, but only 20 clicked on the link.
So, only a total of 165 players clicked on the link to the flyer. I haven’t checked every email, but I suspect that this was the worst rate of any set of emails promoting tournaments that I had ever sent. People were either still scared of Covid-19, or they were upset about the vaccination requirement. Or maybe my emails were less effective because it was difficult for me to be enthusiastic and creative about the promotion of an event that I could not attend.
I sent a second email a week later to emphasize the convenience and quality of the hotel, which I had never seen. Only people with less than 50 masterpoints were excluded from this email (copy posted here). Nearly 59 percent opened it, and 127 clicked on the link to the flyer. There was no link to the hotel; reservations needed to be made by telephone.
On April 29 I sent a set of three emails that Sue Miguel composed. Her style was much different from mine. A sample of one is posted here. A total of 120 people clicked on the link to the flyer. No further marketing was done.
The schedule placed a lot more emphasis on the party element than the bridge.
Sue Wavada attended the Gala, and when she picked me up at Logan Airport after the tournament was over, she reported that she enjoyed it. She also was allowed to take home some balloons.
The Grand National Teams (GNT) was one of the events scheduled to be held at the eleven-day Summer NABC to be held in Providence in July. Both the qualifying tournament in District 25 and the finals of the event had been held online in 2021. Although I hated playing online I played with my partner, Ken Leopold, on Bridge Base Online (BBO) as often as I could. We teamed up with our long-time teammates, Trevor Reeves and Felix Springer.
On October 25 of 2021 I sent an email to all three about the 2022 qualifying tournament for D25:
My total masterpoints went over 2500 yesterday. However, I just checked the ACBL’s Conditions of Contest for the GNT for 2021-2022 (http://web2.acbl.org/documentLibrary/play/coc/gnt/GNT2021-22.pdf). The cutoff date for the GNT is the roster of August 6, 2021. So, I will still be eligible for one more GNT. The finals will be at the summer NABC, which is scheduled for Providence. The date for the qualifying tournament has not been finalized, but it will probably be in April or May.
I hope that you guys will be willing to play with me again in my final opportunity for this tournament.
All three responded positively to this request. On April 28, 2022, I wrote the following email to all three in order to confirm our plans.
The GNT qualifier for Flight B is on April 30 and May 1. I have read the Conditions of Contest. It will be held online under approximately the same conditions as last year. Two teams will qualify if more than eight participate. The cost is $15 per session
The finals in Providence start on Wednesday, July 13.
Is everyone still up for this? If so, I will register us.
Felix responded within an hour or so with this disheartening message: “Dan Morgenstern asked Trevor and me a while back to play in the GNTs with him and his partner and we accepted. Another time.”
This was soul-crushing news. I really wanted to compete in this event with a team that I trusted and could plan strategy with. I forwarded to them a copy six months earlier of their positive responses to my invitation, but neither of them responded to that email.
Ken suggested that we should look for other teammates, but I told him that I did not want to do so. We had played with inferior teammates in this event in 2019, and I had not enjoyed it at all. In that case the event was face-to-face. This would be online, which I could scarcely tolerate even with good teammates.
Felix and Trevor’s team qualified in the second team from D25 and got to play in Providence.
I was heavily involved in the promotion of the Providence NABC, helped with the partnership desk a couple of times, and played bridge almost every day. The beginning of the description of my involvement has been posted here. Felix and Trevor’s team made it to the semifinals, where they lost to the eventual champions.
The first regional tournament that I was able to attend was the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, which ran from August 30-September 5. The flyer has been posted here.
The first promotional email was what I would call a postcard. Sue Miguel designed it. I sent it on July 27, about five weeks before the tournament began, to everyone in D3, D24, and D25, as well as the people who attended in Providence. 41.3 percent of the 15,000 recipients opened the email. 340 clicked on the link to the “schedule”. There was a mistake on it. I sent out a correction the same day. The correction, which has been posted here, had an additional 500 clicks.
I wrote and sent out the second email on August 18 to everyone in D3, D24, and D25. 184 people clicked on the link to the flyer. It has been posted here.
Sue designed an email for 3,000 players in D25 with less than 750 masterpoints. It was sent on August 22. The email, which was posted here, did not contain any links. She also had me send one for the 824 “Gold Rush Graduates” (750-2000).
The less said about the actual tournament the better. On Tuesday Sohail Hassan4, whom I had met at the partnership desk at a tournament before the pandemic, and I did poorly in the Open Pairs. Sohail showed up at the last minute for both sessions. Since there were a few things on our convention card that I was shaky about, this distressed me.
We intended to play in the Wednesday-Thursday knockout, but we were unable to find teammates. Since the schedule had been pared back to save on director’s fees, our only other choice was to play in Wednesday morning’s Side Game5. It was a horrendous experience. Sohail again appeared at the last minute for both sessions, and in the morning he got into a boisterous argument with one of our opponents. The director had to be called to calm them down. I made several mistakes; our scored was miserable. Nevertheless, we had a 58.71 percent game in the afternoon Side Game.
Bob Potvin.
On Thursday we played in the Open Swiss. We teamed up with two guys from Rhode Island, Don Rankin and Bob Potvin. I had played against both of them before. We somehow finished third in B and sixth overall. This was not that great an accomplishment. Most of the participants were teams that had been eliminated from the knockout on the previous day.
I confided to Don that playing with Sohail had been a miserable experience. He replied, “Maybe we should play together.”
Abhi Dutta.
On Friday I had scheduled a new partner, Abhi Dutta6, for the knockout. Our teammates were Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider. Although the four of us were fresh from a victory in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA (described here), we could not get any traction in our five-team group. We were eliminated and forced to play in the Open Swiss on Saturday. I remember a general feeling of great frustration, but no details.
The Executive Committee met on Friday. I was in no mood to participate. This version of the Warwick tournament, which had always been the jewel in the district’s crown, seemed pitiful to me. Even though we did not even rent the other ballroom, the main room was not nearly full. The rotunda was used for both the side games and the 299ers, and there was still room to spare. The attendance, by historical standards, was alarmingly low.
We learned that we had taken a financial bath at the Gala, and Warwick was probably worse. The only good news was that, as I for one had come to expect, Joe Brouillard, the treasurer, had turned water into wine with the district’s finances. We still had a lot of money in the bank.
I could hardly believe that the roles of tournament chairman and partnership chairman were no longer going to be handled locally. Sue Miguel was going to do the former, and Denise Bahosh had volunteered for the latter. The problem was that the two new sites, Southbridge and Marlborough, had no natural constituencies. Who would take the responsibilities for them? Nevertheless, I considered it a mistake not to use local people in future tournaments in Warwick.
The decision was made to raise the table fees to $20 and to use the projected revenue to turn the Spectacle Regional into a very enjoyable event. I voted for it and even spoke in favor of the move, but I would have liked to see more details about how Sue Miguel intended to spend all of that extra money.
Mark Aquino, the Regional Director, made a depressing presentation that included the statement, “The ACBL is broken.” I left the meeting with the strong feeling that our best efforts might not be enough to save bridge as we knew it.
The Saturday Open Swiss once again was dominated by teams that had been eliminated in the knockout. We finished fourth in B and won a few gold points for a performance that was not worthy of any recognition.
The Ocean State Regional was the most disappointing tournament that I had ever attended. I had no fun in any event in which I played, and I found the EC meeting depressing in the extreme. The Crowne Plaza was not a disappointment, but only because I had also stayed there during the NABC event in July (description begins here) and no longer expected my room to be cleaned after I used it.
The last D25 tournament of 2022 was the Spectacle Regional, held in Southbridge, MA. It began on Tuesday, November 15, and ended on Saturday, November 19. I had been asked to prepare a Bulletin for this event. I therefore joined Curtis Barton (president), Carolyn Weiser (secretary), Sally Kirtley (tournament manager), and Denise Bahosh (partnership) in a “walk-around” inspection of the facility. Sue Miguel was also expected, but for some reason she was unable to attend.
The hotel/conference center was a nice modern place, but the rooms in which we would be playing were much smaller than the ballrooms in which we usually held regional events. The plan for this event was to provide exceptional hospitality, which meant free food and something new (and free) for newer players. Sue Miguel devised that approach, which she called Fest.
I sent out the first promotional piece on September 9. It was composed by Sue Miguel in the postcard format that she preferred. The message was that a lot of gold would be dispensed in Southbridge. I have posted it here.
Sue designed the piece sent on September 12 as well. It was directed to 2,000 players with less than 150 masterpoints. It provided an introduction to the concept of Fest. It has been posted here
On September 15 I sent a different email that Sue created. It was also in postcard format, but it also contained a link to the schedule that had by then been posted on NEBridge.org. The target audience was everyone in District 3, 24, or 25. It can be viewed here.
On October 19 I sent an email to the same audience. This one was in the format that I ordinarily used, but I emphasized the convenience and uniqueness of the site, not the bridge schedule. I considered the latter very meager. I have posted it here.
On October 25 I sent out another solicitation to those with less than 150 points. This one included the 9/15 postcard, but it also had text that Sue had written to explain the Fest concept. It has been posted here.
The next day I emailed to the rest of the players a message that I had written. This one has been posted here. This was the last email that was sent to promote this event, and it was also the last email that I composed for the district. Sue Miguel took over the creation of the emails more or less by default. I don’t think that they tried to find anyone else to do it.
I intended to promote the “Knock-in Knockout” event because it was the only imaginative offering on the schedule for players with more than 2,250 points. The district had also enjoyed great success at attracting players at all levels to bracketed events like this. However, I had been warned by Sue Miguel and Peter Marcus to avoid any explanation of the event or to use the Kiko abbreviation. Apparently they feared that the ACBL might come down on us. I don’t know why.
I decided to commute from my house in Enfield to the hotel. The drive was less than forty-five minutes each way. Sue planned to drive up on Friday morning, play on Friday, attend the Board of Delegates (BoD) meeting on Saturday, and see what she felt like doing on Saturday.
On Tuesday I played with Sally Kirtley in the Open Pairs. Attendance at all events was meager. Sally and I had not played together often, and we were definitely out of our depth in the open event. Playing with Sally at regional tournaments is always challenging. She was interrupted to deal with some sort of problem fairly often in her role as tournament manager.
On Wednesday Eric Vogel and I teamed up with Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider in the Kiko. There were only three brackets! My recollection is that there were only five teams in our bracket. At any rate, we were eliminated on Wednesday. On Thursday, however, the same foursome finished first in the Y strat of the Open Swiss. It did not seem like much of an accomplishment.
On Friday I played with Abhi Dutta, at least that is what my calendar said. The only game that I was eligible for was the Open Pairs. Abhi should have found a partner with fewer points so that he could play in the Gold Rush Graduate event.
On Friday there was a free lunch consisting of a couple of a couple of pieces of pizza. The hotel was poorly prepared for this. Although the total attendance was not very good, the lines for pizza were very long. I had to rush back for the second session.
Robin Hillyard.
While I was in line Pete Matthews and Gary Schwartz complained to me about the fact that the only pairs games available on Wednesday and Thursday were side games. They asked me why no Open Pairs games were scheduled. I said that I did not know. I was not on the Tournament Scheduling Committee any more, but I would bring up up at the EC meeting that night. Previously Robin Hillyard had sent me an email asking why the Sunday games had been eliminated. This was hard on the players who were still gainfully employed. I told him that I would bring that up as well.
I found the attitudes displayed at the EC meeting rather shocking. People were raving about how successful the Fest—a combination of education, free lunch and other goodies, and a short bridge session (also free)—had been. The yardstick for this was that a good number of the forty-four participants had approached the organizers and presenters to offer thanks and praise. Sue Miguel said that it was the best thing that the district had done in twenty-five years. Give me a break.
I, frankly, was much more concerned about the turnout of the people who were willing to pay to play. The attendance in the Gold Rush (0-750 masterpoints) events was shockingly low. My wife Sue had driven up on Friday to play in the Gold Rush pairs. When it did not make, she had to play in an event in which she had little chance of success.
Another surprise at the meeting the report by Mark Oettinger (vice-president). It brought up the possibility of getting more pro teams to come to our tournaments. Evidently Adam Grossack agreed to help with this effort. I wondered if anything would come from this. How would they find them to offer enticements to attend?
My wife Sue and I attended the BoD meeting on Saturday morning. There was no coffee, and the hotel served only breakfast sandwiches that were improperly marked. The only attendees from CT were Paul Burnham, Peter Marcus, Sue and me. That meant that nine delegates from Unit 108 were absent. Curtis announced that the Fest was the greatest thing ever. He insisted that the people attending the meeting were responsible for doing whatever it would take to increase attendance at future tournaments. It was not inspiring.
Sue surprised me by making a little speech complaining about the lack of events for people like her. She got tearful when describing her frustration about the fact that the Gold Rush event on Friday had been canceled. Mark Aquino offered to play with her one day in the Presidential Regional in the same facility in February of 2023. She was happy (and a little nervous) about that.
1. When I write “bridge” I usually mean face-to-face bridge. The online game is, in my opinion, not worthy of the appellation of “bridge”.
2. As soon as I heard that the tournament was canceled, I sent emails to that effect to the same email addresses that I had sent promotional mailings. I also posted a notice on the website. However, one couple from New Jersey read the initial email, but for some reason they did not receive the second one. They drove all the way to Warwick and were shocked to discover that no tournament was in process. I sent them a personal email apologizing for this.
3. Sometimes it is spelled without the final “ugh”.
4. Sohail was retired from a job on Wall Street. He had a house in the NYC area and another on Cape Cod. I could not find his LinkedIn page on the Internet. His name was much more common than I imagined.
5. This was the first time that the district scheduled side games during the daylight hours. I do not know what the TSC was thinking of when it drew up this schedule. I was not a party to it. I had resigned after I had to miss the first three meetings because of scheduling conflicts.
6. Abhi lived in Walpole, MA. I met him when he played with my wife several years earlier. I had teamed up with him once in the Grand National Teams qualifying tournament in 2019. His LinkedIn page has been posted here.
This entry, like the process that it describes, is absurdly long. In fact, it is much longer than it looks because it has links to a large number of documents that have more details. I don’t expect anyone to read this entry. I did it out of a combination of determination to leave nothing out and a sense of catharsis.
I really loved my job as webmaster for District 25 and all of the other functions that I had added (as described here). The only aspect of it that I found tiresome was the assembling of photos for the Winners Boards. I had decided unilaterally that I would no longer do that in 2020, but I was still enthusiastic about everything else that I did.
The pandemic struck New England in March of 2020. The game that I loved that involved card tables, chairs, playing cards, bidding boxes, human beings, and conversation vanished almost overnight. Some people enjoyed, or at least tolerated, playing on the Internet, but I did not like it at all. It did not seem like bridge to me.
At first I enjoyed my new life of leisure. As I described here, I started walking a lot, occasionally traversing as much as ten miles per day. I also read books much more frequently than I had previously, and I invented a method for the people who had played together in Simsbury to describe what they were doing in the new world of isolation. I discovered that a very large number of operas were available free on YouTube. I downloaded a free program, MP3Studio, to make mp3 files that I could download to my mp3 player. So, I could carry forty or fifty operas in my pocket.
In June of 2020 my schedule changed dramatically. I undertook the gargantuan 1948 Project that is described here. From that point on I sat in front of the computer for several hours per day writing and researching, and the more time that I spent on the project the larger that it grew.
Bob Bertoni.
In the summer of 2021 my friend and boss in District 25, Bob Bertoni, died after a long and debilitating illness. At that point almost all of the people with whom I had enjoyed working for so many years were no longer involved in the district’s leadership. Moreover, the ACBL had taken strong measures to promote online play as an alternative to real bridge. It seemed almost certain to me that the game that I knew was doomed.
The Hartford Bridge Club tentatively reopened in the summer of 2021, and Sally Kirtley and I figured out a way to schedule games of the Simsbury Bridge Club. However, no tournaments were held in New England except the poorly attended sectional in December sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association (EMBA). At the time I was a member of both the district’s Executive Committee and the Tournament Scheduling Committee. Both held occasional Zoom meetings. I wrote this about the decision-making:
I have been on the scheduling committee for a few years, but two crucial online meetings were held in the winter on Wednesday evening, the one time that I am committed to play at a very small club. Evidently a lot of decisions about the three tournaments in 2022 were made at those meetings or at the one in May, during which I was in Europe.
Sally and Helen
In the last quarter of 2021 I notified the Executive Committee that I intended to resign my positions tied to the webmaster job at the end of 2022. I modeled my decision on this with how Helen Pawlowski handled the termination of her long tenure as the district’s tournament manager. She had given a year’s notice that she was leaving. A committee was promptly formed, people applied for the job, Sally Kirtley was chosen, and Helen showed her the ropes at several tournaments.
After I resigned not much happened for several months. When I had started in 2013, absolutely nothing was documented in writing. By contrast, I had already produced on NEBridge.org about forty web pages that documented everything that I did in every area. Thereafter, I spent an enormous amount of time making sure that each of these pages was up to date. They can all be reached from here.
The oldest email that I could find about the subject of the transition was dated November 30, 2021. In It Curtis Barton, the president, asked me, “Do you have a candidate to replace you?”
The one thing that I did not want to do was to become an active participant in the search for my replacement(s). I thought that it was incumbent upon the people who would be running the district going forward to determine which of those functions was still important and to find people who were willing and able to perform them. I did not want to prejudice this effort with my own ideas.
I felt that I had done everything that I could to smooth the process. When I was chosen to be the webmaster, Bob Bertoni had assumed the responsibility of finding someone for the job, mostly because he was the only person who knew how the site worked, and there was no documentation whatsoever. In the intervening years had thoroughly documented how my various functions were performed.
So, on December 31 I sent the following reply with four attachments.
As promised, I have produced and attached documents that outline the duties of four functions that I currently perform: • Webmaster • Database Manager • Email Manager (MailChimp) • Bulletin Editor (printed, online, and Day 1).
Someone needs to decide on who, if anyone, should perform these functions in 2023 and following. The Database Manager and Email Manager are not official positions.
I am not sure if the Communications Committee still officially exists, but I formerly set the agenda for and presided over its meetings.
I also have been composing a high percentage of the emails used to promote tournaments. Whoever assumes that function in 2023 and following will need to work with the Database Manager on the selection criteria to be used and the Email Manager on the format to be used for text and images.
At some point Gary Peterson, who was a Tournament Director for the ACBL, expressed an interest in becoming the webmaster. He negotiated with Curtis about how he would be compensated for his efforts. I was not privy to those exchanges. My assumption was that he would be responsible only for maintaining the website. I suspect that Curtis expected him to do much more than that. It is also possible that Curtis only glanced at my write-up.
In April of 2022 I sent all the members of the Executive Committee an email that detailed open issues in areas that I was involved. I attached to this email a spreadsheet that served as the index to the documentation pages.
It has been a long time since I made a report, but I have been keeping a list of developments and issues.
Website: 1) I removed four items from the main menu in the left column that appears on every page of the site. Three of them I moved to the “Archive” tab: District Director Info, District Director Report, and Learn from the Experts. The other one was a link to the ACBL’s Partnership Desk, which the ACBL’s webmaster told me is no longer supported.
2) There are three issues. The Tournament Location option is a custom program that uses a list of the district’s tournaments to create a map. For a while it was broken, but Megahertz fixed it. I removed Cromwell and Sturbridge. I added Providence and Marlborough. I left Mansfield and Hyannis on, but added notes that they were canceled for 2022. This will need to be maintained (using the “Clubs” option in the admin section) when the 2023 schedule is set.
The second issue is the banner, which currently says “Exciting New Event Schedules for 0-2500 –Click Here for Tournaments”. It links the NEBridge.org calendar. I don’t know how to change it. Bob always did this. We should probably be highlighting Providence. After that, I don’t know.
The third issue involves reports from the Regional Director. The DD reports had their own custom option. Should I add the RD reports to this program (and bring it back from the Archive)? Should I create a new tab for RD reports? They are now emailed to members; posting them on the website is less critical than it was ten years ago.
3) The list of winners of NABC and NABC+ events has not been updated since 2019. The source of data was lists provided by the DD. I have not received any such lists since December 2019. What should the policy be for the future?
4) I have decided not to post Winners Boards (photos) for the 2022 tournaments. It is a lot of work, and I won’t be attending one of the three events. If someone else wants to take the photos of winners and solicit photos from the ones that were missed, I will post them. However, I don’t want to do this if the percentage of missing photos is high.
I also decided not to award the Best in Class prizes in 2022. With only three events, all in the eastern half of the district, it did not seem worthwhile to me.
5) Someone should check the conditions of contest on the website. I don’t think that the first five documents on the Conditions of Contest tab have been checked in a long time.
Database: 1) A decision should be made about whether the MySQL database, which I maintain on both my iPower account and my local server, will be used in 2023. If not, a suitable substitute to be used as the basis for emails should be found. The current database includes all ACBL members–active and inactive, living and dead–since 2014. It also contains pretty good records of who attended D25 and NABC tournaments since then. It also has a history of achievement of ranks of D25 members and points by month of everyone.
2) In the past I have received .LZH files from Keith Wells at the ACBL to use as the basis for the attendance (at tournaments) table. He did not respond to my last request. Does anyone know if he still works for the ACBL? If not, from whom could I get these files. I used the attendance tables both for targeted emails and for the attendance breakdowns after tournaments.
Email: I currently create the emails by using a text editor on my PC to write HTML statements. I then use the “Code your own” method to paste the code into MailChimp. As I was writing up the documentation for this process it occurred to me that it will probably be very difficult to find someone is who is both willing and able to do this. MailChimp has a lot of templates for emailing that would presumably be much easier to use, but I have never investigated them because I already knew how to make the emails look exactly as I wanted them to.
If templates are used exclusively, it will affect Sue Miguel’s emails. She sends me an email that looks the way she wants it. I extract the HTML from it and then post it using the “Code your own” method.
Bulletins: I was told that there will be neither a printed nor an online bulletin for the Gala. Eventually decisions should be made about the other two tournaments in 2022.
Documentation: I have documented almost everything that I do in “pages” on NEBridge.org. I have created a spreadsheet that serves as an index to these pages. I have attached a pdf of it to this document. I am confident that by later in the year it will be complete and as accurate as I can make it. I suspect that the person or persons who do these tasks will want to simplify the processes, but whatever process is used, it should be documented, and I think that the format that I chose is optimal, since anyone can see the most current version.
The starting page is 342. It can be accessed with the URL NEBridge.org/pages/342. All pages can be reached from there, but if you want to look at a particular page, the easiest way is to key in NEBridge.org/pages/ppp in your browser, where ppp is the three-digit page number on the spreadsheet for the index.
Communications Committee: I think that consideration should be given to restarting the CommComm in 2023 or maybe sooner. I am willing to serve on it, but I don’t want to be chairman in 2023.
Two regional bridge tournaments in New England in 2021 had been canceled because of the pandemic. The Presidential Regional that was scheduled for February 2022 was also canceled because no suitable site in the southwestern part of the district was available. A new event, which was called the Gala, was scheduled for late May, which was the time that my wife Sue and I had planned to take a cruise in Europe1. We had deliberately chosen the second half of May because, in all the years that I had been going to tournaments, the district had never held an event then.
Curtis Barton.
Meanwhile Curtis was trying to figure out if, as an ACBL Employee, Gary would be allowed to be both webmaster for the district. Curtis finally determined that he could. In early July he asked me to set up a Zoom meeting with Gary, Peter Marcus2, and himself. I told him that I had no idea how to set up a Zoom meeting, and that I was very busy at the time.
The second half of July was dominated by the Summer NABC that was held in Providence. Curtis decided that he needed two people to replace me. He offered one of the jobs to Gary in this email sent on August 10.
The other candidate wasn’t interested. That puts you (Gary) back where you’ve been – my choice for NEBC Database and NEBridge.org Webmaster. If you accept the position we will discuss compensation (Mike gets free plays and some other stuff – not too valuable for you) on a per tournament basis.
I suggest you contact Mike for his write-ups on the efforts. If you accept I will also begin the search for a Communications lead to supplement (not replace) existing efforts.
Communications Lead:
• Voting member of the TSC • Cannot be an ACBL employee • Essentially a volunteer position; may, in the future be compensated with free plays or similar consideration. • This primarily a marketing function with technical considerations as agreed with the NEBC Database/NEBridge.org Webmaster • Coordinates the electronic aspects of tournament advertising and execution • Works with the Database/Webmaster • Edits the Tournament Bulletin as required • May use MailChimp email system to create messages as required.
NEBC Database/NEBridge.org Webmaster • Does not and cannot be a voting member of any NEBC Committee • Can be an ACBL employee • This is a compensated position on a “per tournament” basis • Maintains the NEBC website • Maintains the NEBridge.org database • Works with the Communications Lead and Tournament Coordinator to maintain Calendar
This was by far the longest communication that I had ever received from Curtis. It appeared that some progress was being made. The fact that he was conflating the webmaster and database jobs was, of course, disconcerting. The webmaster job had gotten easier over the years. The database job was quite another matter.
This missive pretty much confirmed my notion that no one wanted to revive the Communication Committee. The “as required” appellation applied to the bulletin position was also ominous.
Peter Marcus.
An email from Peter asserted about the database that “It might be work, it might cost money, but I think we really don’t want to abandon it.” Nobody ventured a different opinion. The question then became where the database would be kept. I did not want other people with administrative authority to sign on to Wavada.org.
I am not sure that my next contribution was helpful, but I did not want anyone to claim that I was not forthcoming about the difficulties.
Now that I think about it, iPower is not a critical element. Assuming that two copies of the database (one live and one for testing/backup/disaster recovery) are used, what are needed are two installations of WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, php) or the equivalent. I used iPower for the live version because I already was using its server for other projects on my personal website, and there was a lot of capacity. WAMP is available as a free download for windows-based computers. iPower uses a UNIX version of the three products, but they do not charge extra for MySQL and php.
Mark Oettinger.
Mark Oettinger, the newly elected (sort of) vice-president of the district, suggested that Sue Miguel could do some of the work of the Communications Lead. No one objected.
Gary officially accepted the job of webmaster and indicated that he and I might be able to meet together at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, (documented here) scheduled for the end of the month. I responded with the following:
I have created a user profile for you for the admin section of NEBridge.org. The user ID is GaryP. After I send this email, I will send the password in a separate email.
I will be in Warwick for all five days. I will be attending the meetings of the Tournament Scheduling Committee and the Executive Committee. I will have the other evenings free. I will be pretty busy until then.
I have documented almost everything that I do on numbered pages (the ones that have the green menu on the left) within the NEBridge.org website. The starting page for all communications functions is #342. The starting page for webmaster functions is #85. The full URL’s are https://nebridge.org/pages/342/ and https://nebridge.org/pages/85/, respectively. The easiest way to get to them is to go to NEBridge.org, click on “Tournament Results” and change the /3/ to the page that you want. I have attached a spreadsheet that has all the page numbers.
There are wysiwyg tools for editing the numbered web page. It is also possible to enter HTML code. I resort to the latter when the former doesn’t provide what I want. The concepts are pretty straightforward. When I started in 2013 there was no documentation, and Bob Bertoni’s training session only lasted thirty minutes.
I am looking forward to meeting you in Warwick.
I introduced myself to Gary when I played in the side game, but I never met with him in the evening. I did meet Steve Ackerman, a player from Vermont. Mark Oettinger had recommended that I get him involved in the transition. I sent him essentially the same email.
In September Curtis sent Gary and me a short email asking whether I could teach them to use MailChimp. I did not envision either of them using it much, but here is what I responded.
MailChimp is not hard. I will set up a user ID for NEBPres and for NEBWeb. I will send the passwords in a separate email. The steps for using MailChimp are documented on NEBridge.org. I will provide training if necessary. I know nothing about using Zoom for training.
The big issue is what is going to happen to the MySQL database that is used for, among other things, populating the lists on MailChimp. The database currently resides on an iPower server on which I have leased space for about ten years. I am willing to give the php scripts that I have written to maintain the files to the district, but the database and the scripts somehow need to be copied to a server owned or leased by the district. That is unlikely to be an easy task. However, there is a great deal of other stuff on my website on iPower, and I don’t really want anyone else to have read/write access to it.
The other big issue is that Keith Wells, who is now a contractor for not an employee of the ACBL, has not answered any of my emails in five months. His last one said that he was still the person that I should contact in order to obtain the .LZH files used by the scripts that update the attendance table. On the advice of Tim Hill I sent an email in September to tournaments@acbl.org. The unsigned response, with a cc to Keith, said that Keith was still “at the ACBL”.
So, I have been unable to maintain the attendance table by my usual methods. Someone needs to decide whether it is still necessary for the district to maintain the attendance table, on which I formerly recorded who attended each regional and sectional in New England and each NABC. If not, it might not be worth the effort to continue using the MySQL database to keep a comprehensive roster of players, their advancement, their attendance, and a few other things. In that case the whole emailing strategy may need to be rethought. Maybe it could be done with spreadsheets or some other method. To my knowledge no other district goes to so much trouble to target emails.
It is possible to update the attendance table without the LZH files. The alternative method uses the “Master Point Winners” report in the posted results on the ACBL tournament schedule. However, 1) It is both kludgy and very time-consuming because there are no ACBL numbers, and 2) there is no way that I know of to account for people who earned no points at the tournament. So, I have been reluctant to resort to that method.
I am doing what I can to help the transition, but I don’t want to be the one who makes important decisions that affect how the mailings are done in 2023 and following.
The first sentence was a mistake. The way that new user profiles are created in MailChimp is to “invite” other people through an option in MailChimp. They then are sent an email from MailChimp that explains how new users can create their own profiles.
As of this writing in June of 2023, I have still not been able to gain access to the LZH files.
Shortly thereafter someone brought up the possibility of using the Pianola software that a third party had customized for the ACBL When the product was introduced several years earlier, I had looked into this and shared my low opinion of it with the members of the Executive Committee. I repeated those points for Curtis and Gary.
Addendum: The ACBL allows direct but very limited access to its active player database for emails, but there are several limitations that render this approach less effective in targeting. I have not investigated this approach recently, but the limitations that I remember are:
1) You must use Pianola. My understanding is that it does not support images, tables, font changes, and other tricks that I sometimes have used within messages. Both Sue and I use a lot of embedded images.
2) You can only access the records for a limited number of districts/units.
3) The format is, to say the least, unimaginative. It is black on grey.
4) I am uncertain of how much targeting can be done. I seriously doubt that one can target (as I did for NAP) based on the May 6 ACBL roster. I also feel certain that targeting based on attendance or zip code (Cape, for instance) is not possible.
5) The rate charged U126 is four times what we paid, and the last time I looked that rate is still available.
6) Access to the database can only be for the purpose of emailing. If you want to use it for some other purpose, you must keep your own files somehow.
7) I am not sure that Pianola has all the reporting tools that MailChimp offers. People who have complained to me about not receiving an email are sometimes surprised that MailChimp knows whether each email was delivered, whether it was opened, and whether any links were clicked on.
8) A small number of people have provided me, but not the ACBL with their email addresses.
9) I think that if someone unsubscribes on Pianola, they can no longer be reached. MailChimp has the same rule, but because we have lots of lists, we can control the effect. For example, if a club manager unsubscribed to the recent club mailing, he/she would still receive emails about tournaments, letters from the president, surveys, and other types of emails. On the other hand Pianola does support attachments, and MailChimp doesn’t. I have not found this to be much of a limitation, but if we did not have a website on which to post the attachment so that we could link to it, it would be.
Nobody mentioned Pianola for quite a while after that. Somehow someone got the idea that I would host the database for the district. On October 28 I wrote the following to Curtis:
I don’t host the database now. I pay $200 per year to iPower to host it. I know very little about hosting databases. The district could get an account with iPower or some other hosting service that supports MySQL and php and has a way to import databases and programming files. I contracted with iPower a long time ago. I don’t remember why I picked them.
I will help with migrating the database and the scripts over. I don’t really want to support the php scripts, but if you cannot find anyone who knows php, well … I would have to think about it.
If you are really asking me if I would agree to set up user ID’s for others on my iPower account, the answer is no. I have a great deal of other stuff on my account, and I have spent hundreds of hours on it.
So, the first decision is whether it is worth the effort to maintain a relational database. If the district cannot find a reliable source for getting the lzh files, I would be inclined to doubt it. The roster files, which are the source for most of my selections, can easily be downloaded from ACBL.org and then opened in Excel. Someone who is a wiz at spreadsheets could probably do the selections from the spreadsheets. The uploads to MailChimp require csv files, and spreadsheets could–after some slicing and dicing–be saved as csv files for that purpose.
When the above issue has been addressed, one other remains: How many lists on MailChimp will be used and reused? I suggest at least one for presidential communications, one for regional tournaments, one for NAP/GNT, one for clubs, and one for I/N. We now have a very large number of lists–one for every email (as Bob recommended). This has been feasible because the database has a field to flag players who have unsubscribed. I never select these people for any mailing promoting a tournament. Without that field I would need to reuse lists, as I sometimes do now for other types of emails.
If you decide to reuse the lists, you should add fields for masterpoints and rank description so that you can “segment” the lists as required for the email. This is the way that I handled the five emails promoting the 2022 NAP. The only problem is that someone would need to decide whether people who unsubscribed in response to those emails should also be unsubscribed from one of the other lists.
Curtis put the burden on Gary and Steve with a short reply: “We need someone to host our data base, and we need that someone now. You guys are the experts. Figure out what we need to do, and let’s get it done. “
Gary said that he was not a database engineer, but he was an “Excel weenie.” Steve set up a Dropbox for me and asked me to put the database and the php scripts in it. It took me most of a day to do this because a great deal of what is on Wavada.org is related to my blogs, journals, and other projects. Even after I culled those out, the remainder barely fit in the Dropbox, and the company that sponsored it kept sending me emails that I should upgrade my subscription.
Not much else happened until I wrote up the following summary on November 28:
General: All of the tasks have been documented on pages of NEBridge.org. The appearance of a few MailChimp screens has changed, but the work flow has not. All the documentation pages can be reached from https://nebridge.org/pages/342/.
Webmaster: I have given the credentials for the email redirecting to Gary Peterson. I have also set the emails for webmaster to redirect to his email account.
Action item: The ad on NEBridge.org for the ACBL online regional was still there today.
Database: Peter said that LZH files should now be available from ACBL somehow. If so, it is still probably a good idea to keep up the database if someone can learn how to maintain it. Those files can help with both targeted mailings and analysis of attendance at tournaments.
Action item: I will communicate with Peter about how to get the LZH files from the ACBL. When I do, I plan to upload all of the files for D25 sectionals and regionals in 2022 as well as the Providence NABC. I will then submit attendance reports for the Providence and Southbridge regionals and the Providence NABC to the Executive Committee members via email.
The current database is MySQL. The scripting language php is used for maintenance and reporting. I will create a copy of the database, the php scripts (including the Javascript and CSS), and a file of the SQL statements that I have used for lists and other purposes. I will then send them to wherever the new home is. I will also help with the migration as much as I can.
Action items: If the database is to be continued, 1) Who will maintain it and use SQL to select lists for mailings? 2) Where will the data and programs be stored? The system can actually be run on any Windows or Unix computer that has the free download WAMP or XAMP, but I chose to run it somewhere that provided support, which I have used four or five times per year. 3) Will the person who manages the database also manage MailChimp?
MailChimp: Policy decisions need to be made about how many lists will be used. The issue is how to handle “unsubscribes”. If a person unsubscribes from one list, should they simultaneously be unsubscribed from all? This will not happen automatically on MailChimp, but there is an “OK to email?” field on the database. The “actives” view of the players table, which I often used for selections for email lists, eliminates players with an N in this field or any other disqualifying information.
Action items: Who will manage the site? What will the workflow for new emails be? Will there be any reporting?
Email composition: Sue Miguel.
Bulletin Editor: I have copies of all the ones that I have done. I can send in odt or word format.
Action items: Is this worth doing? Who will do it? Will we resume using online bulletins?
This email generated a lengthy thread of responses. Curtis established the parameters:
Mike has done his usual great job in laying out the tasks ahead. I will take the Bulletin Editor3 task for Southbridge 2 (Mike: please send me the last Bulletin in Word format, please.)
Who will take on the rest of the effort? Please advise soonest.
I sent a copy of the Bulletin that I had created for the Optical Regional in 2022 to Curtis.
Curtis sent the following to Steve Ackerman and Neil Montague, who had expressed some interest in handling the emails:
We need a Mailchimp email expert (or maybe two!) to do the email parts of Mike’s current job. You both are great candidates for this. Any interest? Note: this will, in effect, make you a part of Sue’s marketing campaigns. It’s fun.4
Neil told Curtis that someone would need to show him how MailChimp worked. I invited him to create his own account and wrote:
MailChimp is not difficult. I have documented everything that I do in it on the NEBridge.org website, and the MailChimp site has very good FAQ’s and support when one needs it. I figured it out with no training whatever.
The bigger issue is whether to continue using the MySQL database as the source for creation of lists, and, if so, where it will reside.
Curtis wrote that Neil would officially become the MailChimp person and that Sue Miguel would compose the emails. Steve attempted to address the database issue.
As far as the database goes, I’ve taken a look at the LZH files that ACBLScor uses to update its database. Unfortunately, it only ACBL numbers and Points, not names and addresses. We would need more information than that to maintain the database. Another option is Pianola. I understand they are pricey, but it might be possible to work out a deal with them. https://www.pianola.net
I could not let that go unanswered.
I use four sources of information for the database: 1) Once a month (on about the 7th) I download the entire ACBL roster, which has almost all the census information on all active ACBL members; 2) The ACBL sends Webmaster@NEBridge.org a list of the players who advanced in rank during the previous month; 3) The LZH files for attendance at tournaments; 4) Individual maintenance when I learn something such as a nickname, a new email address, or an unsubscribe. Here is what I have for each player:
I described the problems with using the ACBL’s program that uses Pianola on a previous email. I will look for it and resend it if necessary.
This exchange generated an overly optimistic assessment by Mark Oettinger that showed praise on all the participants. No emails were exchanged in December except one from Curtis that asked me how much I would charge to continue to send out the emails “for one more month”. I said that I would certainly continue to do it if it was necessary. In actuality I sent out all of the emails in the first five months of 2023.
In January Neil wrote this to me: “I think I am supposed to send out the e-mails to the district via MailChimp. I have an account but since I’ve never really used it before, some quick help from you would be appreciated.” Neil was referring to the computer-generated emails sent by BridgeFinesse.com to players who had advanced in rank. I explained to him that he did not need to get involved in this process.
On February 11 Curtis notified me and the other participants that there would be a Zoom meeting to discuss the succession issues. He then wrote that Peter would send the invitation. At some point it was changed to an in-person meeting at the Presidential Regional in Southbridge. That gathering was never canceled, but it did not happen.
An email that I received from Sue Miguel got my goat. Here is what I sent to everyone on the Executive Committee.
In November of 2021 I gave notice that I did not want to be involved in precisely this type of thing–promotion of online gold point events, which I am convinced will be the death of regional tournaments. I have not seen one inch of progress in removing this responsibility.
I will send this out, but I AM PLEADING that the district relieve me of this responsibility. It makes me furious to be promoting this sort of thing.
Curtis sent me an email that said that Sue should have sent the email to Neil instead of me. I sent out this email and several more over the course of the next few months.
Neil sent me an email on March 8 concerning an email that he had received from Paul Harris, the president of EMBA. He wanted to know the details of the district’s contract with MailChimp. I answered the inquiry with the following.
MailChimp charges D25 by the number of emails sent. Back in 2015 or 2016 Bob Bertoni negotiated the purchase of 2 million email credits for $2500 in a “pay as you go” plan. We had to purchase that many to get that rate. At the time we had no limits on the number of lists or the total number of contacts. We have about ninety lists (but they won’t let us create any new ones) and a very large number of contacts. In the old days I built a new list for each version of each email, and I had roughly seven or eight versions for each tournament.
808,020 credits remain. I am not sure that MailChimp still allows pay-as-you-go plans. It appears to me that it now sells four or five tiers of plans that require a monthly fee based on the total number of contacts. Each has other limitations as well.
In my opinion MailChimp’s best feature is that it allows you to “code your own” emails in HTML. It is much more time-consuming to do it that way, but you can–with a few small exceptions–make the email look exactly the way that you want it to. Of course, you have to be familiar with HTML and how email clients (as opposed to browsers) interpret various tags. The only thing that I have never been able to do is to get Outlook to show correctly a caption for an image.
Without the “code your own’ feature I do not know how anyone will be able to create the kind of emails that Sue Miguel likes to send. She creates the emails using a program on her Mac and sends me the finished product. I extract the HTML and make a few changes to fit MailChimp’s requirements.
By the way, MailChimp is now owned by Intuit, the QuickBooks company.
I know nothing about Constant Contact.
I have been promised that I will not be required to send any more emails, but the meeting that was scheduled for Southbridge to determine who would do it and (more importantly) how was never held. Then there was supposed to be a Zoom meeting about it, but it never occurred either. At this point I do not know whose responsibility it is to find a way to continue. I am pretty sure that Curtis does not want to hear any more about it.
Another Zoom meeting was scheduled for March 30 at 8 p.m. Peter sent out the following email at 6:56 a.m. on that day to the people scheduled to attend the 8:00 meeting and a few people from the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA).
I just attended a webinar (not sure if any of you did, but I did see Ken there) about their new marketing program, sending out emails, and using Pianola. I don’t know enough to know if this is any good, but, unlike a lot of what ACBL does, it actually looked at least presentable.
One obvious benefit is an immediate access to ACBL data (email addresses, masterpoint holdings, etc.) without having to update them ourselves. A downside, to the extent we do it, is that it doesn’t seem to include information about tournaments attended though they said that could be added.
The tools for developing emails did seem reasonable and it does have the ability to include attachments, like a flyer.
Obviously, one issue is cost. I know, when Bob Bertoni investigated this, we ran from Pianola because of cost. They addressed this and said they are cheaper than MailChimp (what they compared themselves to), though they talked about buying 10K or 25K Mailchimp credits. If I remember correctly, D25 bought something like 250K, which was an upfront cost (almost like a capital cost, buying new equipment) and then it lasts for years.
Anyway, I do not have the technical expertise to make comparisons. So, my questions are
1) They recorded the webinar and are offering a masterclass in developing emails/marketing next Tuesday (for about an hour). I will forward the link to the recording and the masterclass if anyone wants to hear it or sign up for the class. I will not sign up, I don’t have the background to make an informed decision.
2) Where are we with MailChimp credits, i.e., are they about to run out or do we have years to go?
3) They are setting up credits for each unit and district and accounts to send emails will be done individually, i.e., a unit or district says who should have access and they will get their own login, not done with everyone in one organization sharing the login. But, is there any rationale to considering setting up credits for the units and district to share, as a way of lowering costs, particularly for smaller units?
I am not looking for answers, since I wouldn’t know how to evaluate them, just asking questions. We can discuss more tomorrow on the ZOOM call.
Will send out the info from them when I get it.
I watched the webinar later, but I wanted to provide answers to Peter’s questions before the Zoom meeting.
I could not attend the webinar because of a medical appointment. Incidentally, the message announcing the webinar was composed using the new tools. The last word or two of every line on the message was cut off when I opened it in Outlook. I tried changing the width of the window, but it did not help.
D25 bought 2 million credits from MailChimp. Over 800,000 still remain. Attachments, especially ones with images, use up a lot of band width. Requiring links rather than attachments is the main reason that MailChimp delivery is so fast.
I have never used Pianola, but I know where I ran into problems with MailChimp. Some of my questions are:
1) How are unsubscribes handled? If someone unsubscribes to an email sent by one user will other users still be able to reach them?
2) To which districts would we be allowed to send email?
3) Can pre-formatted emails like Sue’s be sent or must they be redone in Pianola’s tools?
Curtis took notes at the 8:00 meeting and sent them to the participants. I have posted them here. It is worth discussing his three “Takeaways”.
“Peter will transfer Mike’s data to a new source.” In fact, I sent an up-to-date copy of the database to Steve. Peter had nothing to do with it.
“Henceforth we will use Mike’s data from Peter’s source for emails and the like.” It was not until May that Steve’s copy of the database was available. In actual fact, the audience that I had been using on MailChimp was still used through the end of June. However, Neil did successfully process a couple of Sue Miguel’s emails in May and June.
“Peter and Steve will attend the Pianola Master Class to determine whether we can easily port the current system and data to that (ACBL) system.” I don’t think that anyone involved in the transition process ever attended the Pianola Master Class.
Peter, with whom I had a bizarre contretemps (described here) earlier in the year, recognized the crux of the problem in a friendly email:
I understand that Mike, who has been so good to do all this for us since forever, and had announced his departure as of the beginning of 2023, is still involved and really, really “wants out.”
If we need help to actually move this to final migration, I think we should consider actually getting a professional in this kind of work to help/do it for us. Even if this group has the skill (and I don’t), finding the time can be a much bigger problem, and, if we have to pay for it, so be it. We could speak first to Megahertz5, to hire them, and, failing that, find someone who could get it done. I don’t think their geography matters though, unlike the ACBL, I would suggest we don’t save money by using IT contractors from Poland.
Curtis favored a different approach:
Here’s what we can do to get Mike OUT of the loop, at least formally.
1) Neil: if you can take Mike’s stuff for storage, please do so.
2) Gary/Steve/Neil: please discuss this among yourselves, and determine whether we should take Peter’s suggestion and hire Megahertz to set things up. Let me know what you decide, and I’ll get it approved.
Then let’s finish this.
Steve immediately reported that he had a copy of the database, and he would find a place to put it. His email on May 3 listed the progress that he had made.
I have uploaded Mike’s database to a server on google as I had some issues attempting to sign up at Oracle.
I’ve created user accounts for everyone on this list. To log in, use your username portion of your email, and the number you enter into the bridgemates (so no letters).
I have updated the masterpoints based on the April version of the MP file available to ACBLScor. I understand that in the past we were able to get a more complete database listing from ACBL, but I don’t know who to contact for that.
Neil & Gary, let me know if you need help generating the queries to populate your mailchimp lists.
A few thing that he wrote were not quite accurate. Here is what I replied:
On your MyACBL page do you have a tab called “Member Rosters”? It should be right below “Ribbon”. If not, I think that either Curtis or Mark Aquino can designate you to have access to that feature from the ACBL.
A new roster will come out on 5/7 or maybe 5/8 since 5/7 is a Sunday. I have a list of email addresses that have unsubscribed in the last year or so. The “OK to email” field for all of them should be set to N. Should I send this to you, or is there some way that I can do it?
After I sent another email for Sue, a player replied with a request to change her email address. I forwarded it to Steve. He replied with some good questions.
Does the normal procedure include asking the player to make sure they also update their email with ACBL? I suspect that when I update next week from the roster this email address may be incorrect if the player doesn’t also notify ACBL.
In addition, I updated the player database to flag not to email the addresses you sent me. However, I found about 20% of the addresses were not in our database. I’m assuming these addresses may not be active ACBL members, or they are for some other list than D25? I’m attaching them for your review.
I was happy to respond to this. It indicated that someone was finally getting into the nitty gritty of the database.
When they give me a new address I also change the “email source” to Player. I should have told you this. My program for processing the the new roster does not change the email address unless the email source is ACBL.
Either the addresses were changed, or the players were added to the database after I sent it to you, most likely the latter. So, after the database is next updated, the update of the “ok to email?” field should be run again. Should I change the email that receives messages about unsubscribes to some other account? I received notice of one more yesterday.
This is only important if a different audience is used for a future email. As long as the audience that I have been using is employed, the fact that they unsubscribed from that audience will prevent them from getting any more emails.
A few days later I sent the following to all of the people involved in the transition.
1. A new roster came out over the weekend. Is there a plan for updating Steve’s copy of the database?
2. One more player has unsubscribed, carl_palmer@yahoo.com. Should I change the owner of all of the audiences (Mailchimp word for mailing lists) so that someone else gets the emails that indicate such changes?
3. Neil, when Sue has another email to send out, do you want to try to do it? NAP qualifiers and Nashua will probably be promoted soon. Since we have not gotten access to the .LZH files, they can all be sent from the audience that I have been using (2209_Southbridge_D3_D24_D25) for the last year, but a new selection should be made from the database to update it. Then already defined “segments” of the audience can be used in the definition of the mailing. If necessary, it is easy to define new segments. That audience includes fields for rank description, masterpoints, and district.
4. I have a folder of files with SQL statements that I have used in the past. I would be happy to share it.
Neil Montague.
Neil said that he would try to send out Sue’s next email, which arrived in my Inbox that same day. Most of my subsequent conversations were with Neil, who had told me that he was very familiar with SQL and had extracted HTML from emails.
Sue has just sent me an email that she wants sent to potential players in Flight B of the NAP.
I will forward it to you. It contains formatted text and an image with a link on it. It does not have a width, but I always set the width to 600px. The link she provided should work, but the image must be uploaded to MailChimp. Sue does not like her emails to have the masthead, but this one is signed by Peter Marcus. So, I would add the masthead at the top. I have enclosed an HTML file that has the width and masthead set. You should be able to paste the text (after removing the instructions in red) into the HTML file. Then find the image (<img) tag and whatever divs or spans are around it. After the physical image (which I get by using Prt Scr and then cropping in an image editor) has been saved as a file and uploaded to MailChimp. The “src=” in the image tag must be changed to the URL on MalChimp. An alternative is to ask Sue to send you the image in a jpg and then upload it.
I almost forgot: the image tag has style=”float: right” in it. Since Microsoft Outlook does not recognize that, I always add align=”right”, which it does recognize. Incidentally, the width in the HTML is set in a table because that was the only way that I could get Outlook to recognize a fixed width.
This is all described in the instructions in detail with pictures on NEBridge.org. The instructions begin on https://nebridge.org/pages/345/. You may very well be able to do all of this using one of MailChimp’s many templates. I have never tried that.
This afternoon I updated the audience (2209_Southbridge_D3_D24_D25) with the data from the latest roster. The SQL statement that I used was:
select familiar_name, last_name, email, name_town_key, rank_desc, masterpoints, district from actives where district in(3,24,25) and ytdpoints >= 1 order by last_name, first_name
It will be necessary to define a segment of the audience that is limited to records in which the district is 25 and masterpoints are less than 2800 or 2900. The limit is 2500, but the check is made against the database as of last August. It would be tricky to get that because there might be people who were not on that roster (late with dues or other reason) but are now eligible. It seems better to annoy people like me who are not actually eligible than to miss some who are.
I should be in most of the day.
Neil, who was still gainfully employed, said that he would work on it over the weekend. He did. He wanted to do the project from scratch, which began by making sure the list (“audience” in MailChimp) was up to date. I was happy to explain MailChimp’s concepts of audiences and segments.
In olden days I created audiences for each email. That made sense when other people (president, I/N director, and district director) were also using MailChimp. If they unsubscribed because of one of their emails, I did not want them to have automatically unsubscribed from mine. In addition I was sometimes using MailChimp for other purposes than event promotion (emails to clubs and for the Best-in-class competition). Furthermore, I also sent to people who had attended New England or NABC events, and the selection was too complicated for segments.
In the last year all of the emails have been composed by Sue, I no longer have access to the tournament attendance data, I did not contact the clubs, and I stopped doing the Best in Class. So, I have been using the 2209 audience for every event. It includes all active players in D3. D24, and D25, and I have updated it every month with the SQL statement that I sent to you. I had previously added the masterpoints, rank description, and district fields so that I could use simple segments to select from this audience for emails for both regional tournaments and Grass Roots qualifiers.
Peter is still, at least in theory, working on getting access from the ACBL to the LZH files again. If we had them, we could update the attendance table as before. This would allow us both to send emails to more people with some likelihood of attending and to evaluate our tournaments better. It would, however, necessitate recycling some of our previous audiences, of which there are 89. MailChimp no longer allows us to create new audiences.
I sent the following to Steve and Neil:
All the “unsubscribes” that I sent to Steve had unsubscribed from the 2209 … audience that I have been using for the last year. When I updated the audience last Monday I selected from the actives view, which excludes anyone with N in the OK to email field. It would not matter for the current email project because they would all be excluded by MailChimp anyway. It is not possible (as far as I know) to send an email in MailChimp to someone who has unsubscribed from the audience used in the campaign.
I got the list of unsubscribes by taking the “export” function in the audience section of MailChimp. It sent to my download folder a zip file that contained three csv files: subscribers, unsubscribeds, and cleaned. The last had email addresses that had repeatedly bounced back. These files all have a large number of fields. I deleted all of the columns except the email address from the unsubscribed file and sent it to Steve. Since I have been using this audience for many emails, and I have previously run this procedure to change the ok to email fields, I am sure that a good number of those on the unsubscribed file already had the ok to email field set to N.
My phone number is 860 930 8784. I am scheduled to play bridge at the Hartford BC on Saturday. I will leave my house at noon and return a little before 5. I have no plans for Sunday, but I wake up early in the morning and then take naps during the day.
I was actually a little excited about Neil taking on this project. It would have been much better if I had been next to him when he did it, as I usually was when I installed a new AdDept system at a client’s. He wasted a lot of time trying to clean up the HTML that had been generated by the software product that Sue used, and some of the things that he did made it worse. He sent me a test copy and an email with the following questions.
I think I have completed the work necessary to send out Sue’s e-mail but I have a few questions:
(1) I thought I put the code into centering the image at the top but it’s not centered. My HTML experience is minimal and from a few years ago, although I did successfully embed the link that Sue wanted in the image. The instructions talk about having text appear when someone is using an e-mail client that doesn’t support images, but when I did it, the text always appeared which isn’t what we want. Do I need to worry about this? If so, let me know what to change.
(2) I followed your instructions of pasting your e-mail into Outlook and saving the source and pasting that into Mailchimp. There are a lot of tags that probably don’t need to be there but probably some of them do. Should I not worry about this or should I eliminate the ones that don’t really belong. As both you and the instructions mention, different e-mail clients require different tags so I can’t really go by how it looks on my machine.
(3) The next e-mail you receive is the test e-mail. I sent it to myself first and verified that I did the href tag correctly (I have experience doing that as we convert statutory references in the law to links to the legislature’s web pages when the Massachusetts budget gets signed so I actually have done this before.
(4) Finally, can you verify that I did this all correctly? The segment should be fine and you shouldn’t have any trouble finding this new campaign.
I looked it over and then sent Neil what I had discovered.
1) The image at the top should be the banner, which was in the HTML that I sent you. It should NOT link to the flyer. The Chicago image should be where Sue placed it. I separated it out on its own line in the HTML editing screen. There is already a link around it. I am not sure if it works. You must change the src= on that image to that of the one that you used at the top. Don’t change any of the other attributes, but add align=”right”.
Also take out lines 8 and 9.
2) The tool that Sue uses inserts a lot of extraneous tags, but I never worry about them. I am worried about the extra line feeds. We need to figure out where they came from.
3) Make the above changes and send me another test. When I say that it looks OK, send a test to Sue.
Neil made some changes and sent me another test along with the following email.
I think I made all of the changes and I eliminated the “excess” html code – at least I think it is excess. I put <br> tags in to force line breaks in the right place. I’m getting three errors (code turns red) but it doesn’t seem to be causing a problem. If I remove the body tag, then the text only goes half way across the page. Please take a look. I also am sending you the test e-mail now.
His remark that “the text only goes halfway across the page” was a reaction to the code that set the width of the email to 600. I looked at the entire campaign more thoroughly this time. Here was my reply.
I had not checked the segment before. I noticed this morning that the total number selected was roughly twice what I expected. D25 has about 6,000 members. The audience also includes D3 and D24. Here is how it currently is defined:
2. From section: As it is,the replies will go to Gary (webmaster@nebridge.org). That should probably be changed to inchair, but Sue may want the replies to go to Peter. It is her call.
3. Subject section: I always have copied the subject from Sue’s emails and pasted it directly into the subject line. That would put it in all upper case. I don’t know if it would increase or decrease the number of people who open the email, but she gets to make decisions like this now.
4. Content: I removed the <html, <meta and the second <body tag. I put “Folks,” inside a <p tag.
On the second <img tag:
I removed align=center and replaced it with align=right. I know that was what she wanted because her original source said style=”float: right;”. I also replaced width=500 with width=400. I also added a ) at the end that she forgot.
After this I expected the test email to look like what Sue sent me, but it doesn’t. This is because you removed all of her <font tags.
You did a lot more work than was necessary. I am sorry that I did not describe this to you very well. Basically, Sue’s email was fine. It was not necessary to remove all of the extra stuff that her program puts in, and, in fact, those font statements were necessary to make it look the way that she wanted.
The only changes that I usually make are:
1) Start with my frame.html
2) Add the banner if necessary
3) Find all of her <img tags: upload the physical image or find the URL if it is already uploaded, change the src= parameter to the location on MailChimp, and add align=”right” if she used <style=”float: right”. By the way, it would make things easier if she sent the image as a .jpg file in addition to the one that is embedded in the message.
In this case the image itself is no longer showing up in my copy of the email that she sent. We may need to have her send it again. I decided to replicate the campaign you made, and show how I would have done the content. The campaign I created is titled 2023 Flight B GNT (Mike’s content). I hope that this makes things a little clearer. I do not understand why Sue’s original image is no longer showing up in the email that she originally sent. I would like to see what her image looked like in Outlook.
Neil replied in detail:
1. Sorry about that with the segment. I have added the criteria that the players have to be from district 25 and now there will be 5466 recipients which is about what you expect.
2. I’ll ask Sue who she wants the from to be. I guess Gary is the default but obviously we can put whatever we want in that box.
3. I’ll ask Sue whether she wants the subject in all upper case. I was taught that all upper case is “yelling” although it probably doesn’t make a difference whether it is all caps or not. I agree with you to defer to Sue on this.
4. There still were some red tags (errors) when I opened my version of this which you edited for me. However, I added a few more tags and close tags at the top and that seem to fix the problem without changing anything.
5. I added back the font tag towards the top. The font appearing on my computer is Helvetica 11 when I put the tab back and when I look at the original e-mail you sent me which was Sue’s e-mail. Yesterday, my version was sending it in Helvetica 10. As you know, fonts are at the mercy of what is on the users computer so what you are seeing might not match what I am seeing. I am looking at these in Chrome.
6. Your version of the e-mail is doing what some of my previous versions did which is only going half way across the page for the image at the top and all of the text. My version has the image at the top the same as yours but the text goes across the page entirely. I think that’s what we want, right? Your change to the Chicago image pushed it to the right and has the text wrap to the left. That’s not what came across in the original from you but I think it looks good your way. I guess I’ll find out how much Sue wants these e-mails to reflect “exactly” what she sends. Not sure what you mean when you say the image from her e-mail disappeared? So we can proceed one of two ways. First, I am sending you my updated campaign test e-mail. If that looks good to you, I will send it to Sue with the question for her from above. If it is still problematic, I guess we can use your version but I will ask Sue about the width issue since it looks weird only going half way across. If it is easier to talk, my phone number is 617-771-2527 if that is how you would like to next proceed. Looks like we’ll get this done today which is what I told Sue.
Our conversation ended with my reply:
3. I am virtually certain that Sue wants the subject in uppercase. When you talk with her, I would not mention about “yelling”. I was taught the same as you. I avoided all-upper case when I wrote emails or anything else. You also should probably ask her about the banner. She did not like it on the ones that she composed, but this one was mostly written by and signed by Peter.
4. The width of the email that I composed was 600 pixels, the standard size of an email window and also the size of the banner. If your window is wider than that, it might have seemed strange that everything everything wrapped at that spot. The 600 px setting was set in both the body and the table. Some email clients respect the one in the body, but Outlook only respects the table. So, if you closed the <body or <table at the top, it would be wider than 600, as it was in Outlook on the test you sent me.
5. On Outlook the font is now Calibri 11. On my version it was Arial 16, which was what was specified in Sue’s. Maybe my eyes were deceiving me, but this morning Sue’s original email had the word image001 where the second image was before. The computer on which her image was stored must have been down; the image is back now. It is smaller and has slightly different writing on it than the one whose URL I gave to you. If I had this to do over, I would try to use it or at least set the width to around 320.
What you sent me is, in my opinion, perfectly fine. You should see if Sue agrees.
Going forward (if you are still game) I advise using the method that I proposed in the replica. I can do one of her emails in about a half hour, and it always maintains her fonts and positions her images where she wants them. Sometimes in the middle of an email she likes to change the font size, color or even the font itself. The only mistake that I have made is failing to find an image that was down at the bottom of an email. If the src= parameter is not changed, it does not appear in the MailChimp version.
You also might want to investigate using a template. When I started, I had several years experience at writing emails in HTML, and I hated the restrictions of the templates.
A few security issues still remained, but the email went out on time. In a few days the security issues were resolved. I had to change the owner of the audience. That will probably need to be redone every time that a new audience is used, but since Neil has been designated as the owner of the account, that should not be difficult.
At the end of the Executive Committee meeting on June 24 in Nashua Neil button-holed me to assure me that he would handle Sue’s emails the way that I recommended. He seemed to enjoy telling me about how he had dealt with the issues. I did not voice my primary thought, which was, “Better you than me.”
After the email went out Neil asked me about the fourteen bounce-backs that were reported. I explained how MailChimp handles them:
The ones that have bounced will have a status of “cleaned”. I generally do not worry about them. They will no longer be sent emails by any campaigns in this audience. If you recycle an old audience for new emails and select them, they will be set to subscribed unless they were already unsubscribed or cleaned on the audience that you archived or deleted. If the first mailing bounces, they will be set to cleaned forever.
Just a reminder: the audience has one record per email address. The database has one record per ACBL number. A lot of players share email addresses.
There is a field on the players table called email_rejected. I have not kept this up, but if you wanted to, you could export the audience. One of the csv files in the zip that it produces will contain all of the cleaned ones. That could be used to make the database more accurate. However, if they later provide the ACBL with a new valid address, that one will appear after the next monthly update. The email_rejected fields are NOT currently automatically reset by the monthly update program. So, the email_rejected field would not be accurate.
The last issue (so far) was that Sue wanted an NEBridge account for TheFairyGOLDMother. I turned this request over to Gary Peterson, to whom I had provided the credentials for the software that redirected the emails. He had lost the password. I sent it to him again.
1. This trip did not come off as planned. However, I did go on a cruise, as is thoroughly documented here.
2. I am not sure why Peter Marcus, who was the principal tournament director for the district was involved at all. Perhaps Curtis thought that because Peter had worked for DEC, he would understand what I did.
3. No Bulletin was produced for the Presidential Regional, the tournament to which Curtis referred. I had produced the Bulletin for the Optical Regional in November. Thereafter the Bulletin, which cost to district $100 per tournament, was considered too expensive to continue after an informal email poll of members of the Tournament Scheduling Committee.
4. Over the years I sent out perhaps twenty email messages for Sue Miguel. I do not remember that any of those experiences was what I would call fun.
5. Megahertz Computer was Bob Bertoni’s company. In theory they supported the district’s website, but it was difficult to get them to respond to problems and questions.
I kept pretty good records of what my activities during 2021. I decided to arrange this entry in chronological order with separate entries for a few startling or momentous events.
January: 2020 was widely considered the worst year ever or at least in my lifetime, but it appeared that 2021 might wrest that crown away. It had the usual 365 days, but it felt like the longest year of all time. I had rather enjoyed the tranquility of the isolation in 2020, but by January of 2021 I really wanted to play bridge and see all of my friends again on a regular basis.
During the first few days of the new year no one talked about anything besides the election. I had become convinced early in the election campaign that Trump would try to start a coup if he lost. I was right. That story has been told here.
On the Pandemic front the big news in late 2020 was that three different vaccines would soon be available, but the schedule had not been published. The priority would be given to health care workers and then to those over 65.
We sufferers from trypanophobia were relentlessly subjected to photos of people with their sleeves rolled up as someone near them administered the shot (or “jab” as they called it in England).
On January 1 I played bridge online with Ken Leopold. We scored over 65 percent, one of my best scores ever. I still did not enjoy it.
Senators Manchin and Sinema.
On January 4, my sister’s 65th birthday, both of the Democrats were declared winners in Georgia. The Democrats seemed to be in control of both houses of Congress, but two of them, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, were not reliable votes. The former was in bed with Big Coal and conservative for even a Blue Dog, and the latter was just a narcissist.
On January 6 I played bridge with Ken again. This time we did horribly. When I get nervous playing online (sometimes because I am not yet used to the BBO interface), my left hand begins to shake.
Almost none of the rioters that stormed the Capitol wore masks. Deaths from Covid-19 were still averaging 4,000 per year. So, on top of everything else the insurrection was also probably a super-spreader event.
Ken and I had another awful game on January 8. This time I had an excuse. While we were playing, Sue was in the other end of the house and had a heart attack. She called 911, and an ambulance took her to the emergency room of St. Francis hospital. The doctors put in a stent. In January of 2021 hospitals were a very dangerous place. I was quite worried. I had long known that a day like this might come. Sue was quite overweight, and she knew that she had a mild case of diabetes for a long time. She never exercised, and her eating and sleeping habits were deplorable.
Almost all my horror stories involved Unite.
Expedia sent me an email that said that I had a credit with United Airlines. I had absolutely no idea what caused this. I looked at the header for the email; it seemed legitimate. At that point it seemed pretty unlikely that I would ever fly on United again. Unfortunately, the email got lost when I cleaned out my Outlook folders before moving to the Asus computer (details here) in 2023. So, I probably will never know any more about this.
I drove Sue home from the hospital on January 11. For the rest of her life she was required to administer insulin shots to herself and to take several types of heart medicine and a few other drugs for other chronic issues. She was on a fairly strict diet aimed at getting her weight down and her blood-sugar level under control. She could walk without assistance, but she had no stamina. She seemed worse a couple of days later.
She made an appointment with her primary care physician. The appointment with the doctor seemed to go OK. There might have been an adjustment to her drugs. I was required to wake her up every morning at 9 a.m. and to remind her when it was 6 p.m. After a while she figured out how to give herself reminders on her phone, but I still needed to awaken her every morning.
On January 20 Joe Biden was sworn in peacefully. At this point some right-wingers were claiming (with no evidence whatever) that the rioters (or at least the instigators) were actually from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or even the FBI. The FBI had begun searching for participants. There was an unbelievable abundance of video. Evidently for a lot of these bozos this was the culmination of a great deal of training and effort, and they wanted to make sure that they had mementos. Many of them would come to regret that decision.
On the 23rd I wrote in my notes that Sue seemed a little better, but she was still quite weak. She said that she could cook some, but she requested that I do the dishes. I agreed, of course, and there were several delicious but easy meals that I was comfortable preparing and cooking. I shopped for them, and she learned how to order groceries online.
February: On February 5 I played on BBO with Eric Vogel. We scored better than 54 percent.
Sue has rehabilitation therapy scheduled for the 8th, but she canceled it. She did that a lot when she had her knee replacement surgery a few years earlier. For a little while she tried to walk around on Hamilton Court. I joined her for a few of these jaunts. The cold air bothered her breathing for some reason. When it got warmer she went on little walks by herself, but she eventually stopped doing them. That was just the way she was. It would have done no good to nag her to exercise.
On the next day I played with Eric again. This time we scored better than 57 percent. I was starting to feel more relaxed playing online, but I still hated it. It was also the day that Trump’s trial in the Senate began. The first vote was on whether the process was constitutional. That passed 56-44 with six Republicans voting in favor. However, 67 votes will be required for conviction, and so it appears that he will walk again.
On the 10th Sue went back to her heart doctor. He put her back on Lasix to reduce the buildup of fluids. This seemed to help her a lot, but it made her go to the bathroom. It took her a bit of time to learn how to control this situation.
On the same day I went downstairs to walk a few miles on the treadmill1. It made a horrible sound, and I had to unplug it. After I thought about it, I became pretty sure that this was caused by the cats, Giacomo and Bob. They both took naps on the treadmill after visiting the litter box, which was also in the basement. A bit of litter might have stuck to their paws, then fell into the treadmill’s mechanism, and somehow made it jam up. In any case fixing or replacing it was not a job to be undertaken when all of society was under lockdown.
I always watched an opera or a streamed TV show or movie on my laptop situated on the ping pong table.
On the very next day I spent 100 minutes on the rowing machine that Sue had bought for me many years earlier. It gave me a sore tailbone. I brought down a small pillow and strapped it on top of the seat. I also brought down a pair of grey sneakers and permanently tied them into the footrest. It had bothered me that my feet slipped while I was rowing. This solved the problem.
Sue at some point in February had an anxiety attack. This was really the worst symptom yet. She had difficulty breathing for several minutes. This development meant that I had to keep bottled up my feelings about everything (including but not limited to my disdain for the pigsty in which we lived) or risk killing my wife. She got a prescription for this from one of her doctors. It seemed to work.
Over the next few days I spent some time doing our income taxes. I filed them electronically using “Free File Fillable Forms” and almost immediately received a refund from Connecticut. The federal refund did not arrive for several months. I can’t complain too much; the IRS did send a “stimulus” check of $2800.
At some point I dropped my Pixel 2 cellphone and cracked the screen. It still seemed to function correctly. This device, which I came to hate, continued to function until May of 2022. Its demise occurred somewhere in Germany and was described in detail here.
March: The 2nd was Sue’s 70th birthday. She was planning on throwing a big party, but she was definitely not up to it, and not many people would have been able to come anyway.
On March 15 Sue and I drove to a huge parking lot on Runway Rd. in East Hartford. There we received our initial Pfizer mRNA-based vaccine. It was a very quick and well-organized process overseen by members of the National Guard. The vaccine was reportedly more than 90 percent effective, which was incredibly high for a vaccine of any time. The number of new cases was already dropping in response to its availability.
A meeting of the District 25 Executive Committee (EC) was held via Zoom. Not much was decided. The big issue was whether the district would follow the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), the locality, or nobody with regards to requirements for vaccination and/or masks.
On March 16 the weather was nice enough to walk five miles outside. However this was the last time in March that I was able to achieve that distance. Subsequent walks were cut short by pain in my right foot that seemed somehow to be related to the chronic tendinitis that I had in the IT band that ran from my knee to my hip (described here). This was quite upsetting to me.
On March 21 I posted the pre-registration form and deposit for our team for the Grand National Teams (GNT) qualifying tournament: Felix Springer, Trevor Reeves, Ken, and me. The qualifying games would definitely be held online on BBO. The national finals were scheduled for the summer NABC. Because that tournament had been canceled, the GNT finals would be held online.
On March 22 the Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) met on Zoom. The plan was to hold the Ocean State Regional in Warwick on the week before Labor Day, if possible. The ACBL was planning to make a decision about sanctioning tournaments on May 22.
On the last day of March I made a long overdue appointment with my dentist, Dr. Coombs in Suffield. I later canceled the appointment because of fear of Covid-19.
April: No April fool jokes on April 1: The last blossom on the Christmas cactus appeared. The most remarkable story of the year concerned the mysterious injury to Sue’s cat, Bob. The details have been posted here.
April 5: I sent out an email composed by Sue Miguel to promote the online GNT qualifying tournaments that will be held at various times.
April 7: Bob seems nearly fully recovered.
April 13: Frances Schneider, the outgoing president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) asks me to take over her job at the end of her term. I declined because I was still doing a great deal of work for the district, and no one seemed to be taking seriously that I planned to resign those duties at the end of the year, and a great deal of effort would be required to replace me.
April 15: Sue and I drove back to East Hartford to be given the second Pfizer shot. I was once again amazed at how easy it was. I have always absolutely hated even the idea of shots, but this was not a bad experience. A fairly sizeable percentage of the population, however, has bought into the idea that the vaccines are some kind of plot generated by the Big State.
No screens online.
April 17-18: The GNT qualifier was held over a weekend online on BBO. In the first round on Saturday our foursome played in a four-way, which was necessary because there was no way to do a three-way on BBO. Because it was so easy to cheat on BBO, we were supposed to provide our own way of communicating visually (via Zoom or some other device). There were no instructions as to how this should or could be done. It was left up to the players, each of whom was paired up with an opponent in the way that is done in matches that used screens. .
The Meyerson team. Bernie is on the right.
In the first half of the first round we met Steve Meyerson’s team for a twelve-board match. I was supposed to set up some kind of communication with Bernie Bendiksen. I had played against Bernie a few times at tournaments, but I did not know him well. He didn’t know how to do it, and neither did I. So, we just played. I think that the other six people figured out a way to do it.
We won easily. The margin was 30 victory points. That meant that we did not need to play in the second half of the first round. We did not need to come back until after lunch.
Meyerson’s team won the second half of the morning. So, they got to play in the second round after the lunch break
Stay away, Fluffy.
In the afternoon we had another four-way. In the first twelve-board match our opponents were the team captained by Dana Rossi, who was also the person with whom I was supposed to establish verbal communication. Dana was from southwest Connecticut; I had played against him quite a few times at sectionals, but I had never been friendly with him. He provided me with a link to a Zoom feed that he was controlling. I signed in on Yoga, my convertible laptop. I played the match online on my desktop computer. I was uncomfortable listening to Dana Russo talking to a little girl, presumably his daughter. He told her that they take dead animals to the incinerator to burn them.
Not in Flight B.
We won again, this time by 35 victory points. So, we qualified to play in the quarterfinals on Sunday. We were matched up against Brad Mampe’s team. I was paired with his long-time partner Steve Willner. I had played against them once or twice, but I had not conversed with either of them. They seemed to play very little except in this event. Steve ran the Zoom feed. They had previously played a version of the Polish Club (as, in fact, so had Dan and his partner, Adam Lally). In this match they played a fairly standard version of 2/1.
This was a twenty-four board match. We lost the first half by 11 victory points. Steve was not around when the second half began, but he showed up a few minutes later. Ken and I had some chances in the second hand, but we each misplayed one hand. We lost the second half by 24.
Eric and Victor Xiao in 2019.
The Mampe team defeated the team captained by Dan Jablonski in the semifinals. Their opponents in the final match would be the Xiao team, whose captain was Victor. They would play a 48-board match for first place at some later date, but they were both guaranteed to qualify for the GNT.
On April 19 I sent out another email on MailChimp for Sue Miguel. When I attempted to remove everyone from the audience that I was using so that I could replace them with C players, Donna Cone’s record did not move. In an online “chat” someone from MailChimp told me it was because her record had been “cleaned”, which meant that the email address was no longer valid. I had obtained this address from the Rhode Island Bridge Association (RIBA) several years earlier.
After I sent out the email I undertook to print a coupon for $3 off of a box of cat litter. Thus began the great encounter with the Geek Squad that has been recounted in detail here.
On April 24 I walked 2.5 miles, but I had to quit at that point because of the pain in my right foot. The pain persisted throughout the evening.
The next day I sent out another email for Sue Miguel.
On April 26 I listened to a very disturbing podcast on This American Life about how right-wingers are sabotaging the effort to get the nation to a state of “herd immunity”, in which enough people have immunity that new infections cannot find new hosts. It has been posted here.
May: On May 2 I sent the following email to my friend, Bob Sagor (introduced here), the captain of the team that finished third: “The Xiaos won C. They can’t play in both flights. You may get to play in the NABC!”
On Thursday, May 6, I mowed the lawn for the first time in 2024. As usual, the Honda lawnmower started on the first or second pull. I needed to stop after completing the parts of the yard that face Hamilton Court or North Street. I sat, stretched the IT band on my right leg, and rested a bit. I then mowed the rest of the lawn.
The flowers on the daffodils and tulips in the neighborhood were withering. New Englanders said that the plants were “going by.” I had never heard this expression before coming to Connecticut, and I have never seen it in print.
Bob Sagor.
On May 8 Brad Mampe’s team beat Victor Xiao’s team in the final match of the Flight B qualifying tournament by 50 Victory Points! The third-place match was won by the team thrown together at the last minute by my friend and occasional partner, Bob Sagor. In fact, Bob’s team did attend the tournament, which was held online. They added Felix to their roster.
On May 11 Sue somehow hurt her left foot. I gave her the ankle brace that I had used a couple of times when I had sprained my ankle. Also, her ears were stopped up. Neither of these conditions lasted very long, but they made her even more miserable.
On May 13 I walked five miles with only two stretch breaks in 70 degree weather. I considered that a big improvement! Giacomo was having trouble getting up the steps from the basement to the house. I hated to do it, but I was going to need to bring the litter box upstairs.
The was the day that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) eliminated the mask guidelines “for most”. This was strictly a political move. Hundreds were still dying every day, but an incredibly large number of people resented being told to wear them. Good masks were an effective means of reducing the spread of the virus. The CDC had fumbled the ball when they said that any sort of face covering would do. Only later did their spokesmen indicate that the N95 masks were many times more effective than ordinary cotton ones.
Yoga and Big Bubba.
On Wednesday, May 26, I had placed my convertible computer, Yoga, on the floor next to the nightstand in the bedroom just before I took a nap. I then set my Big Bubba mug on the nightstand. It fell on the computer. Even though Yoga was closed, the impact cracked the screen. It was no longer functional.
Two days later I ordered a Microsoft Surface Go laptop from Best Buy. Before the Pandemic there was a Best Buy store in Enfield, but it had been closed. I had to drive to Manchester, CT, to pick it up. I did not give it a name.
On May 31 the Hartford Bridge Club reopened. Eight pairs played in a Howell. Masks were required (thank goodness!) because of the policy of West Hartford.
June: On the first day of the new month my new laptop would not operate. The screen was all black or dark grey. I could see the cursor, but i could not get it to operate. I made an appointment and drove to Best Buy in Manchester. The guy at the Geek squad desk was sanguine. He told me that “It uploads changes every Tuesday; something must have happened so that it could not reboot.” I asked him if I should make an appointment now for the following Wednesday. He advised me to hold the power key, which was the second one from the right on the top row, down for ten seconds.
On June 3 the TSC had a Zoom meeting. The district will try to hold a tournament in the week before Labor Day in Warwick, RI. This was exciting news. I sent out three big emails about Warwick.
That evening I found Bob in the basement. I deduced that he was able to climb up and down the stairs. I moved the litter box back to the basement.
Sohail Hasan, a partner from a tournament in 2019, sent me an email that asked me to play with him in Warwick.
On June 5 Chen’s team beat Mampe’s in a close match in the Flight A final of the GNT qualifier. That would really have been something if Mampe’s team had won both A and B.
The internal modem on my desktop computer stopped working, but I got the Belkin external modem to function. 52 people unsubscribed to my emails. That was a very high number. It was 94 degrees outside that day. I found that I could no longer tolerate long walks in temperatures above 90. When I was in my fifties I had no problems running in 100+ temperatures. It was still very hot the next day.
Sue told me that she has seen a white circle in the middle of her field of vision twice. This could be very bad. I certainly hoped that it didn’t happen again.
On June 8 I committed to play on July 1 with Felix Springer at the Hartford Bridge Club. I needed to avoid getting too many masterpoints because my total was very close to 2500, which was the cutoff for the GNT in 2022. I needed to be under that total for the roster that was published on August 6, 2021.
While researching for the blog entry about the Mark Twain writing contest (posted here), I discovered that Dorothy Clark was one of the judges. I played against her many times in Simsbury, and I was also her partner one evening, as described here.
Me, Felix, Eric, and Trevor.
June 12th was my third straight day of pain-free five mile hikes. I committed to play on 6/21 with Eric Vogel in club qualifying game for the North American Pairs (NAP).
The next day I committed to play at the HBC with Trevor Reeves on June 29. That game got canceled later.
On June 14 I discovered that Sue’s cat, Bob, was able to use the ramp that led from the basement to the cat door and thence to the back yard. So, he evidently no longer needed the litter box.
I played with Eric online on June 21. We were horrible.
I learned on June 27 that I did not need to report for jury duty. In 2023 I would be 75, which would allow me to avoid jury duty forever. I never served on a jury. I came close once. I was selected as an alternate for a civil case about an automobile accident. It was scheduled for two days, but one of those was canceled because of a bomb threat. I was unable to attend on the rescheduling date, and so I was excused.
6/29 Bob Bertoni (introduced here) died at 5:45 AM. This was very hard to take. Bridge in New England will have a very difficult time recovering without him. Over the subsequent years I have thought of him very often. His obituary was posted here.
John Willoughby.
Sue played bridge at the HBC with John Willoughby. After the temperature topped out at 97 degrees, a front came through with a thunderstorm.
6/30 I played with Felix at club. There were nine tables. We won with 62+%, and I earned my Q for the NAP qualifier.
July: A lot happened in July. On the first Sue and I drove to Bradford, MA, for Bob Bertoni’s wake. I had to let Sue off and park several blocks away. I saw Peter, Lois DeBlois, Carolyn Weiser, and Paula Najarian, who, to my great surprise, had white hair. A lot of the bridge players from the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA) were also there. I introduced myself to Beth Bertoni and told her that I did not know what we were going to do without Bob. I really meant it, and in the ensuing months and years I learned that my concern was justified.
Sad news: O’Connor’s closed for good at the end of 2022.
On the way back to Enfield we stopped for supper at O’Connor’s Irish restaurant in Worcester. I had to let Sue off again before I found a parking sport a good way from the door. This was our first night out in over fifteen months. We wore masks until the food came. Most of the other diners acted as if the Pandemic had never happened.
Mrs. Brown’s giant chicken and vegetable pot pie.
I had the chicken pot pie and a Guiness. It was good, but not a lot better than what could be purchased at the grocery store and reheated. It was nice, however, to be in public and see people who were having a good time.
It was raining lightly when I walked out to retrieve the car. By the time that we reached the Mass Pike there were torrents of rain. I drove almost all thee way home with the windshield wipers on at the highest speed. Most of the time I had great difficulty seeing the lane indicators. This was the worst occasion for summertime driving that I ever experienced.
It continued to rain very hard on the next day. Enfield seemed to get more rain than nearby locations. The back yard was flooded, and a few puddles were evident in the basement. Never in the more than thirty years that we had lived in Enfield had water seeped into the basement. I struggled to understand where it came from. Evidently concrete is slightly porous, and when the soil is very wet the water finds its own level.
Sue borrowed (or otherwise procured) a Sears Wet/Dry Vacuum and showed me how to use it. The puddles were eliminated rather quickly.
Stuart Whittle and Saul Agranoff.
On July 9 Saul Agranoff asked me if I could help with the EMBA website. It had been designed and supported by Bob Bertoni. I supplied him with the email address of the contact person at Bob’s company, Megahertz Computer. I also explained that I had never worked on the EMBA website, had no credentials for it, and was pretty certain that it was significantly different from NEBridge.org.
On July 10 I received emails from District 25 officials who were concerned about new ACBL rules for tournaments. They evidently required masks on all players and a distance of nine feet between tables.
My notes said that on the next day the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) announced a sectional in Stamford. I could find no details about when this was scheduled to occur. This struck me as very peculiar because I was a member of the board in 2021 (and the previous eight years). To my knowledge we had no meetings whatever during the Pandemic.
My notes also indicated that on the next day that I sent email to my steady partners. Because a large number of emails were deleted when I converted to the Asus box in the fall of 2023 (described here), I cannot locate a copy of this email, but my recollection is that I wanted to set up a regular schedule for online play at the HBC on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
On July 13 I played bridge at the H
I kept a couple of these masks to use while mowing my lawn in allergy season.
BC with Felix. Quite a few players had difficulties with the masks. The most common complaint was that they caused glasses to fog up. I had bought ten masks for $10 at Shoprite. They were sold by Hanes and made of cotton and were washable. They probably stopped not even one infected particulate, but they did not bother me even a little.
Ben and Ginny Bishop provided decorated masks for members of the HBC. Sue ordered one. I don’t know what happened to it.
On July 15 I renamed the blog entries that chronicled the story of my life as The 1948 Project. It was a takeoff on the somewhat controversial 1619 Project that was sponsored by the New York Times in 2019 concerning the role of slavery in the development of the United states.
On the same day a $63.75 charge from Slice appeared on my American Express card. This was for three pizzas that the cellphone that was in my pocket apparently ordered while I was on one of my five-mile walks. The pizzas were delivered, but I had refused them because I did not place or confirm the order.
In an open pairs game at the HBC on July 20 Donna Lyons (introduced here) and I scored 62%. It was Maria Van der Ree’s 90th birthday.
On July 22 I played at the HBC with Joan Brault (introduced here). There were a lot of wild hands. Joan and I did not deal with them very well.
On July 24 Sue and I attended Maria’s birthday party. We found the event somewhat scary. No one was wearing masks. People had had enough of Covid-19, but the threat was a very long way from over.
Ken Leopold’s teenage son Sam had died at some point in July. I never learned the details. Sue and I attended the burial service in Avon. It was the first Jewish burial service that I had attended. A few people from the HBC were there: Ronit Shoham, Geof Brod, Y.L. Shiue, Marie Abate, and Felix Springer and his wife Helene. Ken gave a very touching speech about his son’s baseball heroics.
The virus had been raising its ugly head. On July 30 the ACBL responded by canceling all tournaments scheduled for August, which included the tournament that D25 hoped to old in Warwick. I immediately sent out an email with the same selection criteria as the on that I had previously sent to announce the cancellation of the tournament.
August: On August 2 I received an email from Viking (the cruise line) moving the departure date for our Grand European Tour to October 23. That would preclude attendance at the scheduled tournament in Mansfield, MA. I began investigating the alternatives.
My notes for August 5 say “Stood up by Joan. Had to drive back to pick up Sue Rudd.” I do not remember either of those events or what caused them. American Express reinstated the charges for the pizzas. I called, and they reopened the dispute. In the end I had to pay for one pizza. It was not worth it to fight this any more, but I deleted the Slice app from the Pixel 2. I have told this story many times, and I have yet to meet anyone else whose phone ordered anything for them.
After a Zoom call in the evening with Mark Aquino, who, after Bob Bertoni’s death, had decided to run for Regional Director, I felt very depressed about the future of bridge in New England and elsewhere.
On August 6 I rebooked the Viking tour to depart on October 11.
Brenda Montague.
On the next day on behalf of Brenda Montague, the chair of the Nominating Committee, I sent out a set of emails to bridge players in New England soliciting volunteers for the job of vice-president. Trevor Reeves later talked with me about the possibility of applying. I don’t think that he went through with it.
On August 11 I attended the Zoom call with the three Regional Director candidates, David Moss, Mark Aquino, and Allan Graves. David was the District 24 Director from New York City. Allan Graves lived in St. Johnsbury, VT, but for years had only participated in NABC’s and international events. No one mentioned the word tournament. Allan argued that we should concentrate our efforts on trying to get people to play rubber bridge. I found the whole event very depressing.
After the bridge game on my 73rd birthday a bunch of people who had played in the game joined Sue and me for lunch at Effie’s Place. In attendance were Lea Selig, Susan Seckinger, Lois McOmber, Jeanne Striefler, Maria Van der Ree, and Fred Gagnon. We ate outside. I think that I had a Reuben sandwich. It was nice to have any kind of a social occasion.
The next day a “war room” Zoom meeting of D25 officials was held. Carole Weinstein, Carolyn Weiser, Jack Mahoney, Peter Marcus, Sue Miguel, Joe Brouillard, and Sally Kirtley atttended. Peter wanted D25 to cancel all tournaments for 2021 and 2022! Nobody took that suggestion seriously. The qualification tournaments for the NAP would be held online. Carole called the decision a “no-brainer”. I thought that it was a bad idea to decide that anything would be played online if an alternative was possible.
On August 19 I reluctantly voted for Mark Aquino for Regional Director. He won.
I learned on August 20 that airline reservations had been made by Viking for the trip in October. I started doing some serious research about the ports of call on the cruise, which would start in Amsterdam and end in Budapest.
SBC games were played at Eno Hall, the Simsbury Senior Center.
On August 21 I sent an email to players in the vicinity of Simsbury to determine whether they would be interested in resuming the games of the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). It is posted here. I received a lot of positive responses.
The next day Hurricane Henri passed through Connecticut. Enfield received only a little bit of rain, but floods were reported in Vernon and Manchester.
On August 24 I learned that the SBC will have been turned over to Sally Kirtley as of September 15. Ken did not want to direct the games. I asked her to verify the schedule with Eno Hall before I announced it.
On August 25 I sent an email to SBC subscribers that we would not be allowed to validate vaccinations on site. I definitely did not want to play bridge with anyone who had not been vaccinated.
Med Colket.
On August 30 Med Colket came up with a work-around. We could change SBC games to invitational instead of open so that I could validate vaccinations that were sent to me through emails. I could also automatically register players whom I had seen play at the HBC.
Aaaaargh! The U.S. has been removed from the white list by the European Union because of the recent uptick in the number of Covid-19 cases here. I began to wonder whether the cruise would be called off and, if not, whether we would be quarantined before boarding the ship.
September: On the first day of the month tropical depression Ida arrived in CT late at night. The rest of this heroic story has been told here.
On September 3 three European countries (Norway, Sweden, and Italy) began requiring tourists from the U.S. to quarantine. The problem was the new Delta variant was nearly twice as transmissible as the original strain, which had spread at an incredible rate before the vaccinations began. .
On September 5 the leaders of D25 were considering—via an exchange of emails—whether to cancel the tournament in Mansfield in November. Most people seem to be leaning in that direction.
On the following day Tom Corcoran, Sue and I decided to postpone the cruise until the spring because of the threat of quarantining in Europe. This would also allow Tom to spend his 70th birthday with his family in Vermont.
On August 8 the cruise was changed to begin on May 5 and end on May 22. Sue made the arrangements while I was playing bridge at the HBC. This period was chosen because no bridge tournaments were scheduled then. The new cruise started in Budapest and ended in Amsterdam. The other ports were the same or nearly so. This was not the last change in our plans, but I actually did go on the cruise on those dates. The bizarre details have been posted here.
On September 10 the HBC restarted the Saturday afternoon game. Peter Katz, my long-time Saturday partner, agreed to play with me.
On September 10 Sue and I went to the picnic for the Locke cousins. I sat by myself because I heard that some of the attendees had refused to get vaccinated, and no one in attendance wore a mask.
On September 14 for the first time ever my Honda lawnmower would not start. I later learn that there was gas or oil in the air filter. On the next day it started, and Sue hired a local guy to pick it up, change the oil, and check it out.
The inaugural Friday afternoon open game at HBC on September 17 drew only six pairs. I played with Trevor.
On the next day the first Saturday afternoon game at the reopened HBC was held. Both Mike and Susan Smith and Ken and Lori Leopold attended. There were five tables.
On September 20 I learned that changing the date of the trip had cost Tom $3K. I did not understand why, but there was not much I could do about it.
Giacomo surprised me by climbing back up on the couch. In his younger days he nonchalantly walked up onto the couch. He also executed a very tentative “mighty leap”2.
On September 21 the mechanic delivered the lawnmower and only charged $125. It ran very well. It was (and still is in 2024) the best lawnmower by far that I ever bought.
I realized on September 23 that I officially had exceeded my life expectancy at birth (73.1 years). I told people this at the HBC. No one seemed interested at all.
The cats had been acting weird for the last week or two. They no longer associated with each other. Bob stayed outside all day and night. He only came in only for meals or storms. Giacomo has returned to his throne on the back of the couch. He has taken to biting at his back legs and spine area. Who knows why?
On the same day the EC voted 9-3-1 to cancel Mansfield. I was the 1.
On September 24 the forecast on WTIC radio at 4:30 AM predicted a low of 75 and a high of 69.
The next day I discovered a sensitive spot on Giacomo’s back. For the first time ever he bit me.
Me and Ann.
On September 26 I was on the winning team of the first Swiss event at the reopened HBC. I played with Ann Hudson. Our teammates were Trevor, and Felix. We won by four victory points with a blitz in the last round against weak competition. I made made three bidding errors, but none of them cost us, and one helped us. 1♣-1♠-1NT-2♣–♥-2NT made 3; 2♣ by Ann was a relay to 2D (XYZ)3.Ann wanted to sign off in diamonds.
On September 27 I walked five miles without stopping for first time in months in perfect weather.
On September 30 I changed dentists because Dr. Peter Coombs did not take ConnectiCare. My new dentist was Dr. Bill Cummiskey.
October: On October 11 I canceled Chewy.com order of Advantage II, but it was delivered four days later. The charge was refunded on October 18.
On October 13 I saw Boris Godunov (an opera by Modest Mussorgsky recorded live in HD at the Met) at Cinemark4 at Enfield Square. Only one other person attended. Since that person was at least thirty feet away from me I took off my mask. I also saw two employees and one other person who was there to see a movie.
On October 15 I sent out the invitations for the first Simsbury game to 72 vaccinated people.
The next day Linda Starr helped me make boards at the HBC for the first game at Simsbury. Peter Katz and I finished first. There were only five other pairs, but it was a strong field. So far 4.5 tables are committed for the first game at the SBC.
On October 19 I got the points that I needed to finally make Gold Life Master even though I played poorly with John Calderbank.
Sally Kirtley set me an email that Eno “cannot accommodate SBC” on October 20. I had to postpone the first game, for which we had five tables.This was hard to take.
On October 20 I checked to make sure that everyone saw my email about the cancellation. Felix and Trevor agreed to play with Ken and me in the GNT qualifier next spring. HBC announced that it will drop mask requirement as of Friday. I had absolutely no intention of abandoning my mask.
On October 22 I discovered that Bob had a bump on his right shoulder that he did not like being touched. Sue was convinced that it was a bite. It did not feel like that to me.
I played with Sally Kirtley and learned that Eno Hall canceled our game because it did not have a janitor scheduled for October 20. Eight pairs had so far agreed to play on October 27.
On October 24 the HBC held its annual meeting on Zoom. Trevor had asked me to serve as a trustee, and I had agreed to a three-year commitment.
Donna Feir.
On October 27 Donna Feir let us use the boards that were made for the Tuesday night that was canceled because not enough people registered. It was Tom Corcoran’s birthday. Sue and I talked with him and his kids on Zoom. I copied the wrong .pbn5 file onto my thumb drive to give to Sally. I was ten minutes late at Simsbury because of Sue Rudd. Ken and I tied for first (out of eleven pairs) with Felix and Trevor.
On October 29 I discovered that Bob had one or two ticks.
November: We assigned November 1 as the birth date for two of our cats, Giacomo, and Woodrow. So, we celebrated Giacomo’s eighteenth birthday on 11/01/21. This was a big one. Both Woodrow and Rocky had made it to 18, but each died shortly thereafter. So, from now on Giacomo was playing with the house’s money.
In other cat news: Bob would not come into the house. Sue put food and water in bowls outside for him and made up a bed for him among all of her junk piled up outside of the blue door to the kitchen. Maybe he was afraid of Giacomo. Maybe he was afraid of me. Maybe he was just crazy.
On Tuesday, November 2. I drove into the HBC before the morning game and used the HBC’s dealing machine to make boards for the SBC game the next evening. John Calderbank and I then had a 59 percent game, a real coup for us.
I somehow managed to pull a huge tick off of Bob’s right shoulder. Sue claimed that he still had a smaller one on the left side of hs neck, but I had not seen it.
On Wednesday evening we had 3 1/2 tables at the evening game at the SBC. I had used the correct pbn file this time.
On November 6 the grey cat that sometimes roamed our neighborhood appeared. Bob stayed inside.
On November 7 an astounding sixteen teams played in the Swiss at the HBC! Food was provided, and the players were definitely ready to party.
I picked a second tick off of Bob’s right shoulder. I could not find anything on his left shoulder. This might have been the best day of the year at the Wavada household.
On November 12 Bob returned to the family. He got up on Sue’s chair without help while she was sitting on it. Sue was absolutely delighted.
On November 23 the first meeting of the new HBC Planning Committee was held on Zoom. John Willoughby, the new vice-president, ran the meeting. I learned that there would be a “rainbow” event for clubs in January. Gold, silver, red, and black points would be awarded 6
Sue has taken to sleeping on my chair in the living room because Bob would not leave her chair. Why, you may ask, does she sleep prefer to sleep on a chair rather than a bed?
On November 24 I sent a long email to the people on the EC to explain what I had been doing in my role as webmaster, database manager, and other things before the Pandemic. The rest of my frustrating but ultimately successful attempt to resign from these responsibilities has been described here in excruciating detail.
November 27 was another great day. U-M defeated Ohio State 42-27. Michigan had no takeaways and only punted twice. They had seven drives that ended in touchdowns. Needless to say, I did not watch the game, but I wished that I had. I feasted on lots of replays of the many highlights. Michigan finished the regular season 11-1 and would meet Iowa on December 4 for the conference championship.
11/29 For some stupid reason the TSC announced that it would meet on Zoom on December 15, a Wednesday evening. My protests that this was the ONLY time all week that Sally and I could not attend fell on deaf ears. I don’t know if Sally emphasized this, but I certainly did. was really upset about this.
December: Sue and I got our booster shots for the Pfizer vaccine at the local CVS.
12/3 I had a minor pain in my shoulder and neck; the only reason to mention it was because I had no known injuries there. The passport that I planned to use on the October trip would expire before I needed it for the rescheduled one in May. I had researched what was required. I took a photo of myself in the size and format required. I mailed it with all the other materials, including my old passport. The State Department did not accept the photo and sent the package back to me.
On the next day Michigan beat Iowa 42-3. The Wolverines were champions of the Big 10 for the first time since they started the championship game.
On December 6 the new stove that Sue purchased arrived and was installed. The burners are, in my opinion, much too hot, but I didn’t know what we could do about it. My neck felt much better.
12/7 I went to Walgreen’s and bought a new passport photo. They guaranteed that it would be accepted. Evidently there was a website that examined the image and validated it. I could not find my old passport.
The next day I found the old passport under my chair in living room. It had apparently dropped through the cushions. I mailed the forms back in.
Ken and I scored more than 72 percent at the SBC bridge game. That might have been the best score that I had ever recorded up to that point.
The space to the right of the Gold LM certificate will probably always be empty.
On December 10 I received Gold LM certificate from the ACBL and attached it to the east wall in my office below the other ones. I don’t expect to win any more
On the next Tuesday Donna Feir needed me to make boards for the morning open pairs game while she got the room set up. I did so. I only had time to make 5 boards for the Wednesday night game at the SBC. I made the rest of boards by hand. Unfortunately, when I did so I made boards #21 and 22 the same. Ken directed and Margie Garilli kept score on the BridgeMate.
On December 16 the EC voted on Zoom to move the Royal STaC to April of 2022, to cancel the Presidential Regional ordinarily held in February, and to hold two four-day regionals in May. One would be a free tournament structured along the lines of the Gold Mine held in 20197. The other would be open.
On December 17 President Biden postponed closing U.S airports to people from countries that were infected by the Omicron virus.
On December 22 I could not get dealing machine to work. At the SBC game we played using an old deck that had been given to me years earlier. The players did not like this much.
Discontinued but not forgotten.
In the little shelf on the north wall of my office I found a package of McCormick’s Meat Marinade. On Christmas day I used it to marinate a spoon roast that Sue and I feasted on. I put Bob up on my lap both in the office and the living room. He really liked the former when I petted him with both hands, but I was not able to get much work done when I did so.
By December 26 Omicron accounted for 71 percent of the cases of Covid-19 in the US. The number of new cases eclipsed 200,000 per day. The holiday season turned into a super-spreader event.
I realized that I must be allergic to Bob—sneezing and blowing nose all day. I bought ten N95 masks at Home Depot for $23. The CDC finally admitted that simple face coverings were better than nothing, but the N95 masks were tremendously more effect
I encountered no problems whatever in making thee boards for the SBC game. I played with Felix in the open pairs game at the HBC. We almost won; one different decision against Tom Joyce would have done it.
On December 29 I had a 64 percent game in the open pairs at the HBC with Eric. In the last game of the year at the SBC 3 tables, Ken and I scored 65%.
On December 30 at an emergency meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) on Zoom. Carole Amaio was a riot: “Can you hear me? I broke my wine glass. Shit!” We decided to require masks starting on Monday.
On December 31 over 500,000 new cases were reported, the most of entire Pandemic. The only good sign was the fact that hospitalizations and deaths were not as prevalent as with the original virus. However, both vaccinated people and those who had already had Covid-19 were susceptible to Omicron.
U-M lost to Georgia 38-11. The football team had a great year, but they were not (yet) in Georgia’s class. Four bowl games were canceled in 2021.
1. This treadmill was given to me by Tom Corcoran. My first treadmill was purchased second-hand from someone who had never used it. I found them on Craig’s List. The belt on that one broke after I had used it regularly in the winter and foul weather for several years. Tom brought the second one from his house in Wethersfield. His wife Patti had used it for a while. He somehow arranged for removal of the old one and installation of this much better one. Incidentally, I claim to be the only person who has ever broken two treadmills. Prove me wrong.
2. Giacomo was the only cat that we ever had who attempted to make the “mighty leap” from the couch on which he tended to spend his days to my easy chair where he liked to sit on my lap while I was watching television. When in September 2021 he executed the “tentative” version of the leap, I realized that his legs and body were so long that he could actually reach the armrest that he landed on by just stretching out to his full length.
3. XYZ is a kind of new-minor forcing. After any three bids 2♣ is a relay to 2♦, usually to show invitational values. A ♦ rebid is an artificial game-force.
4. In December of 2023 the twelve-theater Cinemark complex in Enfield Square closed for good. At that point it became a twenty-minute drive to see a movie or, in my case,an HD opera.
5. Files with the extension “.pbn” (portable bridge notation) can be read by the Dealer4 software that runs the dealing machine at the HBC. At first I had Linda make some of these files for me using software on the HBC’s computer. In 2023 I discovered free software available for download that allowed me to make them on my computer. In both cases the files generated were completely random.
6. I am pretty sure that the “rainbow” event was later called a Royal STaC.
7. The free Gold Mine never happened. I do not remember why.
