In November of 2024 two dates were circled on everyone’s calendar. The presidential election that featured Kamala Harris (after Joe Biden was convinced to stay on the sidelines) and Donald Trump was scheduled for Tuesday, the fifth. It was difficult to imagine a pair of candidates any more different than they were. Most supporters of each considered that the election of the other would be disastrous. The experts judged it a toss-up.
The other big day was Thursday the 28th, Thanksgiving. Sue and I had been invited to Burlington, VT, to celebrate the occasion with the extended Corcoran family, but we had felt awkward at the previous such gathering that we had attended, and so we declined.
The last regional bridge tournament on the calendar in New England was scheduled for Monday the 18th through Saturday the 23rd at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT. The Nutmeg State had not hosted a regional tournament since February of 2019.1 I had amassed lot of hotel points for IHG, the company that owned both Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza. During the summer I had unsuccessfully tried to use them for the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, in September. No such rooms were available. Since the dates for the Harvest Regional in Norwich had already been published, I immediately reserved a room for all five nights and paid for it with points.
Xenia Coulter.
Abhi Dutta asked me to play with him on the first three days. Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider were looking for teammates for the Swiss team games all week.2 My other three prospective partners were fellow members of the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). John Lloyd agreed to play in the bracketed pairs on Friday, and Eric Vogel committed to the Get-Away Teams on Saturday.
Xenia Coulter, who grew up in Ann Arbor, attended U-M, and lived in a town near Norwich, volunteered to play with me in the open Swiss scheduled for Thursday. Xenia and I had never played together before. We spent quite a bit of time going over the convention card via email. The HBC scheduled a special game for Veterans Day, November 11. We played together in that event and finished third out of eight, which was worth 1.34 masterpoints. I added Xenia to my list of partners, which at the time totaled 151.
Here, then, is a snapshot of my calendar for early November.
In addition to what is shown above, I also played in my regularly scheduled bridge games on the first two Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays at the HBC as well as the Sunday afternoon game with Sue. I also played in the two Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). In the week before the tournament I played Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday (twice), and the following Saturday. All of my preparation was relegated to the remaining three days.
The latest iteration of Covid was spreading fairly rapidly through the HBC. YL tested positive for Covid after the game on Saturday the ninth. Mike Carmiggelt. tested positive after the game on the tenth. I played against YL, but Sue and I did not play against Mike. We both wore masks because we had the sniffles. Other regular players at the HBC who reportedly had contracted Covid were Jim Macomber, Laurie Robbins, Lesley Meyers, and Bill Watson.
Wednesday, November 13: I never felt even a little sick, and by Wednesday my congestion was no worse than usual. However, Sue was much worse. She told me when I returned from the evening bridge game at about 11:00 that she had trouble breathing and could not sleep. I was very alarmed at this development. For the last few years she generally slept with a CPAP machine and supplemental oxygen. She asked me if we had any Alka Seltzer Cold Plus packets. I remembered seeing one in a drawer in my bathroom. I fetched, and she dissolved it in a glass of water and drank it.
I was already in a very bad mood. After playing two nondescript bridge games it occurred to me that I had come to enjoy the game a lot less than most of the other players. Almost everyone talked about the hands at the table, a practice that annoyed me greatly. People made the same old jokes, such as Eric’s “best for last” comment in the last round of almost every session, just to have something to say. I would have laughed if the remarks were original or funny, but I could not remember doing so even once since the lockdown. So, I had become almost completely a silent participant in club games.
Thursday, November 14: In the morning I drove to CBS and bought Sue Package of Alka Seltzer Cold Plus. It seemed to help, but she complained that it tasted terrible. I also picked up some groceries.
I had nothing of great importance scheduled for either the 14th or 15th. I am almost always worn out after the Wednesday night game. On Thursday I planned to go walking at about 2:00, but between shopping, naps and preparing supper, I never managed to do it. I had heard from Charles Schwab that one of my Treasury bills would mature on that day.
Friday, November 15: I sent out an email to the regulars at the SBC at around 8:00. It announced that there would be no more games in November and erroneously stated that the next game would be on December 3, which was a Tuesday.
I also did my cash worksheet for the rest of the month. I transferred a few thousand dollars from the Schwab account to cover the cash needed rest of the year. I discovered that I could not afford any of the T-bills that were available. I decided to buy a CD from Chase instead.
I did not find time to walk on Friday either. For the previous six weeks I had been reading a massive novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle that I had checked out from the Enfield Public Library. It was certainly one of the strangest books that I had ever read. It was published in 1969, when Nabokov was 90. The two main characters, who are siblings as well as cousins, converse in French, Russian, and English, with a little Italian thrown in. The main plot is about their torrid off-and-on sexual relationship, reportedly consummated more than one thousand times! There are also many subplots, and the setting is not on Earth (called Terra in Ada), but a similar place called Antiterra3. Despite the fact that Ada had been on the shelf for fifty-five years, no one in Enfield had ever filled out the little form provided for short comments at the back of the book. I rated it as 8. My comment was “Incomprehensible but awesome.”
I finished Ada on Friday and returned it to the Library. I checked out two new books, Pnin, a much shorter and more light-hearted novel by Nabokov, and Mrs. Osmond, the only “literary” novel by John Banville on the shelves that I had not read. I was surprised to see that Banville had also published a new crime novel called The Drowned. It featured both of his pathetic sleuths, Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford.
Before going to play bridge at the HBC on Saturday I took an antihistamine to assure that I did not need to cough or blow my nose much. I wore an N95 mask. My partner, as always, was Peter Katz.
I played pretty well throughout most of the game. We finished second for the third week in a row.
My most grievous error came on the hand shown at the right. I, sitting West, passed. If the vulnerability had been reversed, I might have tried 2♦. Tom Katsouleas bid 4♠, and everyone passed. Peter led the ♠A. I played my lowest club (encouraging). Peter continued with the king and a third club, which I ruffed.
I neglected to notice that Peter led the 10 rather than the 8. I had to decide between ♥10 and ♦A. Peter had, in fact, asked me to return a heart. If I had, we would have set the contract. It would not have helped us much because the only team that beat the contract also doubled, and we did not.
Sue finally felt better. She fixed Jambalaya for supper, but she complained that she could not smell it. I ate my serving, and I even had dessert. I had been constipated for a few days, but it in no way affected my appetite.
While we ate supper I washed three pairs of bluejeans and one sweatshirt. An hour or so later Sue moved the clothes to the dryer and set it for thirty minutes. I checked them when the dryer stopped. They were all still a little damp. I put them on for ten more minutes, and I noticed that the dryer’s drum was not rotating. I had to hang the garments on the shower rod and hope that they would dry by the time that I left for Norwich on Monday.
Juan Cole was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. His website was called “Informed Comment.” He specialty was the countries of the Mideast.
Sunday, November 17: I woke at around 6:00 on the morning after a good night’s sleep. Michigan’s football team had had its second bye week, and so I did not rush into my office to check the results on the Internet. I tried to think of everything that I needed to do before leaving the next morning for the tournament. Aside from packing, the most important item was to pay Cox Cable and the statement balance on my Chase IHG credit card. I had some tea and a red Delicious apple (4016) while I scrolled through the websites that I checked every morning—The New York Times and Washington Post, Doonesbury and Non Sequitur, Juan Cole, the Onion’s “opinions”, CNN, and Twitter.
I then sent out an email that corrected the date for the next game at the SBC. It was scheduled for December 4, not, as designated in Friday’s email, December 3.
After a while I had a hankering for some Bowl & Basket chicken noodle soup, an envelope of which was surely the best bargain available for $.495. Really! A box with two envelopes still cost only $.99. I always ate two bowls. On this morning, however, I could barely finish the first one. I felt a little woozy and very weak. At 8:30 I woke Sue up and immediately went back to sleep.
When I woke up an hour or two later I vomited. I drove to CVS and bought a box of ten pouches of Purelax, the store brand of polyethylene glycol 3350. I dissolved one in a glass of water, drank it, and lay down. I got up three times to go to the bathroom and each time I had a small bowel movement. I felt much better. However, the next time that I got up I vomited again. There was no way that I could drive to Norwich and play two sessions of bridge the next day if I could not keep any food down.
I called the hotel in Norwich and postponed my arrival until Tuesday. I let Abhi, Mike, and Jim know that I would not be there on Monday. For supper Sue fixed me a piece of chicken, some leftover vegetables, and two biscuits. I had no appetite. I had a few nibbles, but I uncharacteristically left most of it on my plate. I did not vomit.
My negative result is on top. Sue’s positive one is below.
Monday, November 18: I did not rise from bed on Monday, the first day of the tournament, until after 8:00. Sleeping that late was extremely unusual for me. When I woke Sue up she informed me that she had tested positive for Covid. I was not surprised. Her coughs had diminished only a little, and she was still quite congested. She also said that she could not smell the Jambalaya. Her doctor advised her that if I tested negative, I should get the Covid booster and the flu shot.
I ate two bowls of soup. I ate most of a sleeve of crackers over a period of a few hours. I took the second sleeve of Purelax. It seemed to work pretty well. I felt somewhat better, but I had little energy, and I could not concentrate. Although I did not vomit all day, I canceled my hotel reservations and let Abhi, Jim, Mike, John, Xenia, and Eric know that I would not be coming. So, I would be on a “staycation” until at least Tuesday the 26th.
Sue and I watched TV all evening. Our chairs are ten feet apart, and I wore my N95 mask whenever I was around her.
Tuesday, November 19: My energy was better, but I doubted that I could have mustered the power of concentration necessary for two sessions of tournament-level bridge. I slept most of the day, but I had no other symptoms.
In the afternoon I drove to ShopRite and Stop and Shop and bought almost $50 worth of groceries. The most important purchases were the restocking of my personal staples that I had allowed to get very low because I expected to be at the tournament—Caffeine-free Diet Coke, soup, brats, apples, and potato chips.
I tried to schedule an emissions inspection for Sue’s car for Wednesday, but no one answered the phone at The Mad Hatter at 4:45. They reportedly closed at five.
Wednesday, November 20: I tested myself for Covid right after I awoke. The result was clearly negative. Sue spent most of the day in bed, as she had been doing for a week or so. She could breathe OK, but she was still very stuffy and had even less energy than usual.
I drove Sue’s Subaru Forester to The Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Only one other customer was inside, and he was not there for an emissions test.
What a throwback this place was. Three very stoic guys came in and out. The one who took my $20 and key seemed to be in charge, but the other guy who stood at the cash register might have been a partner. There was no one under 40.
I began to suspect that I might have had a very light case of Covid when my nose was running constantly on Sunday. Sue’s case is certainly not light.
The seven remaining envelopes of Purelax.
Thursday, November 21: I still did not feel “regular”. I therefore drank a third sleeve of Purelax.
I made an appointment for a flu shot and a Covid booster at Walgreens at 3:30. However, the questionnaire that I filled in online asked if I had been in close contact with anyone with Covid in the last fourteen days. When I answered in the affirmative, the program said that I was not eligible for the shots.
The pharmacy it the all-brick area to the right of the last awning.
Sue called Jason, the pharmacist at Walgreens. He advised her to tell me to answer the “close contact” question in the negative and to then fill out and submit the rest of the form. Unfortunately, I could not find a way on the web page to add my patient info to the existing appointment, and so I made a new appointment for 4pm.I arrived at Walgreens shortly after 3:30. I explained the situation to the lady at the counter. About ten minutes later she administered one shot in each of my muscle-bound arm. I did not even feel the first one. This was different from the previous occasion in that she did not ask me to wait around afterwards for fifteen minutes to see if I had an adverse reaction, and she never asked for my insurance card.
It rained for the first time in several months, but Enfield received less than an inch.
The heater in my car was not working again. I had tried every combination of settings. Nothing seemed to work. This happened in 2023. On that occasion I took it into Lia Honda. After a few minutes they told me that there was nothing wrong with it. It functioned correctly for the rest of the winter.
Friday, November 22: I slept until 8:10. I awoke after a very vivid dream about driving in the snow. I was behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler that contained file cabinets. It crashed because someone tried to get an oversized load through a snow-covered narrow road and got stuck. After the crash someone drove off with my tractor-trailer. Incidentally, I have never driven a truck of any kind. I did drive a pickup in the army. I got into trouble when I moved it without fastening the seat belt. That maneuver involved a journey of less than 50 feet that began and ended in a parking lot. An Air Force captain chewed me out for fifteen or twenty minutes.
Both arms were a little sore when I woke up, but I was in no way impaired.
Sue ordered some food from Olive Garden. I drove there and picked up the bag.It cost a little over $50 with the tip. I parked in pick-up space #6. To my left was space #8. To the left of that was space #7. Go figure.
In the afternoon I received a phone message from Lynn Duncan, a bridge player from the Boston area, asking me to play in the Swiss in Norwich on Saturday. I wondered if a card for me was on the partnership desk. I was probably feeling good enough to play, but I could not risk attending when Sue was sick. She was feeling better, but she still spent a lot of time in bed.
Saturday November 23: I walked six laps (3.33 miles) in the Mall. Santaland was up set up very nicely in front of the old entrance to JC Penney, but there were very few walkers or shoppers. Haven Games was the only place that was busy. I probably could have done the remaining three laps, but I did not want to overdo it.
U-M defeated Northwestern 50-6. That gave the Wolverines a 6-5 record going into the final game with Ohio State. It also clinched a slot in a bowl game.
Sunday November 24: I walked 5 miles outside, two laps of my usual circuit. It was 51° when I started and 45° when I finished. I noticed that the pine tree behind the fence at the corner of School St. and North St. that suffered from the same disease as the one that had blown over in our yard had broken in two. A ten-foot tall stump remained.
It never occurred to me to examine the results from the bridge tournament that I had just missed.
Monday November 25: I walked 4 miles outside. The weather was very nice, but a bit of pain in the lower right section of my back led me to cut off one mile by turning onto School St. from Hazard Ave. Still, I managed to walk 12.33 miles in three days, a post-Covid record.
Tuesday November 26: The staycation was over. For the first time in more than a week I drove on the highway. There was not much sunshine. I resolved to make an appointment for my car’s heating problems when I returned. I was pleased to see that the price of a sausage biscuit with egg at the McDonald’s was still $5.25 (including tax).
Geof Brod.
I played bridge with John C. We did badly. I overheard Sally Kirtley tell Geof Brod that the attendance at the regional tournament in Norwich was not very good. She also mentioned that approximately 90 tables worth of people played in an online regional that ran from the 18th through the 20th. The tournament’s flyer has been posted here. Geof remarked that it had not occurred to him that the ACBL was competing with regionals. This had long been obvious to me. Incidentally, no other district had scheduled a regional during this period.
Just before supper I watched episode 7 of Reindeer Mafia.4
1. I started playing bridge at regional tournaments in 2006. For the next fifteen years a regional had been held in February in Cromwell, CT. One was scheduled for 2020, but only a week or two before the event the Red Lion Hotel was closed by the state for failure to pay taxes. The tournament was hurriedly moved to Sturbridge, MA, that year.
2. The flyer and schedule for the tournament have been posted here. It included no knockouts, and the only bracketed games—in which all participants played against people with similar levels of experience—were pairs games on Friday and team games on Sunday. I intended to complain about this when the Tournament Scheduling Committee reported at the Executive Committee meeting in Warwick in September. However, the TSC presented no report. So, I tried to make my point at the end of the meeting, but no one was paying attention because we were being pressured to play in the evening side game. I was just told that they wanted to emphasize the NAP and the bracketed pairs.
3. Antiterra was described as a sort of inside-out version of Terra. The two calendars were out of kilter a bit. Antiterra had banned electronic technology. The telephone system, which was invented by the deranged aunt of the two principal characters, was somehow based on water.
4. A description of this streamed series from Finland can be found here.
My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here. On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my … Continue reading →
My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here.
On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my responsibilities in these and other matters involving communications are detailed here. This was a great relief for me. Some of the emails that I had sent in the previous few months promoted online events that paid gold masterpoints. Each one made me cringe.
On the same day Dan Jablonski finally sent me an email casting the deciding vote in the Weiss-Bertoni award. You can read the details and discover who won the award in this blog entry.
On the 17th I mowed the lawn for the second time. The high pollen content of some areas of the yard made it somewhat difficult, as it has in every May for the last decade or two, but I completed the task without resting.
June
On June 1 I tried to beat the heat by departing for my 5-mile walk at 8:30AM. I nevertheless found it as much as I could bear,1 and there was precious little shade. I noticed that the SmartFuel gas station on the north side of Hazard Ave. near the South Road intersection had closed after only a few months of operation. It replaced the Shell station that had occupied the location for decades. Signs said that it would become a Big Y Express station.
Raveis Realty, located in a house a little bit to the east of of the station, has also apparently one year. A few years earlier a spectacular display of tulips appeared near the west side of the Raveis building.
Zillow’s photo of 2 Park St.
The corner house on Park St. (the street address is 2) is somewhat mysterious. It had appeared empty with no “For Sale” sign for months. I saw two girls there the previous week. It seemed empty again on this occasion.
In the last quarter-mile I was passed by a female walker. I was pretty sure that that had never happened to me before. I did not like it, but I was too exhausted and hot to try to hold her off. My speed and endurance both decreased noticeably as I got older.
It was still very hot on the 2nd, but then it turned much cooler with a misty rain. I attended both days of the sectional in Johnston, RI, and played with Abhi Dutta. Details have been recorded here.
On June 7 forest fires in Canada were causing in the local area thick haze from the smoke. It was quite eerie and absolutely unprecedented, at least in my lifetime. Two days later the air quality still poor.
I learned that day I should have closed my dad’s IRA account at Country Club Bank in Kansas City earlier. There was not much money in it, but it took weeks to get them to send me a check. .Deidra Tossato finally sent me the form fifteen days after I requested it.
The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) scheduled an individual game for June 20, the first day of of the regional tournament in Nashua, NH. I played at the HBC, but I did not enjoy myself, and I did not score well. My adventures in Nashua are recorded here.
On June 28 I played with two new partners—Jim Macomber at the HBC in the morning and Barb Gallagher at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in the evening.
On June 29 and 30 my nose ran all day. Despite this I had no trouble sleeping. I had no fever or any other symptoms of Covid-19.
July
I woke up on July 1 after ten consecutive hours of sleep, close to my all-time record. I experienced a little dizziness when I arose from bed, but it disappeared shortly thereafter. I tested negative for Covid-19 using the rapid antigen test that the federal government supplied for free.
Sue’s cousin from Michigan (on the Locke side) was in town. Sue visited with her, but I did not go. We visited her, her parents, and her sisters on our trip to Michigan in 2008, as described here.
Up to nine inches of rain fell in sections of western Connecticut on July 10, but Enfield received hardly any. The weather definitely seemed more extreme in the twenties, but it is still rather mild in southern New England.
The next morning the temperature dropped to 66° at 4:30. It was the first time that it had been below 70° in weeks. It rose to 90° that day and much hotter on the next. There was no bridge game at the SBC on either the 5th or the 12th.
On July 13 at 5:44AM the bookshelf in my bedroom came crashing down. It missed my head by about two inches. If it had hit me, I would have been seriously injured. The shelf disappeared into the black hole of Sue’s “sewing room”.
On July 14 thunderstorms began at 2:30AM. Flooding wreaked havoc in the northwest part of the state. The Connecticut River was 6′ above the flood level. Damage, however, was minimal.
John Willoughby, the president of the HBC, died on July 14. Both Sue and I had been his occasional bridge partner. I worked with him on the Planning Committee when he was the vice-president.
On the following day I heard Steve Jarmoc, a local farmer and ex-politician, on the radio complaining that the flooding in Enfield had caused him crop damage. The land around our house, which was perhaps two miles from his farm, was absolutely dry. Furthermore, Jarmoc mostly grew tobacco—an addictive drug that caused cancer and other ailments. In the previous few years he had converted much of his land to fields filled with solar panels. I seriously doubt that he suffered much damage, and what if he did? Every business suffered occasional setbacks.
I had a horrible bridge day on July 23. Donna Feir reported that the HBC now had 415 members2. It was 89° and sunny when I left after the conclusion of the Board of Trustees meeting. Up to 91° on I-91. By the time that I reached home it had fallen to 68°, and it was raining buckets. I was very relieved to find that there was no flooding in our basement.
August
On August 3 I discovered a document with my notes about the San Diego vacation that Sue and I took with Sue in March of 2006. In the evening I also found a paper bag with flyers and souvenirs from the same trip. I deleted the 1,000+ words that I had previously written about this adventure and started the entry, which you can read here, anew. It was rather thrilling to relive that week.
On the next day I walked five miles in the Enfield Square Mall. A strange new store, Da Money Pit, had opened. They seemed to sell sneakers, ball caps, and sweatshirts.3 The sneakers on display were wrapped in plastic, for no obvious reason that I could see. My “ghost walks” in the mall have been detailed here.
On the 5th the HBC held a memorial to honor John Willoughby. One dog and lots of people, including a surprising number of children, who were relatives or friends of John’s attended.
The next day I learned that Maria Van Der Ree, who was over ninety, had Covid-19. She recovered within a reasonable period of time.
At the HBC John Calderbank and I had a 54 percent game on August 8. That was by far our best performance up to that time. On the next day I scored 58% at the HBC with Barb Gallagher. There was no game in Simsbury because we only five pairs registered to play.
On August 9 the big news was about the devastating fire on Maui. The most destruction was in my favorite town, Lahaina, where 217 buildings destroyed or damaged. The gigantic tree that was the symbol of the town was badly damaged, but there was hope that it would recover.
Mark Oettinger.
On the same day I learned that Mark Oettinger had “resigned” as vice-president of the New England Bridge Conference. I later learned that Peter Marcus and his friends had pretty much forced him out at a meeting of the Tournament Scheduling Committee that I was unable to attend. This news saddened me greatly. I liked and respected Mark.
On August 12-13 I played in the Western Mass sectional in Great Barrington. That adventure has been described here.
On my birthday I played with the woman whom I had been mentoring. Fran Gurtman (introduced here). We did not do well. Sue bought me three shirts and some shorts from Kohl’s. Sue and I ate supper at Francesco’s in Suffield. I ordered Linguini d’Alessandro, which was chicken, sausage, peppers, mushrooms in wine sauce. I really enjoyed it.
On August 23 Sue brought cake to Eno to celebrate my birthday, but she did not arrive until just after 6:15. We had 4 tables.
On August 24 Fran and I had a 52 percent game, which was an improvement of 18 percentage points in our previous game. I made a costly mistake on the last hand.
On August 26 fifteen pairs came to the HBC for the Saturday afternoon game. We played a Swiss with 7.5 tables. It was the biggest turnout on Saturday by far since the pandemic. Peter Katz and I had a 76.1 percent game, by far my best score ever. More details can be found here.
The Ocean State Regional tournament was held August 29-September 1 in Warwick, RI. My adventures there have been cataloged here.
September
September must have been a boring month. The only notes that I recorded concerned the loss of my Costco Visa card from Citi. The details of this remarkable event have been recorded here.
The University of Michigan football team, one of the favorites for the national championship, started the year with five easy victories. They defeated East Carolina 30-3, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas 35-7, Bowling Green 31-6, Rutgers 31-7, and Nebraska 45-7.
Coach Jim Harbaugh did not participate in the first three games because he had purchased lunch4 for a prospective player. Four interim head coaches were assigned. Jesse Minter coached the first game and Sherrone Moore the second. Jay Harbaugh (Jim’s son) and Mike Hart each coached for one half in the third game. A random co-ed could have coached for all three games, and Michigan would still have won them all easily.
October
On October 3 and 4 I moved all of my programs and data files from my Lenovo desktop that was running Windows 10 to the Asus computer running Windows 11. I documented the experience here.
On October 10 I discovered that Windows did not want me to use Shuffling, the Dutch program that I had downloaded to creates pbn files. I did anyway. However, I also received an error in Dealmaster Pro. I had to reconnect the Lenovo box and run it there. This problem was fixed, but I did not record how.
I decided not to play with Alan Godes at the regional tournament in Marlborough. It turned out that he could not play on the only day that I needed a partner. I asked Ros Abel to play in the sectional in Orange, but she was not available. .
As usual, I started my preparation for lunch by boiling water for ShopRite’s store brand of chicken noodle soup. I was shocked to discover that the package contained no noodles at all. I have opened hundreds of these packages over the years, but this had never happened before.
This box in question bore the ShopRite brand, but at some point in the year the store stopped selling the product. A short time later a new brand called Bowl & Basket appeared. The price of a box containing two envelopes of soup was $.99 before the pandemic. As of October of 2024 the price had not changed, and the quality and quantity of the contents remained the same, at least apparently. I could not name another food item of any description that maintained its pre-pandemic price.
I woke Sue up at 6:30AM on October 11: She was scheduled for jury duty in Hartford. She left the house at 8:08. When she arrived she learned that her service was not needed. That evening Kathie Ferguson returned to the SBC on that same evening after a lengthy illness..
Throughout the last few months my car had repeatedly flashed the message that one of my tires was low on air. In the past this had happened once or twice a year. On those occasions I had just brought my car into Lia (without an appointment), and told them about the message. They checked all four tires, filled whichever one was low, and I drove away. The process took perhaps fifteen minutes.
On October 23 I brought it in to Lia Honda again. Because it had happened several times in the recent past, I asked the mechanic to tell me which tire was low. He reported that one of the tires needed patching and told me to sit in the waiting area. After 2.5 hours the work was completed, but the attendant told me that there was a problem with the brakes. I made an appointment for three days later to address this problem, which necessitated spending another few hours in the waiting area.
On October 27-29 the Connecticut Bridge Association held its fall sectional in Orange, CT. The details are posted here.
After only one day of rest I attended the regional tournament in Marlborough, MA. It ran from October 31-November 4. My thoughts about this event have been recorded here.
The Wolverine juggernaut continued with three more easy victories. They defeated Minnesota 52-10, Indiana 52-7, and Michigan State 49-0.
November
On November 16 I sent a recap of the attendance at the sectional in Orange. I have posted it here. The only person who responded to it was Cindy Lyall, who agreed with my assessment.
From left: Jan, the drummer, Peggy, the bass player, and Patty.
On the next evening my wife Sue talked me into attending a concert by the Patti Tuite band at the public library in Ellington. Although I was not crazy about the music, which was mostly blues, I definitely appreciated the skill of the two main musicians—Jan on the synthesizer, flute, and key-tar and Peggy on the alto sax, violin, and harmonica.The band also had a guy on bass guitar and a female drummer. The one number that I really liked was an instrumental with a complex melody that was unlike anything else that they did. Sue liked the entire performance. Patti announced the name of it, but my notes did not record it.
On November 18 I emailed to members of the Executive Committee my attendance analysis for the tournament in Marlborough. It has been posted here. Both of these reports required quite a bit of work because I no longer had access to the ACBL’s files that provided attendance information in a comprehensive fashion.
On the next day Sue and I decided not to drive up to Burlington, VT, to visit with the Corcorans on Thanksgiving. They had invited us much earlier. However, their house would be full of relatives, and we would probably be “fifth wheels.” We felt our of place the last time that we joined them.
On November 22 my Honda warned me that the battery on the fob was low. Over the next two days Sue located a suitable batter. I managed to replace the old one without much difficulty.
November 23 was Thanksgiving. Sue cooked a turkey. We ate our meals on TV trays and tried to think of something that we should be thankful for. I did not record that anything occurred to us.
A very strange thing happened in the last round of the game at the HBC on November 29: Eric Vogel and I were playing against Tom Gerchman and Lea Selig. After the bidding Tom announced that his integrity was intact because his partner Lea Selig bid 6♥, not he. He then disclosed that he had previously overheard Mike Carmiggelt talking about the hand.
I put my cards in the carrier, said “I quit”, got in my car, and drove home. Tom later sent me an email in apology. I replied, “No harm, no foul.”
That same night Ken made many strange bids at the SBC game. He invited to game knowing that we had a maximum of 24 points and only 8 trumps. I recorded that I did not see how the SBC would be able to hold any games in December. I was right. All of the games for the month were canceled.
Michigan finished its Big 10 season with four more victories to finish the regular season undefeated and ranked #3. They defeated Purdue 41-13, Penn State 24-15, Maryland 31-24, and Ohio State 30-24. Sherrone Moore was the head coach on the sidelines for the last three games because Harbaugh was suspended because of a ludicrous sign-stealing incident engineered by a rogue staff member named Connor Stalions.
December
The new month was welcomed by the first flower on the larger Christmas cactus that had been in Denise Bessette’s office. The other one displayed its first flower on the 18th.
On December 2 Michigan shut out Iowa 26-0 in the Big 10 Championship game. It was U-M’s third consecutive win in that game, and the tenth consecutive win for the team representing the East Division. Michigan, now seeded #1, was scheduled to play Alabama in the College Football Playoff semifinals in the Rose Bowl on January 1. There was some controversy because Alabama was chosen to play over undefeated Florida State despite the fact that the Tide had lost to Texas in September.
The temperature on December 15 and 16 reached the fifties. I walked five miles outside on both afternoons.
I learned on December 17 that Eric Vogel had contracted Covid. I wore a mask at bridge all week.
On December 20 the electrical connection for my cellphone’s charger stopped working. I had to plug the cable into a USB port on Asus. This was only a minor inconvenience; Asus has many ports, four of which are in front. I was astounded to learn that Sue had no recollection of my previous phone dying while I was on the 2022 cruise that has been described in detail here. We went to the Verizon store together, and the salesman showed me that the Pixel 2 I had been using was swollen in the middle. He said that it was probably dead. A little later Sue bought me a refurbished Sony Galaxy. I found this lapse of memory quite concerning.
On December 29 I received an mail from someone named Frank Wilson5 asking about downloading a zip or pdf file of Stupid Pope Tricks. I tried to reply to his reply address, fdmw@gmail.com, but it was blocked because the address was not valid. I had no idea what that was about.
On the next day I (and many others) received a shocking email from Peter Marcus that indicated that he was resigning from all his posts in the New England Bridge Conference. This reportedly had something to do with scheduling conflicts with another district”s tournament.
1. At least once in the nineties I ran more than five miles when it was over 100°. When I was in my twenties I considered no temperature to be too hot for any athletic endeavor. Boy, has that changed!
2. It was incredible to me that the HBC did not actually know how many people were officially members. Eventually, I wrote a set of programs that would allow the club to keep track of the membership—dues, contact information, and other things. The story of that system is documented here. The number of members exceeded 500 in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.
3. The store is still open in October of 2024, but in all my trips to the mall I had seen fewer than a handful of customers.
4. This infraction was widely ridiculed by Michigan fans and called Hamburgergate. It was common knowledge that many large programs arranged for players to be paid under the table. By 2023 the NCAA had ceded the rights to the names, images, and likenesses (called NIL) of the players to the players themselves. By the next year some of them were earning upwards of $1 million to play their favorite sport for a few months out of the year.
5. Of course, I immediately thought that this might be J. Frank Wilson, who, with support from the Cavaliers, in 1964 recorded the remake of Wayne Cochran’s “Last Kiss”. It made it to #2 on Billboard.
Johnston Sectional in March: In January of 2024 Abhi Dutta asked me to play with him at the Rhode Island sectional tournament scheduled for March 2-3. I could not play on Saturday because it was my wife Sue’s birthday, but I agreed to play in the Swiss on Sunday. Abhi was out of town for most of the month of February, but he contacted me late in the month to report that he had acquired teammates. In Johnston I learned that our teammates were the DiOrios, Lou and Megan. I had worked with Megan on the committee for the NABC event in Providence in 2022 (introduced here), and I had played on a team with Lou some time before that.
I was not sanguine about our chances. The partnership of Abhi and me had really recorded only one good result (described here), and that was nineteen months earlier. Our more recent games were not memorable. I also did not remember great successes recorded for either Lou or Megan. The fact that we drew #13 did not raise my hopes, although I always remind people that for Wilt Chamberlain that number was reportedly lucky 20,000 times.2
In the first round Abhi and I played against Al Votolato and someone whom I did not know. The very first hand was weird. Al’s partner opened 1♦ in the second seat; Abhi passed; Al responded 1♠; I passed, and so did Al’s partner! Abhi made the mistake of doubling, which gave Al a chance to bid 2♦, which was the final contract. I asked Al if they had an agreement that allowed his partner to pass his response. He said that he was as surprised as I was. His partner at first defended his pass, but when he understood the situation he said that he did not realize that he had passed.
In the end, even though they were an A team, and we were a B team, we defeated them 29-0, which was a “blitz” that converted to the maximum victory point score of 20. We scored at least one imp on six of the seven hands, and the seventh hand was a push.
In the second round we played another A team, Dan Jablonski and Cilla Borras. They were both very good players whom I had played against several times. I made a horrible mistake in playing a 5♣ contract that Abhi put me in. For some reason I thought that we had nine trumps, not eight. I was therefore quite confident of making the bid when I dropped Dan’s queen on the second round of trumps. A little later, however, I mistakenly led a low diamond from the board. Cilla, who was on my right, ruffed it, and I underruffed even though I had a diamond! I took the requisite eleven tricks, but I was penalized one trick for revoking. Abhi insisted that he warned me when I did it.1
This faux pas cost us 11 imps. We would have lost the match anyway, but our running total of victory points was four fewer—21 as opposed to 25. This was not all bad because we got to play a much weaker B team in the third round, and we beat them 31-0—another blitz.
In the last round before lunch we played a much better B team, Mike McDonald and Tom Floyd. We beat them by 12 imps. At the break we had amassed 56 out of a possible 80 victory points. That was good enough for second place.
I had ordered a salad for lunch. I ate about half of it as well as a bag of chips and a Diet Coke. I sat by myself. I don’t know where my teammates went.
In the fifth round we played the team that was in first place. It included Sheila Gabay and Alan Watson, who had won both sessions of the pairs game on Saturday. The foursome had blitzed both of their last two opponents. Abhi and I played against another very fine pair, Max Siline and Carrie Liu. On the first hand I made 3NT, and our Sheila and Alan had a misunderstanding in their bidding. That was enough for a ten-imp swing, but we would have won the match anyway. The final score was 30-13. Abhi and I had no negative scores at all. I was wondering if it were possible to lose with no negative scores (Yes!), and I was worried that I would find out. I had played against Sheila’s teams at least six or seven times, and I had never won before.
I thought that I played pretty well in the sixth round, but we lost by 16 points to a very good B team. It seemed to me that most of the problems were at the other table. I was most proud of the fact that two of our twelve imps came from when I passed in the fourth seat.
In the last round we played against people whom I did not know. I again passed in the fourth seat, and this time it was worth five imps. Since our margin of victory in this match was only nine imps, I was very surprised to learn that we had won the event by two victory points over both the Siline team and the team from the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC)—Tom Gerchman, Linda Starr, and Bob and Ann Hughes. I was still in a foul mood because at the very end of the last hand Abhi had trumped a trick that I would have won anyway. That mistake cost us six imps, which would have given us two additional victory points. Even so, we brought home 7.15 silver masterpoints.
I did not receive much satisfaction from this result. I had made one huge and embarrassing mistake, and Abhi had made several smaller ones. However, out teammates were very excited about winning. They even asked Tom Gerchman (of all people) to take a photo of the four of us with a cellphone. He had a great deal of difficulty with the assignment.
Was our victory a fluke? I thought so at the time, but after examine the results, I am more inclined to think that we were the best team that day with that set of cards in a fairly weak field. We played all but one of the top teams. We never played against a C team. We beat the top-seeded team decisively in our match with them. We could easily have had quite a few more victory points than we did.
I still had a ninety-minute drive ahead of me. The traffic was slow, and for the first half hour the sun was really brutal even though I had on sunglasses and pulled down the visor as low as I could get it. The high temperature that day was 67 degrees.
On the way home I stopped at Big Y in Stafford and bought a cake for Sue. I should have done it so she could have enjoyed a piece on her birthday, but this was much better than nothing.
St. Patrick’s Day Sectional in Orange, CT: Bill Segraves did a tremendous job of setting up and running this tournament, which occurred the weekend of March 15-17. I am glad that he took the job of president. I would not have had the energy to pull something like this off. The date was the best that could be arranged, but it conflicted with the first weekend of the NABC spring tournament in Louisville. So, undoubtedly some of the best players could be expected to be at that event. That date also meant that it might be difficult to find a director. Robert Neuhart from Troy, NY, was hired. I had no previous familiarity with him.
The design and promotion of this tournament was much better than what was done for the previous ones. I thought that the St. Patrick’s Day theme, which I in fact suggested, was a little overdone, but people seemed to be having fun with it. I planned on wearing on Sunday my bright green sweater that my dad bought in Ireland. Before play started Bill paraded around in a hooded green jumpsuit and a green mask. To goose the Sunday attendance the games on Sunday were designated to support the Grass Roots fund.
A decision was made to increase the masterpoint limit for the Friday and Saturday limited pairs games to 750 masterpoints, but only non-Life Masters were allowed to play. This turned out to be a good decision. The limited games, which had been a problem, were pretty well attended throughout.
I decided to play all three days. Eric Vogel agreed to play with me in the pairs games on Friday and Saturday. I had difficulty finding a suitable partner and teammates for the Sunday Swiss. I sent out a solicitation to my usual list of potential partners, but the only responses that I received were from Buz Kohn, Joan Brault, and Terry Lubman. Terry said that she was still in Florida. Buz was the first to respond positively, but he backed out shortly thereafter. So, I agreed to play with Joan. No one expressed any interest in teaming up with us. So, I sent a request to the email address for partnerships that was on the flyer. Bill replied with an email that indicated that he would find someone. He eventually assigned us to play with Ivan Smirnov from Staten Island and Joe Lanzel from Foxborough, MA. I told Ivan that I would be wearing a bright green sweater with “Ireland” on the chest.
I commuted all three days by myself. Each trip to Orange took a little over an hour, but that included my usual stop at the McDonald’s in Cromwell to purchase a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich. The price at the McD at the end of the ramp for Exit 21 charged a dime less than the one in Hartford. However, the man taking the order on Sunday entered it as “sausage biscuit, add folded egg.” The cost was almost $1 less.
I left each day at about 8:25 and arrived at 9:30. The traffic was heavier on Friday, but it did not really slow me down. A strange thing happened with my car in the mornings. I was accustomed to turning on the front window defogger on cold days. This heated up the car on Saturday, but on Sunday it blew nothing but cold air.4
The return trips were as uneventful as the morning drives, except for the Sunday evening drive. The line of cars backed up on the parkway at the exit that led to I-91 north was more than a mile long. It took me more than ninety minutes to complete that trip.
I decided to wear a mask throughout the tournament. Almost no one except Bill and Frank Blachowski wore one.
Since I arrived on Friday morning before Eric did, I got in line to buy our entry fee. For some reason the director did not allow purchasing of both sessions. I charged the first session. Eric later bought the afternoon session. There was no problem with the transactions on Friday and Saturday. However, the computer connection with the card reading device did not work on Sunday. and so everyone had to pay in cash. I was the customer for whom the malfunction first was discovered. I don’t know if the problem was ever fixed.
The first thing that I noticed about the pairs games on Friday was that Peter Marcus was in attendance and was actually playing with Bill Segraves to fill out the movement. I had seen him at many tournaments, but I had only seen him play bridge once, and that was at the HBC.
The second peculiarity was that there were no clocks to keep track of the time remaining in each round. I cannot remember ever playing in a tournament in which there were no clocks. I never heard why this was the case in Orange. Perhaps the unit has depended on the directors to bring them.
Once play began it was pretty evident that, although the attendance was good (seventeen tables), the field was not as strong as it usually was. That was definitely reflected in the results. Eric and I were in first place after six rounds, but in the last round we were passed by a C team from the HBC, John Lloyd and Donna Simpson. We still won 5.84 points. I did not think that we played particularly well.
Eric and I had two egregious bidding mistakes in the morning session, but only one of them hurt us. Eric had apparently not reviewed our card thoroughly enough.
On one hand we were on defense after I had opened 1♠. I led the ace and then the queen. Eric ruffed it. After the hand I explained that when I led ace and then queen of a suit that I had bid, it meant that I also had the king. He asked why I didn’t just lead the king after the ace. I said that if I did, he would not know that I also had the queen.
Our level of play did not diminish in the afternoon, but our results dropped off a lot. I did not circle a single hand on the scorecard. We finished above 50 percent, but we did not make the overalls, and so we did not get any points.
We actually played better on Saturday. We earned over 9.37 masterpoints over the course of two days. That was not close to Rich DeMartino’s total. He won all three pairs games in which he participated.
We might have gone over the ten-point mark if Eric had not made an uncharacteristic blunder near the end. Acting as declarer, he intended to set up a cross-ruff for the last three tricks, but he discarded the wrong card from his hand. That left him with a heart and two trumps in both hands.
A strange situation occurred on Saturday. The opponent on my right was about to declare a hand. His partner was in the act of setting down the dummy when he accidentally dropped most of his cards on the floor. I did not look, but he said that some were face-up. He said that he was not able to get down on his knees to pick them up, and therefore he called the director, who was also not very spry. I volunteered to put my lead on the table and gather together the cards, but the director insisted on doing it himself.
Eric and I bid a slam in spades after he had opened 2♣. He had hearts and spades. We decided to change our response to the 2♠ follow-up so that the relay to 2NT could be broken if responder had spade support. This eliminated the ambiguity of the sequence 2♣-22♦-2♠-2NT-32♥-4♠. Previously it could have meant signing off in spades or Kickback for hearts.
Ordering lunch was embarrassing. I only wrote the six letters of my last name, but on both occasions the result was almost unreadable.
By the way, both lunches were good. The only problem with Friday’s salad with lots of meat and cheese on Friday was that the only beverage available was a small bottle of water. The sandwich on Saturday was even meatier. This caterer also brought cans of soft drinks. There were only two Diet Cokes, but I managed to claim one. The pizza on Sunday was OK, but the pairs game was still in process when the ninety-six people playing in the Swiss went to lunch. Usually there is enough pizza for seconds, but by the time that the pairs players ate, the teams were back in combat.
Our first round was against Debbie Prince’s team. We won by seven. In the second round we were blasted by 26 imps by a very good team. Joan and I thought that we had more or less held our own, but no hands showed positive results. Our teammates failed to set a 4♠ contract that I could see no way to make. They also bid an impossible slam that got doubled. We won the third round by 13 imps over a C team.
After lunch we played Mike Heider’s team. The results on two 3NT contracts startled me. On one I went down, and they made it at the other table. On the other they made it at our table with two overtricks, but our teammates did not even make the bid. In the fifth round we faced the team from the HBC that had done well in Johnston. Joan and I played against Ann and Bob Hughes. We thought that we had done pretty well, but we were worried about one hand on which we bid 3♠ but made 4. In reality, that hand was our only positive result in an extremely painful 17-imp loss.
Halfway through the sixth round against a team that obviously was over its head I lost interest and started playing badly. Nevertheless, we won the last two matches by 21 and 5 points to finish with four wins and 70 victory points—exactly average.
Our worst hand all day was the last one. We were playing Cappelletti, the only notrump defense that Joan will play. Cindy Lyall, sitting West, opened 1NT, and Joan doubled for penalty. I had a flat hand with only one honor, a queen. Cindy ended up making 3NT for 380 points. It would have been better for them to bid and make 3NT, but at the other table Joe went down in 1NT. Since I did nothing except follow suit and discard the four spot cards in hearts that I was dealt, I have no way to know whether Joan’s defense or Joe’s declarer play was more to blame for this fiasco.
Shekhar and Shashank won the afternoon session of the 0-750 pairs! They won almost three silver points in their first day at a tournament.
The attendance at the tournament was good through the entire weekend. That proved to me that good planning, good marketing, and a good schedule are still the keys to successful attendance in the world of tournament bridge.
Summer on the Sound Sectional in Stamford, CT: The tournament was held at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church on August 9-11. No one asked me to play, and it is a very long drive for me. So, I did not attend. The attendance was good: 57 tables on Friday, 50.5 on Saturday, and 52.5 on Sunday.
I heard from Mike Heider that they ordered far too many pizzas on Sunday. He said that at least a dozen boxes of them were being given away at the end of the tournament.
Western Mass Championships in Great Barrington, MA; The annual tournament in Great Barrington, MA, began on my 76th birthday. I had played with Abhi Dutta in this event in both 2022 and 2023. Our teammates in the Sunday Swiss in those events were Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky. They also agreed to team up in 2024.
The weather forecast was for some rain on Saturday night and Sunday because of Hurricane Ernesto, which was in the Atlantic Ocean heading northeast. It was not expected to land, but locations near the ocean had really been deluged.
On Saturday morning the weather was clear. I took the Mass Pike to Lee and then drove south to GB. I stopped at the McDonald’s near the Berkshire South Regional Community Center that hosted the tournament every year. The event was being held in the gymnasium. I remembered from previous years that it was somewhat cold in there at times, and so I brought my nylon windbreaker, even though it has picked up a few bullet holes over the years.
Tables and chairs replaced the exercise equipment.
When I arrived in the gym I found a table near the back of the building and ate my sandwich while wearing my jacket. The director, Tim Hill, began selling entries a little after I arrived. By the time that I finished the sandwich the line for purchasing entries was pretty long. I had nothing better to do, and so I got in line. The entries cost $15 per session, and the credit card reader was working. I bought both entries for Saturday and let Abhi buy the Sunday entry. We started as E-W at table V5, which happened to be the same table at which I ate breakfast.
I accidentally sat in the East chair. I almost never play East. Perhaps I should have switched as soon as I noticed it.
Before the event started Mike Ramella conducted some sort of raffle. The acoustics in the gym were deplorable, and very few people were able to understand anything that he said. A woman also gave a presentation promoting some kind of show. She carried a poster about it. I couldn’t understand what she said either.
In the morning there were two sections in the open pairs and one five-table Howell in the 299er pairs. There were 21.5 pairs in the open.
The morning session was chaotic. Somehow the BridgeMates got fouled up, and the results (and player numbers) for the first few rounds were lost.
For some reason Abhi and I made games when we bid partials and slams when we bid games. Our opponents made mistake, but they always seemed to end in the right spot.
Abhi failed to take advantage of a once-in-a lifetime situation on hand #6: I opened a strong 1NT, and he had a hand with seven hearts and only four losers. After trying Stayman (because he also had four good spades), Abhi jumped to 4♥, which I passed after mulling over what in the world had possessed him. He easily made 6♥.
I could not immediately concoct a “scientific” bidding sequence that could find the slam. On Sunday morning I wrote up a better sequence that had him start with a transfer and then used cue bidding. At the end he would jump to 5♦ or 5♥ and leave the final decision to me. Because I had prime values, I would have certainly bid the slam.
I did not even check the results for the first round. I was sure that we were in the forties, which would be a miserable score. We had correctly been placed in the A strat. Most of the players in attendance had much less experience than I did.
I only enjoyed two moments. The first was when we had time after the against Debbie Prince and Janice Bazzini, whom I knew from the HBC. Debbie remarked that she could not come to the Simsbury Bridge Club games because her book club met on Wednesday evenings. I asked her if she had ever heard of John Banville. She said that she had not, but she wrote down his name. On Sunday I brought two of his books to loan her, but the two ladies did not play on Sunday.
The other good moment was also at the end of a round. Elizabeth Gompels, who lived in Cambridge, whom Abhi knew much better than I did, thanked me for all that I had done for bridge in New England. I told her that I no long did the emails or website. I also told her that all my pages on the website had been deleted. She was duly sympathetic to my frustration.
The sandwiches at lunch were tiny but tasty. I had tuna. They also provided chips, soda, and dessert. The previous lunches that I had had at this tournament were not to my liking, and I do not have high standards.
The afternoon session was much better. The only embarrassment was when Abhi forgot what defense we were playing against a weak 1NT opening. The opponents, Al Votolato and Grace Charron, asked what Abhi’s double meant. I said that he had a strong hand with at least fourteen points. Actually, he had a long suit and a mediocre hand.
The 299er pairs game had too few participants. Those people had to play in the open pairs, which had 24 tables in two sections. We placed fourth in our section, which earned us .84 masterpoints.
The drive back to Enfield was uneventful. Sue heated up some leftover pork chops. We watched Person of Interest and Raising Hope together.
Patty Tucker and Robert Minter have published books on Kickback.
The weather was still dry when I left on Sunday morning. I arrived at the gym and almost immediately saw Judy Hyde, with whom I planned to play in the regional tournament in Warwick a few weeks later. We sat together for a few minutes. I briefly explained the Minorwood, Redwood, and Kickback5 versions of Roman Key Card Blackwood to her. She then had to rush off to talk with her partner for that day, Philippe Galaski.
When Abhi arrived, I went over Hand #6 (above) with him as well as two somewhat obscure variations on the Stayman convention.
In the first round we faced Mike Ramella’s team. I thought that we had won easily, but I did not realize that Abhi had been conservative with an eight-card club suit, which caused us to miss another game. In addition, our teammates had a serious bidding misunderstanding. We ended up losing by four IMPs. We then defeated two C-strat teams, but only by nine IMPs and 1 IMP respectively.
The lunch was rather strange. They only allowed people to take one piece of pizza, and they only offered two choices—vegetarian and pepperoni. Chips, soda, and home-made desserts were available. I ordinarily avoided dessert, but on this occasion I ate two cookies because of the limit on pizza.
Our team ate together. One of the topics of conversation was obsession with results. Jim related how one of his previous teammates, Bunny Kliman, used to run (I doubt that!) around announcing how many matchpoints the team had won by multiplying the number of victories times the match award. I insisted that I did not even want to know the value of the match award because it distracted from the actual goal, which was always to finish high in the overall results.
Jim and Abhi went somewhere, which provided me with a chance to chat with Mike. He was wearing his famous tee shirt, which was emblazoned with a drawing of a dog and the words “In dog years I’m dead.” He had worn this to every Sunday Swiss event for many years, but the lettering was not very faded. When I asked him if the one he was wearing was the original, he said it was the second one. I then inquired if he washed it. He answered in the affirmative, and then quickly corrected his answer to “My wife washes it.”
I responded, “You really mean that she tells you that she washes it. She probably just throws it in the dryer, folds it, and gives it to you.”
That led to a discussion of getting old. I told him about my baseball cap with the text “It’s weird being the same age as old people.” I then mentioned my favorite saying was “Women my age are very old.” That always got a reaction.
A big smile appeared on his face as he said, “It’s true.” I had not seen that smile for some time. He had been experiencing health problems. They definitely affected his walking and his balance, and I suspected that they also affected his bridge game. I was very glad to see him smile.
In the first round after lunch we lost by thirteen IMPs to a B team that Abhi and I did not think was very good. The scores that Mike and Jim produced were discouragingly bad. At that point we were in tenth place overall, which was terrible for an A team. Jim said to me privately “Remember what you said about the match awards.”
As it turned out, losing that round was a blessing in disguise. The all-star team captained by Judy Hyde had been mowing down every opponent. The team that we lost to in the fourth round was one of their victims in the afternoon. Our low standing meant never had to play them. At the end Judy’s team had the remarkable total of 122 victory points out of a possible 140.
The back side of our scoresheet showed us scoring a six-IMP victory over an A team followed by a resounding twenty-five point win over a B team. That gave us a total of 70 victory points after six rounds, which tied us with the team from the Hartford Bridge Club—Tom Gerchman, Ben Levine, and Ken and Lori Leopold. We played them in the final round. Abhi and I played against Tom and Ben.
As luck would have it, the match came down to the last hand. Ben opened the bidding with 2♠, a preemptive bid that showed a relatively weak hand with six spades. After Abhi passed, Tm made the unusual bid of 4♥. I passed. Ben thought for a while and then bid 4♠. After Abhi passed, Tom bid 5♥, and that was the final contract.
When I led the ♣Q, Tom scoffed and said to Ben, “I know that you are void; that is why I jumped to 4♥ to show you I had a self sufficient hand.” He was obviously disgusted that he was now forced to take eleven tricks. It was generally considered a good idea for a person who made a preemptive bid to refrain from bidding thereafter.
In fact, Ben had two hearts, six spades headed by the AKQ, two diamonds, and three clubs. Tom called for a low club. Abhi and Tom also played low clubs. So, I surprisingly won the trick. I wondered why both Abhi and Tom let me win it. Abhi’s was the ♣6. I could see every club lower than the 6. We were playing standard carding. His signal clearly indicated that he did NOT want me to lead another club. Unfortunately, I could not figure out what he did want me to lead. I settled for a trump. I was afraid that a switch to diamonds would finesse give declarer a free trick.
I learned later that Abhi had both the ace and king of clubs, but his only other club was the 6. He was quite upset with me for not continuing clubs. He asked, “What possible reason could there be for not continuing clubs?” I reminded him that he clearly signaled that he did not want me to continue, and at trick one in such a weird auction I did not know what to do. I did not mention it, but he obviously should have overtaken my queen, and led clubs himself. Evidently this never occurred to him.
So, long story short. Tom took his eleven tricks. Abhi was beside himself.
Short story a little longer: At the other table the bidding was the same, except that Mike passed 4♥, and Ken doubled. Lori, holding my hand, was on lead. She led a spade. This allowed Jim to take twelve tricks. We won eight IMPs on that hand and won the match by six.
This vaulted us into third place overall, which was precisely the same result, earned in an eerily similar fashion, as what occurred the previous year (described here).
The weather both days featured pleasant temperatures, but the sun was never visible because of clouds and particulates that had been generated by forest fires in Canada.
The drive home after winning the last round of a Swiss is almost always pleasant. This was no exception. However, just before I reached Westfield, MA, the traffic in both lanes slowed down to only 35 mph, which is less than half the usual pace. As I got closer to I-91, the traffic thinned a little, but it began raining. By the time that I reached Springfield, it had reached the level of a downpour. The last twenty minutes of the trip was not pleasant. It was well before sunset, but the sky was dark enough, and the rain was heavy enough to make it somewhat dangerous.
Oxford received a once-in-a-thousand-years rainfall.
Sue had spent the day at the Davis family reunion. She heated up some leftovers for both of us. I ate mine while watching Reacher and Endeavour. She made a plate for herself, but she was so tired that she fell asleep in her chair without touching her food.
I later learned that southern Connecticut had experienced severe storms all day long on Sunday. Oxford received more than sixteen inches of rain in one day!
Fall Sectional in Johnston, RI: At some point in August Abhi asked me too play with him at the sectional tournament in Johnston, RI, scheduled for September 21-22. He was looking for a partner for Saturday and for teammates on Sunday. Knowing that I would be missing on two consecutive occasions my standing game with Peter Katz at the HBC, I declined the invitation for Saturday. I asked a new partner, John Lloyd (introduced here), to play with me on Sunday. We worked out a convention card and arranged to meet at 8am at the Park & Ride at Exit 70 on I-84. He would be coming from Avon, CT. I would drive down Route 32 from Stafford.
John had recently purchased a white Audi that he was quite proud of. So, he drove from the parking lot to Johnston. As expected on a Sunday morning, the drive was quite uneventful. Since the rising sun was obscured by clouds, we were not bothered by the usual blinding rays on the predominantly eastbound journey. We talked about a few things with which John had little experience, such as defending against weak 1NT bidding and strong club systems.
Vipin Mayar.
When we arrived at the Johnston Senior Center at a little before 9am, I was surprised to see relatively few cars in the parking lot. In fact, only a dozen teams participated in the event. That was 20 percent fewer than the number in the March sectional described above.
Abhi arrived a little after we did. He introduced us to his partner, Vipin Mayar, who had about 170 masterpoints. So, I had more masterpoints than the rest of the team combined. We were in the B stratum, which contained five teams.
We played eight rounds of six boards each. I would have preferred to play six rounds of eight boards. It probably would have gone a little faster and minimized the number of mismatches in the late rounds.
We narrowly lost our first match to another B team from Rhode Island. We then won a close match against a team of HBC players, the Leopolds, Rob Stillman, and Ronit Shoham. It would not have been close except for the fact that Abhi somehow went down three in a 5♥ contract whereas John and I defeated Ken by only one trick in 6♥. We then won two close matches against a B team and a C team. So, at lunch we were 3-1 with 42 victory points.
I can’t comment on the lunches that they sold. John and I both brought sandwiches.
We won our fifth match against the first A team that we had faced. John and I played against Sheila Gabay and Alan Watson. After we compared scores, I found it incredible that Abhi and I had defeated Sheila in both matches in 2024. I had played against her many times in Swiss matches in the previous fifteen years with absolutely no success.
In the last three rounds we were beaten badly by two other A teams, and we defeated a C team. We won five matches, but our total of only 73 victory points kept us out of the overalls. I found the afternoon session to be very tedious. I played one partial against Sheila’s team, no hands in round 6 and 8, the two rounds that we lost badly. I called such situations in which you feel powerless “playing D&D”—defense and dummy.
The drive home was not bad. My navigating instructions were basically all “Keep to the right.” I enjoyed being with John. He is serious about bridge, and he was a pretty good partner. He forgot a couple of conventions, which caused a few embarrassing moments. He asked me later for advice on how he could improve his ability to spot the situations in which they might occur. This is what I wrote to him:
One key to remembering might be to do it earlier. When you put down a pass card, and your partner has not bid yet, try to categorize your hand as garbage, possibly supporting, or invitational. Then look at your major suits and make a plan as to how you might support. Since one new convention, Drury, is part of that support process, this will allow you to put it into your memory process more often.
When you open a minor you would prefer to end up in NT or a suit. Plan ahead. If partner bids a major he is showing four pieces. If you have four, you are set. However, if you have three pieces you should immediately think about the two tools for finding a 5-3 fit. You can tell partner about your three with a support double or redouble. Partner can tell you about his five with new minor forcing. If partner does not bid a major, then you need to determine whether you should end up in NT or a minor. These require a different set of tools.
Memory improves with repetition, but the repetition need not come under fire. If you plan ahead for potential fits, you activate the right memories without necessarily deploying them.
I used Bridge Baron to learn new conventions. It provided a large number of samples or nearly every convention imaginable. Sometimes the convention was appropriate. Sometimes it wasn’t. Unfortunately, my copy disappeared at some point.
October Sectional in Orange: The CBA’s final sectional of the year was held in Orange on the weekend of October 25-27. Eric agreed to play with me in the Open Pairs, but I was unable to find a partner for the Swiss on Sunday even though two different pairs contacted me about teaming up with them. I had to decline, of course.
The tournament was both very well organized, and the attendance reflected the effort. Bill Segraves, Cornelia Guest, and others did a very good job.
At the beginning of the tournament I was in a terrible mood. I had received a very strange email from Bill on the previous Saturday:
I just stumbled upon your blog and write to express my concern about two aspects of this:
1) It would have been my thinking that CBA board members engaging in communication while acting in that capacity have a reasonable expectation that their communication is not all for public display and consumption. If that is not something you can accept and act on, then I need to bring it up to the board for discussion right away.
2) In your blog, you are presenting a particular viewpoint on various things, but it is not the only viewpoint. I don’t think you even meant to have caused hurt by some of your comments and omissions, but you have.
Of course, I did not agree that people had such an expectation, particularly when they used “reply all”. I certainly did not intend to “cause hurt”. I replied as follows:
I have never purposely done anything hurtful to anyone in my adult life. Prior to Covid there was practically no communication on the Internet among members of the CBA. If there are boundaries about this, I am unaware of them.
Let me know what you want removed. I will tend to it. I know of no one who reads my blogs regularly. I have a hard time believing that people do not want me to express my opinions. I have written over one million words in blog entries. Someone is bound to take issue with some of them.
I am very unhappy with life. I have no family or pets. The only things that I have left are bridge and writing. I already concluded that people were actively trying to take the former away from me. I am very reluctant to accept censorship about the latter.
He wanted to talk on the telephone about the situation. It was very strange and awkward conversation. He refused to provide details. He only said that he would censor himself in future communications with me. This has been my practice for thirty years; it surprised me that he would only start at that point.
On Tuesday I had learned that Peter Marcus had sent a “scathing” email to Donna Feir complaining about the HBC’s supposed supporting of my opinions or activities. She offered to let me see it, but I declined. She did show it to Eric, who was surprised, to say the least.
I inferred that he had been “hurt” by my blog entry on the ridiculous Tonto scandal. I took down the entry. I was tired of fighting. I have never been combative. When I told Bill on Friday that I had done this, he asked me if I had taken care of the “phone numbers”. I had no idea of what he was referring to. He explained that some of the photos of the “partnerships” had phone numbers on them. I should have asked for more details, but he was quite busy.
On that same day I received an email from Carolyn Weiser, the Secretary of the New England Bridge Conference, asking me to remove phone numbers and “addresses” in my blog entries. I went to several of the entries concerning my partnerships over the years, but I could find no way to display addresses or phone numbers with regard to the numerous photos.
On Saturday Bill specified that the photos were in the entry concerning the Pro-Am game (posted here) in Nashua. I discovered that two 300-pixel photos contained quite small and faint phone numbers and email addresses on index cards or Sue’s notes. I could not make out any of them when I looked at the screen, but perhaps someone could have blown the image up and enhanced the contrast. I deleted the photos and slightly modified the text. I sent an email to Carolyn saying that I had done so.
The bridge at this tournament was not memorable for me. It seemed as if our opponents were making mistakes, but Eric and I failed to bid games when we should have. We were a little below 50 percent in all four sessions. It was an extreme embarrassment.
My only strong memory is of the first round of the second day. On two consecutive hands I had no aces and no face-cards. On the third one I had only one king.
As I said, the attendance was pretty good. The open games on Friday drew 33.5 tables. The limited games had 15.5. The numbers on Saturday were 36 and 21.5. The two-session Swiss on Sunday had 23 tables, and the limited game in the morning had four.
This is still somewhat short of 2019’s results: Friday open 39; limited 27. Saturday open 38.5; limited 17. Sunday open Swiss 26; limited 6. It should be noted that the limited games in 2019 were for 299ers. The limited games for 2024 were for 499ers. Prior to Covid the CBA board never considered changing the top level of the limited game.
1. Abhi said that he warned me, and I have no reason to doubt that he did. However, if I were the dummy, and my partner did what I did, I would have announced, “Wait a minute. Are you sure that you did not have any diamonds? You underruffed!” I take great pride the fact that none of my partners has revoked in more than fifteen years.
2. In his 1991 book, A View From Above, Wilt claimed to have slept with 20,000 different women during his life.
3. In the period after the pandemic I have had trouble getting teammates from the HBC. Perhaps the problem is the timing. Some arrangements are made many months in advance; many are made at the very last minute. My efforts seem to fall in the middle.
4. I brought the car into Lia, my dealership, on Friday, March 22. They gave me a lift home in their shuttle. I had only been there a minute when they called to tell me that the heater was working perfectly. I had tried it on Tuesday and Wednesday without success. There must be more to this story.
5. Roman Key Card Blackwood asks for the number of aces plus the king of trump. The bid that starts the convention is always 4NT. Redwood and Minorwood change the first bid if the trump suit is a minor. Minorwood uses four of the trump suit, Redwood uses one suit higher. Kickback uses one suit higher than the trump suit for all trump suits.
7. The fall sectional was traditionally held at various sites in the Hartford area. Since Covid-19 no appropriate site seemed to be available there. In 2072 Carole Amaio contacted the Portuguese Club in Newington. They were supposedly remodeling their facility. However, they stopped returning her telephone calls.
8. I was disabused in the the early nineties of the notion that my electronic communications were in any way private when dealing with Sheree Marlow Wicklund during the early days of the installation of the AdDept system (chronicled here). Sheree was our liaison, which I thought that she would act to help us keep the users happy. Instead, she forwarded all of my communications to all of the managers of areas that would be using the system. Some of my replies criticized some manager’s responses as out of bounds. This did not go over well.
By the end of 2023 I was thoroughly disgusted with the state of affairs in the district. The new president, Susan Miguel, and vice-president, Denise Bahosh, had ideas about running the district that were drastically different from the ones that Bob Bertoni and the people who had called the shots prior to the pandemic had promulgated. The new people insisted that every tournament should have a party atmosphere. They also seemed to think that the only way to induce new players to attend was to bribe them.
The final tournament of 2023 in Marlborough, MA (described here) included a meeting of the Executive Committee. One of the last things discussed was how to attract people to the evening games. In the closing minutes I suggested trying a Pro-Am pairs game in which each pair must have at least one non-Life Master. I remembered that we had attracted two sections of players to such an event before the pandemic. Susan asked if I would agree to tun it. Thinking that she meant at the next tournament in February in Southbridge and that I would be able to market it the way that I wanted, I agreed. The complete story of the 2024 Pro-Am is posted here.
Playbook NLM Regional in Mansfield, MA
The first event of 2024 sponsored by District 25 was called the Playbook NLM Regional. It ran from Tuesday through Friday, February 6-9. The site was the enVision Hotel and Conference Center in Mansfield, MA., that was formerly a Holiday Inn. The Harvest Regionals had been held there for a few years before the pandemic. The all-weekday schedule was, as I recall, devised because the hotel was not available on weekends. In late 2029 the Executive Committee, of which I was a member, held an email vote whether the Tournament Scheduling Committee, run by Denise and Susan after Mark Oettinger was forced out, should continue to “investigate the feasibility” of a gathering that included an open sectional and a limited regional for non-Life Masters with less than 750 masterpoints. The event was placed on the calendar without a subsequent vote.So much for democracy in D25.
The Gold Rush events drew nine or ten tables per day. The sectional drew more than twice as many people, but the five-day event drew approximately the same number per day as the sectional in Watertown, MA, in February 2023. Neither my wife Sue nor I attended. The tournament broke even financially.
The Executive Committee met on Thursday evening. I attended via Zoom. As usual for the previous three years I went away both disgusted and frustrated. The only good news that I heard was that Joe Brouillard had somehow been able to report that the district had over $147,000 in liquid assets. The next tournament would be a five-day (April 17-21) affair in the Wellsworth Hotel in Southbridge, MA. This hotel was once headquarters for American Optical Company and served as the previous site for tournaments under a different name.
For some reason the Executive Committee did not meet in Southbridge, but there was a Zoom meeting on April 2. Among other things this virtual gathering revealed the incredible news that New England will probably never again be allowed to host an NABC. That meant that the district now had roughly $150,000 in liquid assets and no fixed expenses whatever!
My overall reaction to the meeting was uniformly negative. We talked about everything but tournaments. The district’s leadership seemed to be getting distracted by all kinds of extraneous stuff from the role of running good tournaments for our players. I let off steam with a long email to CBA president, Bill Segraves.
I am so exasperated with the attitudes of the people on the Executive Committee that I cannot sleep. I think that I must resign for my own mental health. My wife was subjected to an hour or so of ranting after this painful 2.5 hour meeting. If I had my way, the word “fabulous” would be removed from the dictionary. I am so sick of hearing how fabulous and fun everything is in an activity that I see as falling apart.
Prior to Covid I played every day in nearly every regional. Up until 2016 D25 ran six regional tournaments, one hybrid event for I/N called the Rainbow weekend, and face-to-face qualifying events in both the NAP and GNT. Here it is April, and the only open event we have held since the crappy Halloween tournament was a sectional. The only thing scheduled before June is a “right-sized” tournament in Southbridge that has been (in my opinion) poorly promoted.
Bob Bertoni, our former District Director who died in 2021, implemented the philosophy of holding outstanding tournaments through a combination of good schedules, good sites, and good marketing. Since his demise we have lost our way. In my opinion the purpose of the NEBC should be to present as many good events as possible. Online events do not qualify for many reasons. As I have written before, the online game resembles bridge in some ways, but it is not bridge any more than softball is the same game as baseball. In fact the online game is, I am quite convinced, rapidly destroying the game that I and thousands of others loved before the pandemic.
I voted against moving the GNT and NAP to online in 2021, but no one else on the ExComm did. The decision was called a no-brainer by the acting District Director. I played in one online GNT qualifier and absolutely hated it. Now we learn that we are having a difficult time attracting players to the online qualifiers, and, even though the president admitted that “the bloom is off the rose”, the best that the ExComm can do is put together a subcommittee to come up with a suggestion. To me the solution is obvious. Bring back the Rainbow Weekend (or its successor, the Gold Mine) for the Flight C GNT and hold the others at tournaments. No one even mentioned this as a possibility. Maybe we would lose a little money. So be it. The context of all of this is that we have the incredible sum of $137,000 available, and it is “99% certain” that we will be deprived of the opportunity to use it for an NABC event in New England.
To me nearly every bit of the discussion at the meeting was away from the two critical topics — online bridge and really good tournaments. Maybe we cannot do much about the ACBL’s pact with the online devil, which will apparently be expanded, not eliminated. I cannot brook the way that the Executive Committee management now seems to be focused on so many distractions from its primary purpose of putting on good tournaments. We do not need committees and brainstorming sessions to find out how to do this. Good tournaments have good sites, good schedules, and good promotion. Maybe we will lose money if we go back to this formula, but if we put on really good tournaments, I suspect that the world will come to them. If I am wrong, then at least we went down trying to do what we were supposed to do.
On another subject: The CBA board needs to be notified immediately about the massive increase in the STaC charge. I don’t think that many board members will want to accept such a large increase in the amount the CBA spends on the few clubs who run these games. Certainly not Cindy. As I said, if the HBC has to pay the table fees, I think that it might no longer participate in the STaCs, at least in the open games.
Your proposal to give scholarships to people organizing bridge clubs in college may be a good idea, but where is the evidence that there would be a lasting effect? From what I heard, as soon as the enthusiastic organizer leaves, the program generally dissolves. That is what always seemed to happen in the world of intercollegiate debate with which I am rather familiar. I don’t have any evidence about bridge clubs, but it seems to me that if we are to invest in college bridge, the money might be better spent in subsidizing the clubs themselves rather than the charismatic leaders. Also, I think that it makes more sense for this to be proposed to the ACBL educational fund rather than the NEBC, the mandate of which is to put on tournaments.
I am serious about all of this. I am tired of being the lonely vox clamantis in deserto. I cannot stand what has happened to bridge in New England during the last few years. Maybe I should just spend my efforts trying to help the Hartford Bridge Club survive. The perspective of the people there seem to accord better with my world view.
Thanks for listening.
Bill responded to my email. We exchanged views on a few of the things that I mentioned.
Spectacle Regional in Southbridge, MA
A five-day regional was scheduled for Southbridge, MA, on April 17-21 (Wednesday-Sunday). I decided to play for three days starting on Thursday. On Thursday my partner in the Open Swiss was Abhi Dutta. On Friday I played with Eric Vogel in the 0-4,000 knockout, a two-day event. Our teammates were Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider. I commuted all three days. My wife Sue did not attend.
My experience with lunches in Southbridge had not been positive. I therefore made myself a sandwich before leaving on Thursday. I also brought a package of diced peaches and a bag of potato chips. On my way to Southbridge I made my usual stop at McDonald’s in West Stafford for my usual sandwich. It was very slow, expensive, and they added erroneously cheese to my sausage biscuit with egg, thereby ruining McD’s best sandwich. I resolved to try a different approach to breakfast on Friday.
I located my teammates. Mike and Jim played North-South. We lost our first round by 19 points. The second round was even worse, a by 21 point shellacking by Michael and Ulla Sattinger’s team. One of the swings was our teammates’ fault. On the other one I opened 1♥. Abhi raised. I had twelve points that consisted of three kings and three jacks. We were vulnerable, and so I did not want to pass up a potential game. However, when I counted my losers, I was astounded at the result—9! I passed and then took eleven tricks. Michael must have been more aggressive. They bid the game. He was right, but Losing Trick Count, which I always consult in non-competitive auctions when we have a fit in a suit, had never let me down so dramatically.
So, we were assigned to the second three-way. We won both of those rounds, one by seven and one by one. At lunch I ate my sandwich and some of the chips that I had brought. I bought a can of Diet Pepsi for $3. I did not eat my peaches because I forgot to bring a spoon. I put them back in my cold pack.
After lunch we won the fifth round by 14. We should have won the sixth round, too, but Abhi made a lead-directing double that diverted me from leading correctly after I took my only defensive trick. We won the final round by only two imps, and we needed an eleven-imp swing on the last hand to achieve it. One of our teammates’ opponents got mixed up and bid an impossible slam. They say that it is better to be lucky than good.
It seemed as if we had been playing badly, and I did not think that we had played any really good opponents. Nevertheless, we somehow ended up third in the Y strat and won 3.93 gold points even though our score of 63 victory points was 10 percent less than average.
On Friday morning I varied my routine slightly. I stopped at the McDonald’s in Scitico. The sandwich was very good and no more expensive, and the service was excellent. I also stopped at Big Y and bought a chicken Caesar wrap for lunch. I had also brought chips and the unopened container of peaches.
Eric was my partner for the Swiss that determined the four qualifiers for Saturday’s knockout. Fifteen teams competed in the 0-4,000 flight and eight in the top flight. In the old days our flight would have been split into three five-team brackets or at least an eight- and a seven-. They did not do it that way in Southbridge.
We won our first match by 17. We then lost to John Lloyd’s team by 5 because out teammates failed to bid a routine notrump game. We also lost the the third round when Eric did not look for slam after I opened 1NT. We would have lost that round anyway due to errors at the other table. We also lost the fourth round to Eli Jolley’s team. He and Judy McNutt had been our teammates in Marlboro in 2023. So, at the lunch break, which we ate with our tails between our legs, we were 1-3 and in twelfth place out of fifteen. We had almost no chance of qualifying.
At lunch Susan Miguel made a peculiar announcement. She said that there were actually two brackets hidden in the 0-4,000 Swiss. A total of eight teams, not four, would qualify. This certainly sounded illegal to me. Who ever heard of changing the rules at the halfway point of an event? Susan characterized it as “exciting news.”
In any case it did not help us. With more than 9,000 points we were surely in the top group. We would still need to pass eight teams in the three rounds after lunch. It seemed hopeless, but in actual fact we did better than that. We faced three teams that were in the lower “bracket”, and we defeated them by 19, 6 (Abhi’s team), and 19 imps. That brought our total victory points to 77.99. I did not think that that would be enough to qualify, but in fact only three teams had more, and one of them was in the lower bracket.
Tim Hill, the director, cut a deck of cards to determine the matches in the semifinals. We drew the Sattingers, who were the top seed. That was fine with me.
On Saturday morning I repeated the routine that I had established on Friday. This time I remembered to bring a spoon so that I could eat my peaches. I also bought a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke at Big Y.
Writing about the semifinal is very painful. Mike and Jim played against the Sattingers. We played against Lew and Linda Millenbach, who were friends of the Sattingers. Both couples lived in the Albany area. In our room it was a very friendly match, although Linda upbraided Lew several times for not following their conventions.
Eric and I played very well in the first set. On the very first hand he bid and made a slam that netted us 13 imps. Our lead at the break was 14.
I had great cards at the beginning of the second set, and I made the most of them. In the first five boards I bid and made two slams. They were also bid and made by Michael S. in the other room. However, on the sixth board Eric made the inexplicable play of ducking the setting trick in a game contract. That exactly erased the 12 imps that we had gained on the first and fourth hands. We lost 11 more on two hands in the second group of six, but we still had a three-imp lead in the match going into the very last hand, on which the Millenbachs made an overtrick on a strictly routine game contract that somehow Mike and Jim failed to find. We lost by four. I was absolutely crushed. I could not possibly have played any better, and Eric was also at the top of his game in the second set except for that one play.
The consolation match was against Richard Underwood and Joanne Schlang, whom I had never previously met. They lived in Voorheesville, NY, which is west of Albany. I was wearing the Michigan sweatshirt that I bought on Etsy.
Joanne announced that she had attended U-M between 1966 and 1970. I responded, “So did I.” She then told how she had been the absolutely last freshman admitted in 1966. I had nothing to add to that story. When they asked me what I studied, I admitted to “not much of anything.” That was the truth. She announced that she never attended a U-M football game. I told the story of how I only missed the very last one, one of the greatest victories in Michigan history, the upset of the team from Ohio State that had not lost in two years.
I got terrible cards for the entire match. I kept my attention up, but the disappointing results from the other room outweighed the mistakes made by our opponents, and—once again!—Eric and I lost both head-to-head matches in a knockout in Southbridge. Eric told me that he did not want to play with Mike and Jim any more (but he changed his mind later).
I felt like quitting bridge. If we did not play with Mike and Jim, with whom would we play? I had experienced great difficulty in finding partners and teammates since the pandemic. I was in a miserable mood for the entire drive home.
Sue went to a movie somewhere in southern Connecticut on Saturday evening. I bought a bag of fried chicken at Big Y and devoured a thigh and two legs while I watched Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks (an unpleasant experience). The chicken must have been under the heat lamp all day. It was not very good.
Granite State Regional in Nashua, NH
I could find no one who wished to play with me in the regional held in Nashua, NH, June 11-16. A few weeks before the tournament I asked Sally Kirtley, the D25 Tournament Manager, if she would be able to play. She said that she could certainly play on Saturday. I agreed to that and filled out Google forms for the other five days to indicate that I needed partners. Denise set me up with a man named Steve Banwarth, a resident of Nashua, for Wednesday. He only had 1716 points, which meant that he would have been better off with a partner who could play in the so-called Gold Rush Graduate (up to 2250 masterpoints) events, but our styles seemed quite compatible. We not only agreed to play on Wednesday, but on Thursday and Friday as well, assuming that everything went well on Wednesday.
My wife Sue came with me to Nashua, but she did not arrange for any partners. She exhibited a rather foul demeanor before and during most of the trip. Part of her attitude was attributable to her frustration about the Pro-Am, which has been documented in another entry.
Sue had a dental appointment on Tuesday, June 11. When that was over we packed up1 and left for Nashua at about 4 p.m. The drive was devoid of the horrendous delays that often occurred on I-495. Google Maps advised us to go through Worcester on I-290. We also evaded the interchange between I-495 and Route 3 by going through side streets in Westford, MA.
When we arrived at the Sheraton Nashua I dropped off all of our luggage at the hotel’s door. I then circled around and parked my Honda in the handicapped space closest to the main door. Meanwhile Sue went inside the hotel to acquire a luggage cart. We needed to check in together because, although I had made the reservation using my Schwab American Express card, the paperwork was for some reason associated with Sue’s Marriott account.
After we had gotten settled in to room #361, we dined (at my suggestion) at the Mexican restaurant that I had visited while participating in a tournament before the pandemic. It took us only a few minutes to arrive at La Hacienda del Rio on the Daniel Webster Highway.
I ordered a combo plate that contained a beef taco and a beef burrito. I washed them down with a margarita. I forgot to tell the waitress that I wanted the frozen version of my beverage, but otherwise I really enjoyed the meal. The service was good, everything was tasty, and the price was reasonable.
As usual, Sue ordered much more than she could eat. This time it was three flautas. Two were chicken and one pork. She complained that she could barely tell the difference between the two. She also had a margarita. That surprised me because she almost never drinks any more.
Our room was almost as far away from the elevators as possible. We were also on the opposite end of the building from the playing area, and so the stairs were not an option. Sue called the front desk and asked if we could move to a closer room. The staff eventually offered room #324, which was within a few yards of the elevator. However, by that time Sue had unpacked. I did not care one way or the other, but Sue had no energy left for the task of repacking and moving.
The hotel had been a Radisson on my previous visits. Now it had reverted to its original branding as a Sheraton, which had been purchased by Marriott International in 2016. We noted four significant problems with the rooms:
There were no microwaves outside of the lobby.
The refrigerators were tiny and difficult to open.
Getting in and out of the shower was difficult and dangerous for septuagenarians like us. Worst of all, the closet was in the bathroom.
This bizarre arrangement disrupted the normal protocol that Sue and I have used in hotels for years. It inconvenienced both of us.
I slept pretty well on Tuesday night. At one point I was awakened by the cacophony produced by the blower on the air conditioner, Sue’s oxygen unit, the CPAP machine, and the television set that she had left on. I located my earplugs and was able to get back to sleep within an hour or so.
I spent the hour before game time at a table near the partnership table in order to interact with people who wanted to sign up for the Pro-Am game on Friday evening. Only two signs were on the table at which I sat. One advertised signing up for the Bracketed Pairs (not possible yet); the other incorrectly announced the date of the Board of Delegates meeting as Saturday. There was no signage about the Pro-Am game.
Sue never arrived until after the game had started.
I sat at the table from 9 until 10 every morning. Eventually a very nice sign was affixed to the mirror behind the table at which I sat. A few Pros told me that they would play “if I needed them.” I matched one or two up with Ams who had contacted me directly or through someone else.
Steve appeared at the table at about 9:40. I called Petko Petkov, the only person for whom there was a card at the partnership table indicating a desire for teammates for Wednesday’s Open Swiss. It happened that he was just entering the building. He called me back, and Steve and I ended up teaming up with him and Bunny Brogdon after Petko verified that we would be a C team. Petko and Bunny had driven down together from Maine. We bought the entry and took our seats for the first round.
Our first opponents were another C team. We beat them by 20 imps. I suppressed my excitement. Sometimes it is not a good idea for a C team to win its first match easily. We were forced to play the team captained by Ethan Wood. Steve and I faced Adam Grossack and a client. Evidently the North-South pair at the other table made some reckless bids that Petko doubled. At our table we had a misunderstanding on one hand. I opened 1♦. They bid 2♦, which showed hearts and spades. Steve bid 2♠. We were playing Unusual over Unusual. We had not talked about the details, but the commonly used meaning of that bid was that he had at least invitational values and diamond support. Since I had seven diamonds headed by the AKJ, I jumped to 5♦. The client bid 5♥ and went down four. Steve actually had five spades and only one diamond. Adam called the director, Bob Neuhart, but he let the result stand. We won the match by seven imps.
The third match was the low point of the morning. We lost by two imps to a C team captained by Ann Johnson. I teamed up with her and her partner, Chris Pettingell, in the bracketed pairs game on Sunday. The margin was all on one hand on in which we defeated 3♥ by three, but Ann and Chris made 3NT. Either Steve or I should have doubled. If we had, we would have won by seven or eight imps.
The highlight of the whole event (in fact, the whole tournament) was the fourth round. We defeated Tom Gerchman’s team, which included Linda Starr and Bob and Ann Hughes. At the lunch break we were in second place, one victory point behind Ethan Wood’s team.
One of the best parts of playing in teams games is that occasionally your team finishes early, and there is time for conversation. I had given my calling cards to the other players. During a break Steve asked me what the designation “papal scholar” on my card meant. I bragged that I knew a lot about the popes—all of them. He disclosed that his first name was actually Cletus. He wondered if I knew anything about one of the very early popes, whose name was Cletus. I explained that Cletus had been removed from the list of popes at some point in the twentieth century. Apparently he and Anacletus, who for centuries had been listed after Clement I, were actually the same person. The current list showed Anacletus as the third pope after Peter and Linus. I wrote about this in Chapter 1 of Stupid Pope Tricks.
Then Petko made the mistake of asking how I got interested in Popology. I explained how I had listened to A.J. Jacobs talking on the radio about the famous trial of Pope Formosus (as I have related in this entry). Petko was rather familiar with the history of Eastern Europe. He verified that Prince Boris of Bulgaria tried to determine whether the Greek or Roman flavor of Christianity would best suit his country.
At lunch I bought a so-called Caesar salad (no anchovies) and a Diet Pepsi. I paid for both, but I left my can of soda on the counter. I went back after finishing the salad, and the man running the cashless cash register handed me the Diet Pepsi. The salad was edible, but the price was obscene. From my perspective it fulfilled the requirement of keeping my digestive system busy without supplying soporific carbohydrates.
We won both the fifth and sixth rounds after lunch. We were bumping along in second place. Unfortunately we got undressed by Greg Klinker’s team in the seventh round. At our table Cilla Borras and Alex Taylor bid and made three slams in the eight hands. Two were cold, but we could have set one of them if I had played my honors in a side suit differently. Our teammates only bid one of the slams.
We won the last round. We ended up third in A, second in B, and first in C. We had beaten both of the teams ahead of us. We won 4.73 gold masterpoints. What a great start for a new partnership!
In the evening I ate a roast beef sandwich from Sue’s grocery stash and potato chips from a bag that I had brought from home. I drank half of the water in the free bottle that came with the room. By the time that I had finished my little supper and dealt with my emails it was pretty late.
On Thursday morning Sue and I drove to the Dream Diner for breakfast. When we entered the restaurant only one woman was on duty waiting tables, but more arrived presently. I ordered a ham and Swiss omelette. Sue had hash and eggs. It was a pleasant listening to the pre-Beatles music while we ate.
We saw Al Votolato and Grace Charron sitting in a nearby booth and greeted them as we exited. I had played against them many times over the years.
On Thursday Steve and I played in the Open Pairs. Nothing else was available except the knockouts, to which our new friends from Maine had committed to play. The Open Pairs had a very large field of 31 tables that included several big names.
Steve and I scored a 55 percent game in the morning. That put us in fourteenth place (out of sixty-two) and sixth in B. The highlight was getting to play against Michael Dworetsky, one of my principal partners a decade or so earlier, and Joe DeGaetano, who was splitting his time between Florida and New Hampshire. The low point was the very last hand, in which I made an embarrassing defensive error against two of the very best players, John Hrones and Bob Lurie. They finished the session with a 70 percent game.
Our afternoon game was even better. We were East-West and followed the two newest members of the Hartford Bridge Club, Bart Bramley and Kitty Cooper2, two experts who had recently moved to Avon, CT. I remember two of the rounds. In one we played against Jane Verdrager, who runs a club in New Hampshire. She and Steve made arrangements to play together on Sunday. The other round was against Jori Grossack, mother of the two great professional players from Newton, MA. She thanked me for what I had done for bridge over the years.
We ended up in tenth place, fifth in B. That was worth 3.39 gold points. Lurie and Hrones won the event, a result that did not surprise me a bit.
Sue and I should have eaten supper together on Thursday evening, but she did not want to.
On Friday Steve and I played in the very first occurrence of an experimental event, the Bracketed Pairs. We were assigned to bracket #2, which consisted of nine tables that included a large number of players whom I knew very well. Steve and I played very well. I circled only one hand in each session. We had a 55.65 percent game, which tied us for third place.
We played the same direction in the second session as the leaders. After the last hand the BridgeMate reported that we had a 61 percent game and first North-South. So, we definitely had picked up some ground on the leaders. When the “final” results were posted, we were listed as the overall winners. However, an hour or so later a new score was poster, and we were second. The margin was 1.5 points, much less than one percentage point. We were happy with the 11.74 gold points that we earned, but first place paid an incredible 15.65 points.
After the game I talked with Steve about future tournaments. He said that he might play in the Ocean State Regional in Warwick because his son lives in Providence. I certainly hoped that we could arrange something. He said, however, that he does not like to stay in hotels, and he does not drive at night. Those are very limiting factors.
Sue and I played together in the Pro-Am on Friday evening. We did not do well.
We should have gone to breakfast on Saturday morning, but Sue could not get moving in time. I received a phone call from long-time friend and former partner, Judy Hyde. She and Ann Hudson (another former partner) had finished second in Bracket 2 of the knockout, and they wanted to team up with Sally and me on Saturday. I promptly agreed. Even if we did not do well, it would certainly be a pleasure to play with them.
We won our first match by 3 imps and lost the second one by 5 to a strong B team. In the third round we were hammered by Ethan Wood’s team, but we came back to win the fourth round. We were only a little below average, but we found ourselves in a three-way for the first two rounds after lunch. We were pummeled in both matches. We won the seventh round over Joe Brouilliard’s team. We also won the last match. Sally and I played against Eli Jolley and Judy McNutt. So, our foursome won four out of eight matches, but we finished way out of the money. We could hardly complain; we played against none of the best teams.
At some point on Saturday morning Sue hooked up with Shirley Wagner, a very nice person from Central Mass with whom I had worked on the Executive Committee. They did not do well in the morning session, but they improved in the afternoon after Shirley advised Sue to concentrate on “restraint”.
The Executive Committee meeting was painful. I was Connecticut’s only representative. Bill Segraves attended for a few minutes by Zoom. Denise served soda and cheese and crackers. The district has $158,000 in cash, but it can no longer afford to buy supper for the committee. Moreover, they expect the attendees to play in the evening games after the meetings.
Sue Miguel passed out a list of items that she and Denise had accomplished. She highlighted a new committee of unit presidents. They reportedly had a “fabulous” meeting on Thursday evening. This group is precisely identical to the Executive Committee minus Joe, Carolyn, Brenda Montague, and me, the four people whom she cannot count on for unthinking support.
Mark Aquino talked about his research on the previous sites of NABC tournaments. Because of his position on a committee he thinks that he might be able to salvage an NABC in Providence at some point in the future. It sounded quixotic to me
Sunday morning’s BoD meeting was more of the same. A lot of people from Connecticut were in attendance. At the very end I tried to draw people’s attention to the district’s huge pile of cash and emphasized that, in my opinion, some of this should go to supporting clubs. I didn’t think that anyone was listening. After the meeting I learned from the owner of a club that the drive from his house to the club’s site was not as long as the half hour that Steve claimed.
I learned that the Fall tournament will be at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT. The district had never held an event there. All three flights of the district’s NAP qualifying events will also be held there.
My partner on Sunday was Paul Burnham. We had sat at the same table at the BoD meeting and agreed on a convention card for the Bracketed Swiss. We met Ann Johnson and Chris Pettingell at the partnership table. I totaled up the points and bought an entry using four different credit cards. We were in the lowest bracket, but there was some pretty tough competition there. Evidently the less experienced players had not learned the lesson that the best way to get gold points was in bracketed events.
The bridge is mostly a blur. I remember that on the first hand I opened 1NT with only one small club. I was still discombobulated from the meeting and the chaos at the registration table. One of my spades was sorted next to the singleton club. I only went down one in an impossible 3NT contract, but miscues at the other table caused us to lose this and three of our other four matches.
At lunch Paul and I sat with Ann, Chris, and some other woman. The conversation was extremely tiresome. At no point did I have anything to contribute. Eventually Paul stood up and announced that he wanted to “take a walk.”
The only round that I remember rather clearly was the fifth, which we played against Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider. I quickly explained the WavaDONT defense to Paul. I needed to take at least a half hour because, believe it or not, they opened 1♣ three times in eight hands. On the first occasion I overcalled 2♦, which meant that I had diamonds and a higher suit. I had a seven-loser hand, which is my standard for this bid, but I had no time to explain that to Paul. After Jim bid 3♣, Paul, who had four cards in both majors, bid 3♥, which Mike doubled. I corrected to 3♠, which Mike also doubled. I went down four for -1100. Disasters ensued on several other hands. On the last hand I tried a 6♥ slam3, which also went down. It was the only slam bid my me or any of my partners during eleven sessions of play.
We won the last round to salvage a little respect. Our opponents were from Connecticut. Paul and I played against Marie-Jose Babouder-Matta and her husband Nadim. At the other table were Rick Seaburg and Gayle Stevens. They were shocked that, despite the fact that they had won only two matches, they were assigned to play against Paul and me.
The drive home was not too bad. Sue, who had played in one session of the Gold Rush Pairs, wanted to stop for supper. We could not think of a good place anywhere on the way back to Enfield. We ended up at the Longhorn Steakhouse, where we spent $100 on a lackluster meal that we ate while shivering in a booth in which the temperature was at most sixty degrees.
This was the best tournament, in my opinion, since the pandemic, but I still felt sad and somewhat bitter about the meetings.
Ocean State Regional in Warwick RI
I was hoping to use my large collection of IHG4 Rewards points to pay for my attendance at the district’s most popular tournament, the Ocean State Regional. The tournament was held annually at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Warwick, RI. It was usually held before Labor Day, but in 2024 it was scheduled for Tuesday, September 3, through Sunday, September 8. Unfortunately, although I tried to do so more than a month in advance of the tournament, I was unable to score even one free room. I immediately turned my attention to the November tournament in Norwich. I used points to buy four nights. IHG threw in the fifth night for free.
As I was I looking up the dates for the Norwich tournament, I was surprised to learn that the schedule (which can be viewed here) was a throwback to the simplistic schedules of 2021. I resolved to find out at the Executive Committee meeting whether this was a deliberate move by the people who design the schedules. I hoped that the dominance of open events was a temporary measure, and a real schedule would be forthcoming.
Jim Osofsky asked me and Judy Hyde to play with him and Mike Heider on four of the six days. Jim and Mike did not want to play on Tuesday, and they had already arranged to play with another pair on Saturday. I had not played with Judy since 2017. We agreed to play the card that she customarily used. We played together at one online game sponsored by the Northampton Bridge Club and did pretty well. We later cleared up via email and a phone call a few matters concerning the convention card that I had created and sent to her.
I received a bizarre email from Sue Miguel about the use of paper by the district. It stated that the Secretary of the Executive Committee would no longer hand out reports to attendees. Pdf files would be sent by email, and each member would be required to print his/her/their own copies. She also wanted to eliminate as much paper as possible at tournaments as well. This was supposedly going to create a greener ecology. In my opinion the best way to save paper would be to buy scoresheets with room for results of pairs games on both sides. The other side of the ones that they distribute currently have blank convention cards, which are almost seldom needed by tournament players.
Before I left for Warwick I made sure that all of the household bills were paid and that the invitational email for the game at the Simsbury Bridge Club was scheduled on MailChimp for release on Friday morning.
I consulted Google Maps to determine how long the drive to the Crowne Plaza would take. Its answer was one hour and forty minutes. I was ready to leave at 7:15 on Wednesday morning. I wanted to give myself some time to consult with Judy before the first round.
I went in to the bedroom to ask Sue where she had put my laptop. On my way I noticed that two HP laptops were on the table that she had been using for paperwork in what was at one time our dining room. She was using my laptop in bed. I loaded the rest of the stuff in the car while she finished what she was doing and powered it down. I had to wait a few minutes for her to complete this task. As usual, she could not make the program she was using do what she wanted and was cursing at it.
I left at 7:30. The remote for the garage-door opener in my car successfully opened the door but failed to close it. I had to turn the car off, use the button on the wall inside Sue’s garage to close the door, unlock the door that led from the garage to the house, walk through the house, exit by the door that faced Hamilton Court, lock it, return to the car, and start it. I then tried to engage Google Maps on my cellphone. It reported that Maps was “not responding”. I was pretty sure that I knew the route, or at least all but the very end. I finally hit the road at 7:45.
I had forgotten how unpleasant it was to drive east on sunny mornings at this time of the year. The sun was directly in my eyes for most of the trip. I wore my flip-down sunglasses, and I deployed the car’s visor, but on several occasions I was blinded for a second or two. Part of the problem was that the front window was smudged enough to diffract the sunbeam.
While driving on Route 190 I found my car stuck behind several trucks in Somers and three school buses in Stafford. One of the buses made several stops to pick up students. While waiting for its flashing red light to be turned off, I tried Maps again, and this time it connected. I later ran into a delay for construction on Route 74 in Connecticut.
I arrived at the hotel at 9:35. I had intended to stop at McDonald’s for my customary breakfast sandwich, but there was not enough time. After I had parked the car near the playing area I was unable to find my car keys. I looked everywhere in the vicinity of the driver’s seat. When I stuck my hand between the seat and the console I bruised my right hand in several places. I also checked on the floor in the back seat and on the passenger seat. I tried to start the car. That worked, which meant that the key fob was still inside the car. I walked to the back of the car, where I had set down my backpack and portfolio. I dumped everything from the backpack. No keys.
It suddenly occurred to me that it was pretty warm out. I remembered that I had worn my jacket when I left because the temperature was in the forties. After.it warmed up I had doffed it and cast it onto the carpet in front of the empty passenger’s seat. I went back inside the car and quickly found the missing keys n the jacket’s right pocket. I gathered my gear, locked the car, and went inside.
I was still pretty frazzled when I entered the playing area in the hotel and found Judy sitting by herself at a table. She had paid for my share of the entry. I promised to pay for both of us on Thursday. I got a cup of free coffee at the concession stand and then discussed with Judy a few items on our convention card. I realized that the card that I had inserted into my blue convention card holder was obsolete. However, i was able to locate the correct one in the portfolio that I had brought in from the car.
Twenty teams played in the Open Swiss. The field included many good players, but most of the pros and other stars were playing in the contemporaneous second day of the knockout. Our team won all four of its matches before lunch. None of the wins was decisive.
Sue had made a sandwich for me. I sat by myself and ate it with a handful of Utz potato chips from a bag that I had placed in my backpack. I also bought a 12 oz. can of Diet Coke for $2 at the concession stand and drank it. Cindy Lyall and her mother, Sandy DeMartino, came to my table, seated themselves, and asked me how the unitwide games worked in Connecticut before the pandemic. I explained them as thoroughly as my seventy-six-year-old memory could muster.
We also won the first three rounds after lunch, but we were only tied for second place behind a team that we had already beaten—the one that Cindy and Sandy played on. However, we had already played most of the A teams. We had a good eighth round against a so-so opponent, and we actually finished first overall. It was the very first victory in an open event at a regional tournament for me and (I think) the other members of my team.
Room #644 was was the second window from the right in the wing on the right.
I left the playing area before the final results were posted. I drove my car to a spot closer to the hotel’s main entrance. I then retrieved my suitcase from the trunk, went inside, and registered. They assigned me room #644, which may be the highest number that they had. It was at the far west end of the building. There were rooms beyond mine, but I don’t think that they rented them out. The Housekeeping headquarters was directly across the hall from #644 and beyond it was a small lobby that contained an elevator and a microwave oven.
I unpacked and then called my wife Sue. She previously had informed me that she would “probably” drive up to Warwick on Wednesday, but it did not surprise me in the least that she had not left yet. She described her encounter with a musician friend of hers who was living in upstate New York. Sue had offered to let him house-sit while we were at the tournament.5 She also said that she did not want to drive during the traffic of the morning rush. She would “probably” leave for Warwick at about 4 a.m.
Sue was duly impressed when I told her that we had won all of our rounds. I then spent a few minutes trying to get her to hang up so that I could meet up with my teammates in the hotel lobby. We planned to drive to the Bertucci’s near the airport for a celebratory dinner. We all ordered drinks. Mine was a Guinness. Jim, Mike, and I ordered small pizzas. Judy asked us to share a piece with her. I gave her one willingly, as did Mike. I don’t think that Jim did. Judy announced that two pieces was just right for her.
I asked Jim what he had done when he worked in advertising. He said quite a few words, but he never quite answered the question. I concluded that he had been an account rep, but he might also have been involved in planning. He said that he was quite good at helping clients launch new products.
On the return drive to the hotel I asked Judy what she had done in real life. She related that she had taught English for a while. She got married when she was very young (and later to Tom Hyde). She described both of her husbands as very quiet men. Somehow she got into social work, where she concentrated on dealing with parental abuse of children. On one occasion a man shot his own child in her office. It was a traumatic event for Judy. Recently she has become closely involved with the prevention of enslavement of children worldwide. This affirmed what I have always said: “Nearly everyone in bridge has an interesting backstory.”6
In my room I watched episode 5 of season 3 of the spectacular German television series, Babylon Berlin, on the MHz Choice website on my laptop. I had already seen it, but in the previous week I had discovered that I had accidentally skipped episode 2. So, I watched episode 2 over the previous weekend, and I had rewatched episodes 3, 4, and now 5. They made much more sense the second time.
I got this from the HBC’s library.
I took a shower and then read a chapter or so of Gene Wolfe’s Pirate Freedom. I had no trouble sleeping until about 6am. I then went down to the playing area, grabbed a bagel and coffee and sat with Jim. It wasn’t much of a breakfast, but it was free.
On Thursday our foursome was scheduled to play in the knockout. We found ourselves in the second bracket, which was our hope. We would have expected to get clobbered in the top bracket, which had only six teams.
Seven teams were assigned to our bracket. Many of them were familiar foes. We played in three three-way matches. We comfortably won the first two rounds, which gave us ten wins in a row. We were also in the lead in the two half-matches before lunch.
I retreated to my room and ate the second sandwich that Sue had made for me and some more potato chips. I drank tap water upstairs and purchased a Diet Coke to consume in the afternoon matches.
At some point I realized that I did not have my cellphone. In a panic I went back down the elevator to the playing area and searched around the table at which we had sat all morning. There was no sign of it. In the end I found it in my backpack. I can not imagine why or when I had placed it there.
This is the mechanical pencil that I brought in from the car. The rubber grip was mushy and eventually fell off. A month or so after that the metal tip broke off while I was using it. I guess that the grip was holding the pencil together.
I returned to room #644 to brush my teeth. This time I realized that I was missing the mechanical pencil that I had been using for at least five years. I never found it, but I remembered that two similar pencils had been in the console in my car for months. So, I retrieved a blue one that was sort of gummy and used it for the rest of the tournament.
We won the second half of both half-matches. However, our winning streak of twelve consecutive matches was ended in the last three-way. We were decisively defeated by Susan Mullin’s team, but we won the other match. That made us the top seed of the four teams that qualified for the knockout portion on Friday.
I paid for our entry, but I let Mike Heider pick our opponent in the semifinal round.7 He decided that we would play against Susan Liincoln’s team that we had defeated in the first round rather than Susan Mullin’s team that had brutally vanquished us in the three-way.
Sue arrived at the tournament at some point after lunch. She was miserable because she had totally missed the morning session. She blamed Google Maps for sending her in the wrong direction on a detour. While wandering around southeast Rhode Island she had been talking over the phone with her partner, Nadine Harris. When she came to our table I gave Sue a room key so that she could could bring her stuff up to the room.
Judy had other plans, but Mike and Jim asked me to go to a restaurant for supper with them. I said that I would let them know after I talked with Sue. She was very upset about life in general, but she was also an extremely sociable person. So, we decided to join Jim and Mike. We all drove to the Hibachi Grill & Supreme Buffet in Warwick. It was a pleasant and stress-free change. I had won ton soup and a plateful of other Chinese items. Despite all of her trials and tribulations Sue was her usual cheerful self.
On Friday Sue and Nadine decided to play in the experimental event, the Bracketed Pairs, in order to try to get some gold points.
On Thursday I noticed that Debbie Prince, whom I knew from the HBC and the Board of Governors of the CBA, was in attendance. Before going downstairs I placed my copies of The Book of Evidence and The Sea by John Banville in my backpack. On my way to get coffee I saw Debbie and gave the books to her. She was very happy that I did so. I did not know it at the time, but this was the best moment of my day.
Our team played the semifinal of the knockout. As Judy and I sat down to play against Steve Kolkhorst and Carl Wikstrom in the hallway just outside of the main ballroom, Sue came over to me and asked for the key to the room. I could tell that she was almost in tears.
The first set of the match was a disaster. Over the course of only three hands we lost a total of twenty-five imps. The other nine were OK, but we faced a deficit of twenty-one imps when we resumed play.
In the second through fourth hands of this match I had the following distributions: six hearts and zero diamonds, six hearts and zero diamonds, and six hearts and one diamond. These were “shuffle-and-deal” hands shuffled by three different players, one of whom was myself. I will try to remember this for times in which someone at the table claims that computer-generated deals are not random.
We came roaring back in the first half of the second set. Our opponents made a series of big mistakes, including missing a very easy grand slam. Unfortunately, Jim and Mike did not bid it either. Even so, we erased all but five points of the lead. However, they won most of that back in the last six hands, which were poorly played by our teammates. I made a costly mistake on the last hand as well. So, we lost and had to play in the consolation match in the afternoon.
The tournament’s concession stand is famous for offering hot meals at lunch. My favorite has long been the sausage, peppers, and onion grinder. I bought one and brought it up to my room to eat with the potato chips. I drank water from the faucet.
I was mostly a spectator in the consolation round against our old nemesis, the Sattinger team from the Albany area. I played what I called a D&D match—defense and dummy. I declared only three hands. We won five imps on those three, but we surrendered enough on the other twenty-one so that we once again lost.
As I was searching for Sue I encountered Sally Kirtley in the hotel’s lobby. She asked me if I was going to the Executive Committee meeting. The materials that I brought with me said that it was on Saturday, but her reminder made me realize that that designation had been corrected in a subsequent email. I had looked for a sign about it in the area of the partnership desk, but there was none there. There was a sign near the main entrance, but I did not look there.
The meeting was called to order by Denise Bahosh because Sue Miguel was busy with one of her dozen or so responsibilities. The only food served was cake for Sue’s birthday. Her Majesty arrived fashionably late literally shouting her own praises.
A vote was taken on whether the Executive Committee would support some amendments to the bylaws. Everyone supported the changes, which appeared to be trivial.
Mark Aquino, after a few minutes paying tribute to how fabulous things were, announced that he wanted to go easier on alleged online cheaters because the number of members of the ACBL was decreasing! The problem was that people are “flagged” by a faceless algorithm and then offered unappetizing choices. They are often choosing to give up their membership.
Sue did not answer my questions about Norwich schedule. Instead she complained that the ACBL would not let her run the events that she wanted to run or to advertise them the way that she wanted. Meanwhile I had to look at Sue’s bare foot on the chair that separated us. I felt very sad and frustrated.
The meeting ended with Sue Miguel ordering everyone to play in the night game without eating supper. However, she did not say, “Let them eat cake.”
My wife Sue and I ignored her instructions and ate.supper at the noisy Texas Road House. I could not use my ear plugs because Sue’s voice does not carry at all. I liked the baby back ribs but not the atmosphere.
Burt Saxon.
On Saturday we were in Bracket 2 of the Bracketed Pairs. We did very poorly. There were only two high points. The first came at the very beginning. I got to talk with Burt Saxon and his partner, Steve Emerson from Pennsylvania. Burt formerly was a columnist on the CBA’s bridge newsletter, The Kibitzer. I wrote to him once when he asked for experiences people had had with the Flannery convention. He published my note and responded to it. He also wrote often about his games online and in person with Steve. We also played against Burt and Steve at the very last table. I should have given him my calling card, but I forgot.
The other enjoyable moment came just before lunch. I noticed that Jill Marshall, who had appeared on the cover of the September Bridge Bulletin, was sitting near us. After the last hand I retrieved my copy and asked her to sign. She did so, and she told me that I had made her day. She even went up to one of the directors and borrowed a Sharpie to make the signature memorable.
Sue also had a terrible day in the Bracketed Pairs. She was in a very low bracket but still did poorly.
Sue and I ate supper at Chelo’s on Route 1. I had a Reuben sandwich and a tall Narragansett. Sue had some kind of seafood that she rated as below average. Sue took three boxes and a small cup of chowder back to the hotel. The refrigerator in the room was already full before she crammed her leftovers in.
I was not a bit surprised to discover that Texas creamed the reigning national champions at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. Evidently the game was not even as close as the lopsided score indicated. I watched a bit of Iowa State’s comeback against Iowa. Then I turned the television off and watched episode 6 of Babylon Berlin on my laptop.
On Sunday morning I woke up at 3 a.m. I went into the bathroom and wrote up notes for this journal entry. The last three words were “Sick of life.”
I fell back asleep at about 4:30 and did not arise for several hours. At 8:00 I packed, got ready, walked with my luggage to my car, and then went to the playing area. Sue’s plans at that point were unclear. She had apparently put in a request for a partner, but she did not get any responses.
The event was held in the hotel’s “pavilion”, which was actually a huge tent with rather easy access from the hotel. It was constructed about forty feet from the first floor of the hotel. Access was pretty easy.
One thing that the pavilion was missing was restrooms. The closest one was next to the hotel’s restaurant. That was quite a hike. Two rooms were also left open and reserved for players to use. They each had only one toilet. So, unisex lines formed there. This was not a popular arrangement.
The other problem was that it was quite breezy that day. One side of the tent was left open, and the tables near there, where Judy and I played the last round, were quite chilly. I zippered up my nylon jacket, and I was still cold.
Paula before she became proud of her white hair.
Before the bridge started I reminisced with Paula Najarian, who was my teammate in a similar event the last time that the tournament used the pavilion on the last day. I think that it was in 2009 or maybe 2010. My partner was Steve Smith, and she was playing with Marcia West. In the last round we faced Ron Briggs’s team. They were in first place; we were close behind. On the last hand Steve had bid a risky major-suit game that was impossible to make. He was slowly leading out cards in a side suit in hopes of getting an idea. I noticed that Ron had revoked on the ninth or tenth trick. So, Steve in fact made the bid, and, in fact, we won the match and the entire event! I have always used this as an example of great dummy play. Marcia and Paula were shocked and elated by their victory.
In 2024 our team was assigned to the third bracket of the Round Robin. Seven teams were in our bracket; so, we played six rounds of eight boards each. We won our first two matches, but then we lost two. We also split the last two. The only saving grace was that in the last round we soundly defeated the HBC team of Sally, Donna Feir, and the Hugheses.
Other things made me miserable, but I enjoyed playing with Judy. She indicated that she also liked sitting across from me. I asked her if she would be available to play in the regional scheduled for Norwich, CT, in November.
The drive home was even more brutal than the one on Tuesday morning. The traffic was not a problem, but the setting sun was awful.
One of the first things that I did after arriving home was to send to all members of the Executive Committee an email explaining my attitude about the schedule for the Norwich Tournament. Here is the text:
I don’t think that in the ExComm meeting I explained my concerns about the schedule for Norwich schedule very well. Here, for reference, is the schedule for the five-day event in Mansfield, the last time that the NAPs were held in conjunction with a tournament.
On Wed. there was a 2-2 schedule. Thursday started a knockout. Sunday had a three-flighted Swiss. Was this schedule illegal?
The Norwich schedule for the first four days is the following:
Monday seems to have a 2-1 schedule, Tuesday a 2-2 schedule (assuming the practice counts as a flight), Wednesday a 1-1 schedule (assuming the NAP does not count as a flight), and Thursday a 1-2 schedule (assuming the NAP does not count as a flight).
My questions are: 1) Is it not possible to have 2-2 or 3-1 schedules on one or more of these days? 2) Is it not possible to schedule a knockout?
Her reply struck me as nonsensical, but I knew from all my experience as a debater that it was foolish to get into an argument with the person doing the judging.
I hear what you’re saying and agree whole-heartedly if this were a normal, traditional tournament.
We need to realize it’s just not 2019 anymore. Not only that, this is a new tournament, in a totally new city/state on a new date AND new days of the week. Each of these changes tends to drop attendance, never mind having them all at once. Not only that, it’s the week before Thanksgiving. That gives us an potential problem on steroids.
To mitigate the potential damage and maximize our chance for success, we decided to go with a streamlined, simple schedule – focus on getting people out for the NAPs – and keeping them for the other events. This way the events will be bigger. We can’t afford to slice a small pie into tiny pieces.
We also can’t run mid-flight/GR events when we are sending people into NAP B/C. An encouraging the C to also play in the B and the B to also play in the A.
As a result, this isn’t your normal tournament.
It’s all about encouraging people to come ready for NAP, NAP, NAP! And stay for the rest. Let’s concentrate on making this fun, challenging and create buzz for next year. Once we live through the experience, we can expand our offerings where it make sense on non-NAP days. Not to mention, we’ll be on a more traditional Tues-Sun and well away from holiday schedule.
Hope that enlightens.
It didn’t. The remark about not being 2019 any more really frosted me. It is not 2021 any more either. I think that an organization with over $150,000 in liquid assets owes it to its members to provide a quality product.
A few weeks after this exchange it occurred to me that in previous years schedules developed by the Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for upcoming tournaments were presented to the Executive Committee by the vice-president, whose primary duty was chairing the TSC. That had not been happening recently. The schedule for Norwich would not have even been mentioned if I had not brought it up.
I dug up my copy of the bylaws and the proposed changes. One of the revisions was to eliminate the concept of a “standing committee”, which presumably persists from one regime to the next. One of these committees was the TSC.
I had resigned from the TSC during the lockdown because the meeting times conflicted with my only evening activity, the bridge game in Simsbury. I asked Sally Kirtley if the TSC meetings had been occurring in 2024. She replied that they had not.
It occurred to me that perhaps the bylaw revisions were devised, at least in part, to provide legal cover for the dissolution of the TSC. I wrote to Lois DeBlois, a past president of the New England Bridge Conference about the meaning of the term “standing” and how it pertained to the responsibilities of the TSC. Most of what she wrote back I already knew. She also sent me a copy of the bylaws, which, of course I already had. However, the one thing that really struck me about her reply was that the TSC was a really big thing in her day.
For a while I considered making a crusade of restoring the TSC to its historical function. I thought that that would be a good idea, if only to provide some kind of buffer against the kind of schedule proposed for Norwich.
I gave up on the idea because, in the first place, I did not like the notion of being the initiator of conflict. Furthermore, I was uncertain of the audience . The vote would presumably be taken by the Board of Delegates at a meeting of the Board of Delegates in Norwich. The last such meeting was attended mostly by people from CT. However, there was no guarantee that that would be the case. Furthermore, I would have to contact people and explain my positions. Why was the committee important? I could think of a few reasons, but none was exactly compelling.
I won’t be wearing this badge any more.
So, I decided not to pursue the matter. In fact, I decided to resign both from the Executive Committee and the Board of Delegates. Even though this essentially meant that I was abandoning my quest to save regional bridge from the demographic and technological tendencies that threaten it, I just could not face dealing with the current administration any more.
The Harvest regional was scheduled to be held from November 18-23 (Monday through Saturday) at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT, a hotel that had never been used for a regional tournament before. As mentioned above, I used my IHG hotel points to reserve a room for all five nights.
I had difficulty finding partners for the event. Eventually I put together a schedule that had me playing with Abhi Dutta for three days and with John Lloyd, Xenia Coulter, and Eric Vogel for one each. Our teammates for four Swiss events were scheduled to be Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider.
However, I was ill all day on Sunday, November 17. I eventually ended up cancelling my entire schedule for the tournament. The details have been posted here.
I had heard that the attendance at the tournament was well below expectations. I did not check before I started writing this portion of the entry. I was shocked to discover just how bad it was. The finals for the three NAP flights had 9 (A), 13 (B), and 4 (C) tables. The turnout for flight C was scandalously low. For as long as I have been associated with the district, we have never had such poor attendance at these qualifiers. So, the approach of a vanilla schedule did not help the NAP attendance.
The attendance at the regular events was hardly any better. Even the two bracketed events had only five brackets between them. It occurred to me that if I had attended, I probably would not have enjoyed it much.
1. Sue brought an unbelievable amount of stuff to New Hampshire. Her huge blue suitcase was filled to the brim. She also brought her oxygen unit, her CPAP machine, two canes, and at least three shopping bags filled with food, utensils, and all kinds of other stuff.
2. Bart and Kitty won more masterpoints than anyone in the tournament.
3. This slam was a move prompted by desperation. I figured that we were probably going to lose by a wide margin, probably a blitz. Unfortunately, our auction made it impossible for me to get much information about the possibility of success. I opened 2♣ to indicate a very strong hand. We played that his response showed “controls”. He bid 2♥, which betokened an ace or two kings. Since I had all four kings, I knew that he had an ace. I had two of them, and so I knew that we had only one certain loser. I also had six hearts headed by the AK, but only one outside jack. I needed to know about his queens and jacks, but there was no way to get that information. So, I just bid 6♥ and hoped for the best.
4. The InterContinental Hotels Group owns the Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels, as well as many other. I had a Chase credit card that provided reward points that could be used for free rooms at those hotels.
5. If this sounds incredible to you, you do not know Sue.Taking in strays is one of the primary aspects of her personality. Many of our pets were strays. Most of the rest were gifts from people who were desperate to get rid of them. I have often thought that Sue took me in when I was a stray. I certainly was different socially from the other actuaries with whom we worked.
6. Maybe not actuaries.
7. This was, rather incredibly, the fourth time in less than three years that I had been in the position of selecting an opponent for the semifinal of a knockout. Twice we had lost both the semifinal and final matches, but at the 2023 tournament in Warwick we won both matches.
The problems: Unit 126 of the ACBL, i.e. Connecticut, ran three sectionals in 2023. All three were held at St. Barbara’s Greek Orthodox Church in Orange. I attended two of them. The third was scheduled at the same time as the sectional in Great Barrington, MA. Since I had already made commitments to play in that event, I did not go to the Orange sectional in August.
How, you may ask, could such a thing happen? Aren’t Connecticut and Western Mass (Unit 196) adjacent, and is not the scheduling of competing sectionals in adjacent units prohibited.
The heart of the problem is that the unit has not had a tournament manager for some time. Cornelia Guest asked to be relieved of her responsibilities before the Pandemic, and no one had been found in the interim. So, the president, Peter Marcus, had been performing these duties. This was a terrible situation. Peter had three other jobs in the bridge world: Director-in-Chief of District 25, Tournament Coordinator for District 25, President of Unit 126. In addition, he was a very active participant in both of the district’s important committees and he had a firm commitment to attend every New York Mets game.
So, Peter the U126 Tournament Manager selected the dates for the August sectional and sent them to Peter the D25 Tournament Coordinator. The latter Peter ignored the conflict and scheduled the tournament. The U126 Peter later told Peter Samsel, the president of U196 that he would compensate him for lost attendance. I have no way of determining if he did or not. If he did, he probably took it from his own pocket. He often solved problems that way.
The Board of Governors of U126, of which I was a member, did not meet at any of the tournaments. We had one or two Zoom meetings that focused mainly on nominations for the officers for and representatives for 2024.
The other problem is communications. Our emails are decidedly pedestrian. They do a poor job of motivating the players with fewer points to attend. The ones that I composed and sent for the first limited sectional (documented here) brought in fifty-seven tables in one day. Compare those with the figures in the following sections.
April 21-23 Sectional in Orange. Two months before the tournament I committed to play in the Sunday Swiss with Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky. I could not find partners for that event, and I also needed partners for the pairs game on Saturday. Mike suggested that I try Ros (short for Rosalind and pronounced as Roz) Abel, who lived in Southington, CT. I did, and we agreed to play on Friday and Sunday in Orange. Ros could not play on
In preparation for the event, we worked on a card that we both could tolerate, and we played together once in the open game at the the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). She has subsequently become a member of the HBC, which is actually the closest club to her house.
I learned that Ros had recently moved to Southington from the New York area, where she had run a club. It died during the Pandemic. Somehow she found the club in Newtown, but not the HBC.
We did not score too well at the HBC, but our results on Saturday at the sectional were promising. We finished seventh in both sessions out of thirty-nine and forty. We won over four silver points. We had a chance to place in the Swiss as well, but we were defeated badly by a team from the HBC. I remember that on a critical hand Ros made a bid that made it clear that she did not know how to bid controls when looking for a possible slam.
The attendance in the open games was pretty good, especially on Friday, but there were only 25 tables in the two days of pair games for the 0-499 group. The Swiss on Sunday had eighteen tables, but there was no score given for the 0-499 group.
August 11-13 Sectional in Orange: I wasn’t there, and so I can only report on the table count, which was much worse than in April. Here are the totals by day:
Friday: Open: 15 in both sessions; 0-499: 5 and 4.
Saturday: Open: 13.5 and 13; 0-499: 5 and 5
Swiss: 15.
Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky.
August 12-13 Sectional in Great Barrington: I played with Abhi Dutta. On Sunday we defended our title in the Swiss with our teammates, Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider.
On Saturday morning Abhi and I were eighth our of forty-two, quite a good showing. In the afternoon, however, we were barely above 50 percent. Our combined score was not good enough to place in the overalls. Only sixteen tables were needed in the afternoon.
In the Swiss we got off to a terrible start. There were sixteen tables. By winning the last match in a blitz against a bad team we jumped up to sixth place. We did not play any of the teams that were ahead of us.
September 23-24 Sectional in Johnston, RI: At some point in August Abhi Dutta asked me if I wanted to play in the Rhode Island sectional in September. I agreed. I like going to this sectional because I have a lot of friends in the RI bridge community, and the sectional has always been well run.
On Saturday Abhi and I did what we always seemed to do in pairs games. We had one pretty good session and one awful one.
Our teammates for the Sunday Swiss were Ken and Lori Leopold, who had won the second session on Saturday. We drew Mark Aquino’s team in the first round. On the very first hand Mark opened 1NT. His partner, Andrew Chesterton, announced it as 12-14, a “weak” bid. I had thirteen points and a flat hand. I doubled for penalty.
Andrew redoubled to indicate that he had a long (at least five cards). Mark considered this for at least one minute, and then passed. So did I. In fact, Mark had a strong NT opener and forgot that he and Andrew were playing 12-14. He made exactly seven tricks for a very high score. Andrew said that if Mark had bid 2♣ (as he was required by their runout to do), he would have passed and gone down. Mark admitted that he had been lucky.
Our luck did not improve until the third round. We ended up with three wins and five losses. We could easily have won all of those matches except the first.
The table count put Connecticut’s to shame:
Saturday: Open: 20 and 20.5; 0-749: 8 and 7.
Sunday Swiss: 27! 0-299 pairs: 3.
Bill Segraves.
Recognition Committee: At one of the Zoom meetings Bill Segraves, the webmaster for the unit’s website, CTBridge.org, proposed the idea of four committees to address the problems that the unit faced. One of those was a Recognition Committee to address the various awards and trophies for performance at regionals and perhaps to create new ones. I paid little attention to this because I did not consider it a very important problem, but I was not averse to someone else putting some time in on it.
On October 18 Bill sent the following email to Sandy DeMartino and me:
One of the committees we discussed setting up at the last CBA Board Meeting was the Recognition Committee. Basically, the idea was to set up publicity for our awards and trophies and make them more relevant to the membership, maybe even generate some excitement for the races.
I don’t think this should take a lot of time and I would hope the committee would come up with idea but then others could actually do some of the work, such as authoring emails to go out about trophies being given out at the next tournament, etc.
OK to do this?
I did not immediately respond, but John Lloyd said that he would like to be on the committee. Sandy declined, and so the committee consisted of Bill, John, and me. Bill set the criteria in the following email:
The main things on my mind for attention soon are the following, as they all affect what we post on the website and what will go into the upcoming edition of The Kibitzer as we approach the end of the year.
I thought some of these had already been decided on by the board, but then questions were re-raised and it seems a good idea to resolve them with some real clearity.
1) It was my understanding that the Barb Shaw Trophy would be awarded to the player who earned the most masterpoints in all of Connecticut’s I/N sectionals during the year. Only the I/N sectionals count, not points earned in limited games of the open sectional, STaC’s, or anything else. I don’t think anyone else is going to have an I/N this year, so that’ll he Hartford I, Branford, Newtown and Hartford II. We basically ratified this by posting it on the web that way after the board had discussed it, but I think it’s good at least to affirm that among ourselves, and then I think we can just report on it at the next board meeting. (I don’t know that we’ll have the official winner and standings yet, but I can easily determine the unofficial winner.) Side note: I am aware of no restriction saying that this is a member of the Unit.
2) There was somewhat less clarity on the Monroe Magnus Trophy. This has traditionally been awarded to the highest masterpoint winner in all Connecticut Sectionals. (STaCs do not count for this.) As far as I have understood it, it is not restricted to Unit members. At one of the board meetings, someone (I don’t recall who) said that they thought that the I/N sectionals should not count for this. I don’t think this received wide support, and I certainly don’t agree with it. A sectional is a sectional. At that time, it actually mattered, since there was a pair who did very well in the Harford I/N and then in the Open (!) in the CBA Spring Sectional, but it’s no longer relevant at this point. I do suggest that we go ahead and present to the board a motion that the Magnus trophy race counts points in all Connecticut Sectionals (exclusive of STaCs). Make sense? We will know the Magnus winner after the sectional next weekend.
3) It was proposed in one of our board meetings that there be a new award/recognition for something like a Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year. I quite like this idea, but the devil is in the details. The basic idea is that eligible people would be anyone who met the rank criteria at the beginning of the year and was geographically eligible throughout the year. Maybe I am making this too complicated but I think it’s best to spell out all this stuff in advance.
1) Is it open to any Connecticut resident or just Unit members (this can easily matter – we have some Connecticut residents who are members of the New York unit)? I’m open to either answer.
2) Does the person have to meet criterion #1 for the whole year or just at the beginning, just at the end? People who move in or out? Part year, e.g. college students or snowbirds eligible? I would tend to recommend something like anyone who has had a substantial presence during the year by any of a) completing a semester of school, b) living in-state for at least 6 months, c) maintaining a home here and living here on an ongoing basis for at least four months a year.
3) What events count? Connecticut sectionals? All Connecticut events? And District 25 events? All events? All f2f events? All pigmented events? I would propose all pigmented events (this eliminates the BBO ACBL games but not the VACBs). If you want to limit it to f2f events, I’ll investigate how difficult this is. It may not be too hard. I think there’s a way to filter for VACB leaders and then subtract that.
4) Is there a MP limit? We have some non-LMs who have well over 1000 MP. I would recommend that we restrict this. Not only does it defeat what I see as the purpose (encouraging newer players) to be recognizing players who already have a pile of masterpoints (maybe even twice as many as I had at the beginning of the year!), but if a player never gets their black or silver, e.g., they would never become an LM and would remain eligible indefinitely. I suggest non-LM under 750 at start of the year.
5) Can a person win it more than once. I’d suggest no.
6) Any other criteria?
7) Do we award it for 2023? I would suggest we do.
8) What do we call it? Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year for now? I think we can come up with something more evocative of success but see no point in waiting.
9) What’s the award. For now, I think it’s fine just to get it on the website. The sooner we do it, the sooner we can publish the standings and start giving it a little publicity.
This latter award is complex enough that I’d suggest we ratify the status quo on the other as soon as we can and then talk by Zoom or three-way phone to hit the NLM award issues, come up with a proposal and present it to the board. My schedule pretty flexible Sunday through Thursday.
Anything else you guys would like to have the committee address sooner rather than later?
I only skimmed most of this, but I objected to a few of the items in the first few paragraphs. I sent the following response:
I strongly disagree with some of this, and I don’t think that anything has been decided by the board. At least there was no vote on it. You can proceed this way if you want in 2023, which is a transition year, but we should have policies that are voted on for 2024. That means a motion and a count of votes, not the “silence must mean approval” method used this year.
The primary purpose of the awards has always been to promote the bridge activities of the UNIT. The trophies were bought and managed by the unit’s government in some distant day. The secondary purpose was presumably (I was not around when any of these were established) to honor the name on the trophy (well, maybe not the governor).
A sectional is NOT a sectional. The I/N sectionals are club activities that, like STaC games, happen to pay silver points. They are sponsored, financed, and promoted by the clubs. It is fine and probably necessary to help the clubs in any way that we can, but that was not part of the design of any of the awards. If I had known that attendance at the HBC sectionals was going to help someone win an award, then I would have trumpeted that in the emails for the award. There is also the problem that the I/N sectionals do not have the same rules about who can play as the unit events (or even one another). Surely, the criteria for eligibility should be set and announced before competition begins. There are other small problems that have to do with players changing residences and points awarded to foreign players by the ACBL. I know that those can be addressed because I did so when I ran the “Best in Class” awards for the district.
At this time I think that the main goal should be promoting play at unit-sponsored sectionals by the I/N group. Our record on this so far is, in my opinion, miserable. Awarding the Barb Shaw trophy for persistent performance as opposed to performance in one tournament is also problematic, but the problems are probably addressable. I am not opposed to this change, but the standard for eligibility should be the player’s standing as of January 1. We should be encouraging players to graduate from the I/N game to the open one when they reach the limit, not discouraging them by removing their eligibility for the award when they achieve success.
I do not have strong feelings about whether we should limit participation to members of the unit. I enjoy seeing people from other units at our sectionals. Some have won the trophies in the past, but in at least some cases they didn’t bother to take them.
I do not have strong feelings about the other awards. The nice thing about the way the awards worked was that it gave us something novel to promote for each event. I don’t think that we ever took advantage of this as much as we could have in the past. I have been attending board meetings for ten years, and the only thing mentioned about the trophies was in the form of “Does anyone know who has the _____ trophy?” The number of people who actually care about the other trophies is probably small, but I always have, and I know a few others who do.
In any case the principal problem to be addressed is the promotion (i.e., emails and other advertising), which has always been meh. The board did not care much because attendance without promotion had been good (go look at the 2019 results) and increasing over time. The unit’s finances were so good that we were actively looking for ways to spend our excess money. That has changed dramatically, and we need to react.
Bill then tried to schedule a time for the three of us to meet or have a Zoom meeting. I agreed to meet before or after the games on one of the days of the Orange. So, we agreed to meet before the game on Saturday at 8:30. I started the meeting by mentioning that I had never won the Barb Shaw Trophy and that Michael Dworetsky’s name was horribly misspelled.
Shirley and Bob Derrah, Tony Norris and me in 2015.
Bill could not understand how the first mistake happened. I explained it to him. He asked me what he should do if he could not find out why I was listed. I said that I would prefer to change it to Bob and Shirley Derrah1, the people who were given the trophy.
Bill provided a summary of what we agreed to:
Barb Shaw Trophy
Traditionally, the Barb Shaw Trophy was awarded to the top Flight C masterpoint winner in the CBA Winter Sectional. The award was last made in 2020. There has not been a Winter Sectional since then and the award was not made in 2021 or 2022. For the transitional year of 2023, the CBA Board approved the award of the Barb Shaw Trophy to the top masterpoint winner in all of the Connecticut I/N Sectionals combined. With the end of 2023 and the first planned I/N Sectional of 2024 (Branford in January) rapidly approaching, the Recognition Committee discussed criteria for the award of the Barb Shaw Trophy in 2024.
The Committee does not recommend continuing the 2023 practice of awarding the Barb Shaw Trophy to the top masterpoint winner in Connecticut I/N Sectionals but would instead prefer criteria that recognize or at least include recognition of performance in Connecticut’s Open Sectionals and “graduation” into progressively more challenging events. We present two options for Board consideration, with a very mild Committee preference for the first option.
Option 1: The 2024 Barb Shaw Trophy will be awarded to the player who begins the year with <750 masterpoints and wins the most total masterpoints in all Open and I/N Connecticut Sectionals.
Option 2: The 2024 Barb Shaw Trophy will be awarded to the player who begins the year with <750 masterpoints and wins the most masterpoints at one designated Sectional.
For Option 2, in the likely absence of a Winter Sectional (acknowledging that March may currently be a formal possibility), the award could be made to the top masterpoint winner at the first sectional of the year. The Committee recognized, however, that if the Scott Loring Trophy (normally awarded at the Spring Sectional) were awarded at the the same tournament, it is possible that the same person or pair could win both the Barb Shaw Trophy and the Scott Loring Trophy. The Committee also considered it desirable to spread out the recognition of developing players over more than one tournament. One way to address this, if the Board prefers the single Sectional option, would be to award the Barb Shaw Trophy to the <750 masterpoint winner at the Summer Sectional. (Pushing the Scott Loring Trophy to the second Sectional, expected to be the Summer Sectional, would have disadvantages including increasing the likelihood that the same person would win both the Scott Loring Trophy and the Governor’s Cup.)
While we continue in this transitional period, the Recognition Committee would plan to re-evaluate the criteria for award of the Barb Shaw Trophy approximately one year from now and make recommendations for 2025.
New Recognition Awards
The Committee also considered potential new awards to recognize the success of our developing players. There are a number of ways in which this might be done and the Committee considered the relationship of any such awards to the Mini-McKenney awards and the Barb Shaw Trophy. The Committee recommends that the Board consider two new categories for recognition, Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year and Connecticut Newcomer of the Year.
The 2024 Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year would be that Unit member who begins the year as a non-Life Master with <750 masterpoints and earns the most masterpoints in all face-to-face play during the year.
The 2024 Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year would be that Unit member who begins the year as a non-Life Master with <50 masterpoints and earns the most masterpoints in all face-to-face play during the year.
These two awards would be clearly distinguished from the Mini-McKenney award by including only points earned in face-to-face play (the Mini-McKenney criteria include points earned in virtual club games and online regionals). And the former award would be distinguished from the Barb Shaw full-year option by the inclusion of all face-to-face club and tournament play at any location, not just in Connecticut’s Sectionals.
The Committee has investigated the technical aspects of applying these criteria and received confirmation that the application of any of these criteria should not present any particular technical challenges. The most complex question related to the proposed new Recognition Awards is how eligibility would be determined for people who may only be Unit members for part of the year. Should such a case arise, the Committee recommends that the Unit rely on the established ACBL criteria for GNT eligibility as the basis for a case-by-case determination as to eligibility.
The Committee has begun what will be a broader discussion of how all of our trophies and other awards are made, including when and how they are awarded and whether there is a physical trophy and will solicit input from the Board and other unit members on this subject. We consider it essential, however, that the Unit take full advantage of all opportunities to publicize these awards widely and to use them to recognize achievement and actively to promote Connecticut bridge.
The Committee also began discussion of other questions for Board consideration during 2025 and welcomes input from the Board and other Unit members about any matters potentially under the Committee’s purview.
October 27-29 Sectional in Orange: On October 25 Bill sent the following email to all of the members of the unit’s Board of Directors:
Thank you again to everyone who pitched in to make the August tournament a success. We should be in much better shape hospitality-wise for this tournament with Stacy Herbert working the mornings and with all of us having had a little more experience.
It would be great if a few of you could help out with some things this weekend. On Friday morning, my wife Carol will bring me and help with getting stuff out of our car, but I won’t be able to carry much myself (broken leg for those who may not know – healing well but limiting my ability to walk without crutches). Stacy will help, too, but a few additional sets of hands will be great. I’ll arrive at 8:15 and Carol, Stacy and and I can get the coffee stuff out so Stacy can get that running, but another set or two of hands by around 9 would be great.
The bigger challenge this weekend will be getting stuff back into the car on Sunday. Carol won’t be able to come get me until about 7:30 on Sunday evening, and I don’t want her to have to load it all by herself, so if anyone can hang around for a bit or if someone who lives close by can come back to help, that’d be great.
I said that I would get there as early as possible on Friday. I did not volunteer to stay late on Sunday. The drive to St. Barbara’s takes at least an hour, and I would be mentally exhausted after three days of bridge.
Eric Vogel agreed to play with me in the pairs games on Friday and Saturday, and Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky asked me to play with them in the Swiss on Sunday. I had a very difficult time finding a partner. Linda Green, a board member, said that Terry Lubman of Riverside, CT, wanted to play. I contacted her, and we eventually agreed on a convention card.
I arrived at the church at about 8:30. Everything was pretty much already set up. Renee Clift and I distributed BridgeMates for the director, Tim Hill. Otherwise, I twiddled my thumbs for an hour and a half.
I did not think that I played too badly, but I did not have a good tournament at all. Eric and I scratched in only one of the four sessions. I might have been off my game because of the distractions.
Terry Lubman.
Terry and I were almost never on the same wave length. The worst one was when she doubled an opponent’s 2♥ bid when their wie3 2qw vulnerable. Although I held Q10xxx of hearts (enough to leave a double in according to the Rule of 92), I did not want them to play for 650 points needing eight tricks in an eight-card fit. So, I bid 3♣ even though I only had three. It turned out that Terry only had the QJ of clubs. The opponents drew our trumps and then took their hearts. I managed only four tricks for -500. It was small comfort that the opponents could easily have managed eight tricks in hearts. We only won three of the seven matches.
It was a long lonely ride home. Worst of all, I had only one day to rest and prepare for the regional in Marlborough that has been described here.
Here were the table counts:
Friday: Open: 17 and 17.5; 0-499: 2.5 and 0!
Saturday: Open: 16 and 18; 0-499: 3 and 0.
Swiss: 19. For the third consecutive tournament, the unit advertised a 0-500 event that did not attract enough people to play.
1. Bob Derrah, who worked for Monsanto for decades, died in 2018. His obituary has been posted here. Shirley died two years later. Her obituary can be found here. I played on teams with them several times. We also worked together to teach bridge to young people in the Springfield area. I documented that effort here.
2. The Rule of 9 was invented by Mel Colchamiro as a way of gauging whether it is OK to pass a takeout double. He advised not to unless the total of three things was at least nine: 1) the number of cards held in the trump suit; 2) the number of trump cards higher than 9; 3) the level of the bid. In this case the numbers were 5, 2, and 2. Therefore, I could (but was not required to) have passed.
