Tag Archives: Harvey, Brenda

2008-2019 Bridge Partners at Tournaments Part 2

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Occasional partners at tournaments. Continue reading →

One of the very first tournaments that I ever attended was in the Fiesta Regional in Waterbury, CT, in the summer of 2007. I was planning to play with Dick Benedict (introduced here) in the Bracketed Swiss on Labor Day. On one of the weekend days I drove to the Holiday Inn that hosted the tournament by myself in hope of picking up a partner for both sessions of pairs. The person at the Partnership Desk was Carol Schaper (introduced here), whom I knew from the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC).

Carol matched me up with John Morrin to play in the 299er game in the morning. Dick dropped by the 299er room and said that he was glad that John and I had met. We played pretty well, but we failed to win any points because of a defensive lapse. One of us held the ace in a side suit and the other held the king. We both avoided the suit, and the opponents made a contract that they should not have.

I have played against John many times at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC), at which he still was playing regularly in 2023, but that long-ago game in Waterbury was the only time that we have played as partners.

In the afternoon session in Waterbury I played with Mort Friedman in an event that I had no business playing, the Open Pairs. He was 26 years older than I was and as gregarious as I was introverted. He had come to the tournament from the Albany area. He knew all of our opponents, and he introduced me to them as a “new player”.

Mort thought at the end of the round that we might have placed, but he was overly optimistic. I probably made some simple errors that he did not pick up on.

At the time Mort published a bridge column called “Bridging the Gap”. He emailed it to me for several years, and I occasionally asked him questions about it. He always responded.

Mort died in 2011. His obituary can be found here.

I evidently received my first (fractional) gold points at the Waterbury tournament. Dick, Virginia Labbadia, Donald Fosberg (of whom I have no memory whatever) and I finished third in the bottom bracket of the Round Robin on Labor Day.

The Ukrainian National Home.

I was scheduled to play with Dick Benedict at an afternoon session of the sectional tournament at the Ukrainian National Home on Wethersfield Ave. in Hartford. Our signals got crossed, and, with just a few minutes before game time I discovered that he was not going to come. Lou Brown, who was president of the HBC at the time, also needed a partner. So, although he had much more experience than I did, we formed a one-time partnership.

I remember two things about the session. At one point we played against Mary Witt and Linda Starr. At the time they were both redheads. I question whether that was allowed by the ACBL. A few hands later Lou, as declarer, failed to follow suit even though I had warned him with the question “No hearts?.” He was very embarrassed by his mistake, which prevented us from placing in the event.

I have two other vivid memories of Dr. Brown. He occasionally played at the SBC with his wife Trudi. Quite often he was verbally abusive to her. I took Trudi aside and offered to talk to him about his behavior, which was clearly against the ACBL’s Zero Tolerance policy. She told me not to because, “For me it is like water off of a duck.”

I was present when Trudi got the gold points that she needed to become a Life Master. Lou and Trudi were paired with Merrill Stein and Gary Cohen. I don’t remember who our teammates were, but my partner was Michael Dworetsky. Merrill had bid 7NT on a hand. Michael was on lead on the first trick. For some reason he chose to lead “fourth best” from a spade suit headed by the king. It was a terrible choice that allowed Gary to take all thirteen tricks and win the match. If he had selected any other suit, he would have eventually won that king, and we would have won the event.

Lou and Trudi moved to Delray Beach, FL. They are both still active in the ACBL.

I am pretty sure that in the first event that I ever won I was playing with Dan Finn. Dan was an actuary who lived in the Baltimore area but spent a lot of time working in Connecticut. He played with Tom Gerchman at the HBC on Thursday evenings. He also played with John Morrin at the limited game (that I called 0-Finn) at the HBC on Wednesday evenings.

Dan and I played as partners with Tom Gerchman and his (only?) friend, Terry Fair, an actuary from the Philadelphia area, as teammates. The tournament was a sectional in District 3, probably in northern New Jersey.

We were playing in a B-C Swiss. Everything seemed to go our way. In the final round we played the only other team that was in contention. Our opponents made enough mistakes that I was certain that we had won. When Tom asked us whether we thought that we had done well enough, I asked him, “How many times did you revoke?”

He acted as if he did not understand the question. Dan intervened: “He wants to know how many times you revoked.” Gerchman muttered, “Uh, none.”

I said, “Then I think that we are OK.” I was right. We won the event.

On the way home I wanted to stop and get some real food. We were a long way from Enfield, and it was late. Gerch insisted on stopping at Dunkin Donuts.

Occasionally filling out a card at the Partnership Desk at a tournament brought a very pleasant surprise. Such was the case at the Masters Regional in Mansfield, MA, in 2013 when Ausra Geaski showed up without a partner. I was acquainted with her in three ways: 1) she was president of the district; 2) she arranged for me to become the district’s webmaster; 3) she was Bunny Kliman’s partner at the HBC and regionals and had a lot more points than I did. I don’t think that she was thrilled with the prospect, but she agreed to play with me in the open pairs.

I remember one hand from the round. We missed a slam in a notrump contract because one of us had a six-card diamond suit. It occurred to me that we should have used 2NT as a transfer to diamonds rather than signing off in 3NT. When partner accepted the diamond suit we could have found the slam.

The other thing that I remember was that Carole Weinstein was one of our opponents. She talked with Ausra about helping with the hospitality at the 2014 Fall NABC that was going to be held in Providence.

Ausra still played regularly at the HBC in 2023. She also played at a few sectionals, but she was hobbled by bad knees that she got replaced in October.

This is Paula. I could not find a photo of Marcia.

I came to know Marcia West, who lived in Charlestown, RI, from her association with Paul Pearson. She had taken a bridge class that Paul taught somewhere in Rhode Island. I don’t remember when I played with Marcia, but it must have been at a sectional in Johnston, RI. She did not often venture far from home for tournaments.

I don’t think that we did very well on that occasion, but Steve Smith and I teamed up with Marcia and Paula Najarian in an epic Round Robin at the first regional tournament ever held at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, RI. I have recounted my heroic dummy play here.

I have been friends with Marcia and Paula for many years. Marcia was a nurse in real life; Paula taught math in high school. They both are still playing pretty regularly in 2023. Marcia played with my wife Sue at a sectional in Johnston, RI.

I am sure that I played with Vince D’Souza at a Unit 126 (Connecticut) sectional, but I cannot remember when or where. We were undoubtedly matched up by whoever was manning the partnership desk. I am even more certain that we did not do very well, but don’t ask me why.

Perhaps Vince remembers. In 2023 he contacted me about the lessons for beginners being offered by the HBC to beginning players. He wanted to purchase them for one of his sons or grandsons. He seemed to remember me better than I remembered him.

The LinkedIn page that is posted here is probably Vince’s. I was somewhat surprised to see that Vince was still a member of the ACBL in 2023. He played in the fall sectional in Orange, CT, but he did not earn any masterpoints.

I was assigned to play with Joe DaCosta at a regional tournament. I am not sure which one or when it occurred. I remember that he was expecting his partner to show up, but for some reason he suspected that he/she might not show up, and so he lined me up as a substitute. I had no choice; no one else was available..

We agreed to play his convention card, which included the Flannery convention, in which the 2♦ bid is used for hands with 11-15 high-card points, four spades and five or more hearts. Such hands are difficult to describe in most systems.

I played this convention every week with Peter Katz, and I had played it a few times with others. Joe asked me if I was familiar with it and knew the responses. I assured him that I did.

At the very first table Joe opened 2♦. I quickly responded 2♥, which indicated a hand with three hearts that had no chance of taking ten tricks even if opener had a maximum. I had an honor card or two, but I could have had absolutely nothing. To my surprise Joe bid 3♥. I quickly passed, and he went down by one trick.

Joe’s explanation was that he was afraid that I might have had more strength than I showed. I resolved then and there never to play with him again. I did not need a partner who did not trust me when I said that I knew something.

There are no DaCostas in my database and only one Da Costa, Laura from Clovis, CA. So, our game must have been before I started maintaining my database of ACBL members in 2014.

Sue and Judy.

As was our custom, my wife Sue and I drove up to the hotel in the morning of one of the days of the regional tournament in Nashua, NH. She had made arrangements to play with Judy Cavagnaro, one of her partners from Connecticut, but, as usual, she was late. We arrived just a minute or two before play started, and the car was nearly out of gas. My original plan was to see if anyone at the Partnership Desk was looking for a partner, but I abandoned that idea, dropped Sue off at the door to the hotel, filled up the car’s tank with regular, and went to McDonald’s to buy my traditional sausage biscuit with egg.

I later discovered that one other person was looking for a partner for the Open Pairs. His name was Doug Clark, and he was from the Albany area. We met and went over his convention card together. I was astounded to discover that in the “Opening Preempts” section no boxes were checked, and he had written in “Not used”. I honestly felt like I was going into battle with a broken sword.

Somehow we won some points in that session, but I resolved never to play with him again. He was still an ACBL member in 2023, but he has not won any points all year. At some point he moved to Ponte Vedra Beach, FL.

At the same tournament I had arranged to play in the Round Robin with Tony Norris on Sunday. Our teammates were my old friends, Bob and Shirley Derrah from Springield MA.

Shirley, Bob, Tony, and me.

Tony’s convention card had one peculiar item on it. I remember that I messed it up at one point in one match, but we were on the same page in the rest of our matches.

Our foursome were one of the lowest seeded teams in bracket #1, but in the end we came out tied for first place with a team from Maine. We were all very happy with the result. Someone took our photo. It wasn’t Sue. She had driven home earlier. The Derrahs brought me back to Enfield.

I played with Tony again in Nashua in an Open Pairs game. We won only a half of a masterpoint. The last tournament that he played in was a sectional in Williston, VT, in September of 2018. He was still a member of the ACBL in 2023, but he had not won any masterpoints all year. This was surprising to me because Tony liked to play online.

I met Andre Wiejacki (vee eh YAH skee but compressed into three syllables) at the qualifying tournament for Flight C of the North American Pairs in Sturbridge, MA. I was playing with Steve Smith; Andre was playing with Ron Briggs. They finished second, and we finished third. The winning pair was disqualified, and so all four of us got to to to the finals at the Spring NABC in Reno.

I have often said that everyone in bridge has an interesting backstory. Andre’s is one of the most impressive. He was born in Poland when it was still a satellite of the Soviet Union. He somehow escaped to France where he changed his first name to Andre and learned about computers. At some point after that he immigrated to the U.S.

I played a few times at tournaments with Andre. He was good at playing the cards, but his bidding could be erratic. I liked playing with him, and he definitely liked playing with me. The last time that I heard from him he had moved to the NYC area because the job prospects were better.

In 2023 Andre was still an ACBL member, and he has moved back to Chelsea, MA. He had not played at any tournaments since Covid-19 struck, and he has earned only a handful of masterpoints in 2023.

Andre is still “open to work”. If you are looking for a “scrum master”, his LinkedIn page is here.

I remember that an opponent in one of the matches that Andre exhibited was Sarah Widhu of Nashua NH. After one of Andre’s strange bids, I explained to him how we could have reached the right contract.

We lost the match, and the margin was totally attributable to this one hand. I was impressed that Sarah noticed that everything rode on that one hand.

I only played with Sarah once, and we did not do too well. I suspect that if we had played together more, we would have started to click.

Sarah was one of the most active members of the bridge community in New Hampshire during the period that I became involved with the district. I am pretty sure that she was on the B’s Needs committee, and she was definitely the tournament manager for the Nashua tournament at least once. I designed a successful email campaign for her.

Sarah still played regularly in 2023. She might have still been running the club in Nashua as well, but she did not participate in the administration of the district or its functions.

Ron Agel.

Bridge was definitely only the second-favorite card game of Ron Agel. He was first and foremost a poker player. I played with him for two sessions of an Open Pairs game at a regional tournament in Massachusetts I think that it was at some point in 2014.

At the time Ron only had about half as many masterpoints as I did, but he acquitted himself pretty well. We did not win anything, but I remember one hand that we played against an expert pair, Bill Braucher and Rick Binder, who were playing a strong club system. I had made a lead-directing bid of one of their artificial bids. Ron was not familiar with the concept, and took it as takeout. We ended up in a horrible contract that the opponents quickly doubled. Oh, well, a zero is a zero.

My recollection is that Ron had a home on the cape and another one in Florida. He was still a member of the ACBL in 2023. He had about thirteen points for the year, but he had not attended a regional tournament in New England since 2018.

I have played against Alan Godes many times, including two occasions since the reopening. He and his wife, Charlotte Bailey, have long resided in Needham, MA, but for years they have traveled around the country to play in bridge tournaments.

I don’t really remember the event in which Alan and I played together. He was pleasant enough, but I did not enjoy the occasion. I have often had opportunities to play with him again, but I have been reluctant to take advantage of them. I proudly accept the title of geezer, but Alan was in Junior High when I was born, and his game has not changed much in the decade or so that I have known him.

Both Alan and Charlotte were in attendance at the last D25 tournament of 2023, the regional in Marlborough, MA. Alan played with Adi Chehna, and Charlotte played with a pro, Adam Grossack. They finished third in bracket 1 of the Thursday-Friday KO.

I only played with Bill Gay once, but I have fairly clear memories of the occasion. It occurred at the regional tournament in Nashua, NH, where I was often in need of a partner. Bill and I were matched up by the Partnership Desk and we had agreed upon a convention card. We went over to the table at which the directors were selling entries for the Open Pairs game. In front of us were Marcia West and Paula Najarian. The four of us decided to play in a bracketed team game instead.

Our foursome did not win the event, but we had one surprising victory. Bill and I were playing against Christina Parker, and her sister who was visiting from (I seem to remember) St. Louis. Their teammates were Stewart Rubenstein (Christina’s husband and regular partner) and someone whom I don’t remember. We were big underdogs in the match, but somehow we pulled off a victory. Bill asked me, “Do you know how good that team is?” I told him that I did. I had played against Stewart and Christina often with little success.

Bill has not been to a district tournament since 2018, but he was still a member of the ACBL in 2023, and he earned more than eighty masterpoints through the end of October.

Michelle Blanchard, who is from the Worcester area, is still quite active in tournament bridge in 2023. Eric Vogel and I teamed up with her and Carol Seager in the Gala Regional in the autumn of 2023. That experience, which was not altogether pleasant, has been described here.

I am pretty sure that Michelle and I played as teammates in a sectional tournament in Watertown, MA. We seemed to play pretty well together. I never have done well in any events in Watertown, and so I am sure that we did not come close to winning. If the opportunity presented itself, I would be happy to play opposite her again.

I played with Linda Ahrens in a pairs event held in Hyannis, MA. I remember very little about our actual game together, but I have a fairly vivid recollection of some of the ancillary details.

In the first place I remember that Linda played the Mexican 2♦ convention to handle the hand with balanced distribution and 18-19 high-card points. Most people open balanced hand with 15-17 points with 1NT and those with 20-21 points with 2NT. So, this is used for the ones in between. I have never played it elsewhere before or since.

At the time Linda and her husband Joe Brouillard had a home in Rhode Island and another on the Cape near Hyannis. Before the tournament I drove to Warwick, RI, to play at a club there with Linda. We did not win, but we also did not encounter any major disagreements.

I had the distinction of saying that my partner was the only person who walked from her house to the game in Hyannis. I also was the only person who was brought a home-made sandwich by his partner’s husband during the lunch break. In other ways, unfortunately, my game with Linda was not too memorable.

I took this photo of Linda and Dan. after their victory.

In February of 2017 I was working at the Partnership Desk at the regional tournament in Cromwell, CT. Linda Ahrens had filled out a card indicating that she was looking for a partner for the Mid-Flight Pairs. event.

On the morning of the event Dan Jablonski, a very good player, came to the desk and said that he needed a partner. I matched Dan up with Linda, and they ended up winning the event!

Linda was on the committee that I chaired that awarded the Larry Weiss award to Bob Bertoni in 2018. The details are in Bob’s section of this entry (here).

Paul Lord was from Montreal, but for several years he came down to New England because of his job, which I think involved insurancee. I played as his partner more than once and communicated with him now and then. I have not seen him in quite a few years. However, he was still a member of the ACBL in 2023, had amassed over 3,000 masterpoints, and appeared to be playing regularly.

The last time that I saw Paul he was grumbling about a partner whom he had picked up at a tournament’s Partnership Desk: “He doesn’t know how to defend a hand.”

Diane Storey was a teammate of mine in a knockout. Our team was eliminated in the first round of the Knockout Regional in Cromwell. I have a vague recollection that my partner had been Gary Cohen (introduced here). Diane was probably playing with a guy named Marvin who worked in NYC.

Players who lost in the KO usually played in the Single-session Swiss1, an event that offered only red points. Our partners from the KO wanted to skip the Swiss and go home early. Diane and I were greedy about the chance of winning some points and paired up. The Partnership Desk assigned us to play with a very nice experienced player and a guy with much less experience. I don’t remember either name. My recollection is that we won only one match. The experienced player apologized for his partner’s shenanigans.

I never played as Diane’s partner after that, but I played against her and Marvin often at sectionals. I remember a very bizarre hand from one of those events. I was playing with Peter Katz at a tournament in Hamden, CT. We were playing the Flannery convention, in which 2♦ is used to show a hand with 11-15 high-card points, four spades, and five or more hearts. I have posted a write-up of this hand here. It is the hand that starts after the horizontal line. Diane was LHO. Marvin was RHO.

In 2023 Diane was still a member of the ACBL, but she had not earned any masterpoints all year. Her address on the roster was Vero Beach, FL.

I am pretty sure that we played against the Palmer team in the semifinals. I know all of the people on Don Caplin’s team, and I don’t remember playing them.

Playing with Estelle Margolin from Rego Park, NY, was a real treat for me. She had a lot more points than I did when the Partnership Desk informed my teammates from the HBC, Sally Kirtley and Jeanne Striefler, that she was the only person who was available to play with us in a compact knockout event in Cromwell in 2015.

I was delighted to discover that I had long ago written up and posted details of this event here. It is a pretty long article; just search for “Estelle”.

Estelle was still playing in 2023. She had amassed over 5,600 masterpoints and was a Diamond Life Master.

I must have played as the partner of Esther Watstein at a sectional tournament, but I do not remember the occasion. I do remember playing against her a few times.

I have had many contacts with Esther on the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). She served two terms as president. I was just a representative or an at-large member. Esther is still active as a member of the CBA’s Communications Committee. She also still plays regularly at sectional events, but since the Pandemic I don’t think that she has played outside of the state.

Greg Winkler was from Australia. He lived in Centerville, MA, which is very close to Hyannis, the site of the Senior Regional. The partnership person for the event was one of my regular partners, Ginny Iannini. Greg needed just a few points to make Life Master. I remember him as a very good card player who needed to learn more about bidding. He agreed with this assessment.

I think that I must have played with him more than once. I remember playing in a team event in which our teammates were Charlie Curley and Gene Flynn. I don’t remember how we did.

My other recollection is that after playing in afternoon session in Mansfield, MA, Greg wanted to play in the evening side game. Evidently he just needed a fraction of a point to attain Life Master status. I had to pass; Because I was very tired, I would have made a poor partner anyway. He played with Marcia West and got the points that he needed.

The next year at the tournament in Hyannis I was scheduled to play with Greg a third time. He had been on a vacation, but he promised me that he would be able to play that day. When he had not arrived, I tried to call him, but I got no answer. Ginny was able to find a partner for me, as is explained in the next section.

After this I had no further contact with Greg.

Greg was extremely sociable. He called all the women “love” and al the guys “mate”. I remember that at one tournament someone fell or suffered some other kind of accident. Greg rushed to his/her aid. I did not; I figured that I would likely be in the way of people who knew what they were doing..

I was surprised to discover that in 2023 Greg had almost as many masterpoints as I did, and he earned a lot more throughout the year. Since he has not been at tournaments, he must have been playing online. Although he has almost the same number of points as I had at the time, he was only a Silver Life Master in late 2023. He probably failed to meet the number of gold points required for subsequent ranks.

On the morning that Greg Winkler stood me up in Hyannis (described above) Lynda Flanger of Mayfield, NY, was looking for a partner in the A/X Swiss. She must have already had teammates. I was the only person available.

We had a pretty enjoyable round playing together, but at that point I would have been a lot more comfortable playing in the Open Swiss that was being held at the same time in the Cape Cod Sectional that was going on at the same time in the same hotel.

Lynda died in September of 2022. Her obituary has been posted here. She was still an active member of the ACBL at the time of her death. Despite what the obituary said, she was actually a Sapphire Life Master with over 4,600 masterpoints.

I don’t remember exactly where I met Charlie Curley. I played against him several times when his regular partner was Mike Colburn an actuary who lived in Simsbury, CT.2 They were the top qualifying team for the North American Pairs (NAP) in both 2010 and 2011. They also were the other pair in the epic five-person team that I successfully captained in the sectional in Auburn, MA, that was described here.

I invited Charlie to play on our team in the Mini-Spingold event in Washington, DC, that I described here. At that tournament I somehow lost my red and blue Barça hat. When Charlie and his wife took a vacation to Barcelona, he bought a replacement for me and gave it to me at a subsequent tournament. I was suitably touched.

Charlie won a few D25 tournaments. When I wrote him to request a photo of him with or without his partner, he advised me to just use a photo of Cary Grant. By the way, he also insisted on being called Handsome Charlie Curley.

I only played with Charlie once. It was at a sectional in Auburn, MA. Charlie told me that he had read many of Marty Bergen’s books and pamphlets and suggested that we should just go by his approach. That was OK with me, although it was the only time that I have ever played “Serious 3NT”.

Our round was scuttled by one unfortunate hand. I opened 1♣. Charlie responded 2♥. I interpreted this as a jump-shift, which we were playing as weak (except for Bergen raises). Charlie thought that he was making a standard 2/1 response. Evidently the Bergen books that he had read did not cover this situation.

Charlie owned his own business. During much of our association he was going through the agony of trying to sell it. I commiserated with him. At that point I had already given up on selling TSI (described here). I am pretty sure that in the end, however, Charlie was able to close his deal.

Charlie was still active in the ACBL in 2023. He was closing in on Gold Life Master. However, he has not attended any D25 tournaments since 2018.

I met Tucker Merritt at the HBC, where he was a regular in the Tuesday evening game when I started playing there in 2008. I never played with him at the HBC, but for some reason Tom Gerchman set me up to play with Tucker in a team game in a sectional somewhere in District 3 while he played with Dan Finn or Terry Fair—I don’t remember which.

As usual, we had to meet very early in the morning at the office in Avon where Tom worked. I had to park my car in the open-air garage that was beneath the building. While we were driving to the tournament on the parkway named after one of Tucker’s ancestors I had to memorize Tucker’s convention card, which included a few things that I had never played. I seem to recollect that we played transfer overcalls for 1NT openers.

I think that we held our own in the event, which was a Swiss, perhaps limited to a certain number of points. I am not sure whether we did well enough to place in the overalls. I don’t remember any specifics of this adventure.

I never had a chance to play with Tucker again. He died in 2019. His obituary can be found here.

The partnership coordinator for one of the sectionals in Watertown set me up to play with Lucia Enica (loo CHEE ah) in the Open Pairs game on a Saturday. I corresponded with her by email to establish a convention card with which we both felt comfortable. She convinced me to play a practice game on Bridge Base Online. I was not at all familiar with the interface, and I found the entire experience unnerving. To me it was not bridge. I resolved never to do it again.3

We did not do too well in the event either. My only recollection of it was when I led the ace of a side suit and then the queen. Lucia did not understand that this sequence guaranteed that I also had the king, and she trumped it. She claimed that I was wrong about this, but I could not understand how she could think that I was so silly as to lead the ace from an AQ holding.

Lucia and I never played together as a pair, but we did team up at an equally unsatisfactory attempt to qualify for the Grand National Teams (GNT). My partner was Paul Burnham (introduced here). Hers was Lou DiOrio.

Lucia, who was a psychiatric nurse, was still very active in bridge in 2023, but she had moved to Washington, DC.

I played one session at a regional tournament with a novice player from Rhode Island named Bea Martini. It was probably at the pro-am game that was held in Warwick one year. I remember only that she was rather new to the game.

Bea was still a member of the ACBL in 2023. She amassed a few masterpoints in 2023, but she had not attended any D25 events since 2019. She also did not attend the NABC in Providence in the summer of 2022 even though she lived in East Providence.

I have known Mike Winterfield longer than any of my other partners. He was my first boss at my first job at the Hartford Life in 1972, as described here.

I have seen Mike at the HBC many times and played against him more than a few times. I am pretty sure that my wife Sue played as his partner a few times as well.

When he first started attending games at the club he often played with his wife Jane. She had health problems, an they had relationship problems. They eventually divorced, and she moved away. She died in 2016. I could not find an obituary.

My game with Mike was on a Saturday evening in a pro-am event in the regional tournament in Cromwell, CT, in February of 2016.

We did quite well in the event, finishing in sixth place (out of forty-eight pairs) with a 56.88 percent game, which was good enough for 1.99 masterpoints. I had a good time playing with him and thought that he had quite a bit of potential.

In 2023 Mike mostly played with Barbara Edelstein, who has been his partner for more than five years.

James (really Sun-Ming) Lee has played fairly regularly at the HBC for many years and was still playing pretty often in 2023 when I wrote this. In all of that time he has never really had a regular partner. Since the reopening he has played mostly with Y.C. Hsu.

I only played with him once. It was at the regional tournament in Cromwell. We both needed a partner, and so we paired up. I think that we played in a Mid-Flight pairs game. We did about average.

James has always had a reckless style of play. He loves to play in notrump contracts. He also has shown a propensity for underleading aces on defense.

His most recognizable feature was his posture at the table. He commonly rested his scorecard on his lap and crossed his legs at the knee. When he made any kind of a movement the scorecard would fall on the floor. After several years he had more or less perfected this so that it only happened once or twice per session.

I thoroughly enjoyed teaming up with Brenda Harvey at many tournaments, mostly regionals. My fondest memory is the evening when she, her partner Robert Klopp, and I and my partner, Dick Benedict, celebrated at a restaurant in or near Nashua, NH, the day that she made Life Master.

I also enjoyed the one time that I played with her at a sectional in Hamden, but I don’t remember any details of the occasion.

Brenda moved to St. Augustine, FL. In 2023 she was still a member of the ACBL and played quite a bit.

I knew Pat Nye before I played with her in a game at the Cape. I think that we may have been teammates.

Before the round I disclosed to Pat that I regularly made OBAR BIDS (an acronym for “opponents bid and raise: balance in the direct seat”). I told her that if the opponents bid and raise a major suit, I would bid almost any five-card suit to prevent them from playing in an eight-card fit at the two level. However, when I did it, she raised my bid, and I went down. After the hand, she said, “Well, you warned me.”

In 2023 Pat was still a member of the ACBL, but she had not played in any tournaments since the reopening. On the other hand, the only tournaments that she attended before Covid-19 were on the Cape, and D25 has not sponsored any of those in the last two years.

I played against Tink Tysor, a former IBMer from New Hampshire. I knew how he played, and I thought that our styles would be quite compatible.

We finally played together in an Open Pairs game a year or so before the Pandemic. The result was a disaster, If we were not last, we were certainly close to that.

Tink was still a very active player in 2023.

Sally Kirtley.

I knew Sally Kirtley quite well from both the SBC and the HBC. She often played in both clubs with Jerry Hirsch (introduced here) as a partner. When her mother was still alive she also played with her. When Helen Pawlowski retired as Tournament Manager for D25, Sally replaced her.

Sally also has served as a director for both the HBC and the SBC since Covid-19 caused the mass shutdown. I have worked fairly closely with her at the SBC, and we were also (at least in theory) both members of the D25 Tournament Scheduling Committee.

George Bickford.

I think that Sally and I played together once or twice before the reopening. We definitely have played twice at regional tournaments in 2022 and 2023. We did not do well in the Open Pairs. Part of the problem was that, as Tournament Manager, she was distracted by administrative aspects of the tournament.

Sally was an attorney, and she was still practicing in the same law firm as her husband, George Bickford, who has shown up for bridge in at least one emergency.

Paul Pearson, more than anyone else, helped me get started with bridge in the twenty-first century. That story has been posted here. I often communicated with him via email when I encountered difficulties, especially in the area of competitive bidding. Paul understood the Law of Total Tricks (LAW) quite well, and he directed me to sources that explained its complexity. This knowledge stood me in very good stead against players at the lower levels.

Paul and me in Warwick.

After that I played against him and his primary partner, Laurie Robbins, many times, but I don’t think that I ever played with Paul at either the SBC or the HBC. Our first pairing was in a Swiss event at a sectional tournament in Hamden. Our teammates were two people from the HBC, Joan Brault (introduced here) and Michele (mee KAY lay or Mike) Raviele. I think that we had a pretty good result, but Paul did not like the way that Mike bid one hand.

Our greatest success, however, was at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, in 2015. We played in the ABC Pairs and finished fifth out of thirty-eight pairs and won both the B and C flights. The reason that the results sheet at right says that it was “Based on 67 Tables” was because there were an additional 38 tables in the Gold Rush.

We hoped to defend our crowns in the same event in 2016, but I had a commitment to play in a two-day knockout that started on the previous day. Paul died of cancer in December of 2016. Shortly thereafter Paul’s wife Sue contacted me about donating Paul’s bridge books. I kept a few and gave the rest of them to the HBC.

Paul had been a programmer longer than I had. In his day they coded in assembler. He also had a great interest in orienteering. Paul died in 2016. His obituary can be found here.

I played one two-session game with Geoff Phipps, a Platinum Life Master, in Honolulu after Ann Hudson had said that she did not want to play with me any more. It was only a little short of a miracle that he was available. He probably would not have agreed to play with me if I was not already familiar with a large set of conventions that Geoff and Randy Johnson used.

My game with Geoff has been described in some detail here. What I did not know at the time was that a photographer was taking photos of the playing area and that one of those photos would be used on the cover of a book by Bill Treble. I was front and center, but Geoff was not included.

Geoff lived most of his life in New Hampshire, but he moved to Bluffton, SC, at some point. Nevertheless he returned for the 2023 edition of the Granite State Getaway in Nashua.

Sabrina approved this photo of herself and Darryl Legassie.

Bridge in New England has a diverse population. There are two exceptions, however. The first is that old people are disproportionately represented. The second is the shocking lack of representation of Black people. Sabrina Miles was unquestionably the most successful Black bridge player in New England during my association with the game.

I played with her for only one two-session game at a district tournament in (I think) Warwick. We had planned to spend a half hour going over our card before the game, but she got involved in a conversation with someone. I remember that we had a very bad score in the first session. Although I had thought that the second was just as bad, we actually did much better.

Sabrina won several regional events. She did not like the photo that I had used of her and asked me to take another. I agreed, and from that point forward I used that photo. She was the only person who made such a request.

Sabrina lived in Mansfield, MA. She served as the partnership person at tournaments held there several times. She set me up for very pleasant games with the next two entries.

Sabrina was still an active participant in D25 events in 2023.

I enjoyed the preparation session with Ru Terajewicz as much as I did the round. The things that she insisted that we go over before the first session were very well chosen. I already knew how (at least in New England) the best players bid with a six-card major in the fourth seat. Ru, who was (and still is in 2023) an accomplished teacher explained how to handle a seven-card suit in that situation.

That didn’t come up during the round. We both played well enough to score well, but it was not our day.

Although Ru moved to Ponte Vedra, FL, she has remained very active in bridge in 2023. However, we have not seen her in New England.

Me and Darryl.

The other fine player that Sabrina set me up with in Mansfield was Darryl Legassie, who had been Sabrina’s steady partner for several years. Darryl and I also played in the Open Pairs, but we seemed to click better than Ru and I had.

When the last card was played we finished sixth out of seventy-three pairs and first in Flight B. This was a really great result for two guys who had never really met before.

Darryl’s email address started with lorddarryl and in the “Prefix” field on his record on the ACBL I did not check his entry in Burke’s Peerage, but Darryl assured me that I need not use his chosen title when addressing him.

Darryl was still an active player in 2023, but he had not appeared in any regional tournaments in D25.

The only Grand Life Master with whom I have played was Mark Aquino. He was also elected Regional Director of Region 2 during the Pandemic. That meant that he was the only person representing D24 (NYC and Long Island) and D25 on the ACBL board.

Mark (right) won his first NABC championship with Shome Mukherjee.

Prior to that I worked with him closely when he was the head of the B’s Needs Committee, President of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC), and then District Director. Mark was a consummate politician who knew how to work a room. This was quite rare in a bridge player. He also won the Individual tournament in Newton twice.

I have twice played with Mark. The first time was when he invited me to play in the evening side game at a regional tournament. I remember two hands. On one of them I made a lead-directing bid on a hand that the opponents had been bidding. Mark correctly deduced what I had and bid 3NT. The problem was that if the opponent on his left did not lead hearts, the suit that they had been bidding, he only had eight tricks. On the opening lead he chose a different suit. Mark, however, threw him in a little later, and he succumbed to the temptation and led hearts.

I do not remember the outcome of the other hand, but in that case Mark doubled for a lead. I complied, but he mildly chastised me for not leading the top of my KQJ sequence in a different suit.

Our score for the session was a little over 60 percent, which was good enough for second place.

My memorable round with Mark in Honolulu has been described here.

Bob Bertoni.

Bob Bertoni was known as the Grand Poobah of New England Bridge. He served as VP and then President of the NEBC. At the same time he was President of the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA). He then ran for District Director against the incumbent, Mark Aquino, and won. He held that position and was running for Regional Director when he died in 2021. His obituary has been posted here.

Tuna Snider.

I may have met Bob in 1977 when I was coaching debate at the University of Michigan. Don Huprich, Stewart Mandel, and I made an epic journey to New England (described here) to participate in the tournament at Boston College and two other colleges. At the time Bob was attending BC on a debate scholarship. Bob’s coach, Tuna Snider, threw a party for some of the people at the tournament. We were invited, and we attended. We met some of the BC debaters; we might have met Bob, who was almost certainly in attendance.

Bob asked me to play with him three times. The first occasion was in the Open Pairs at a District 3 regional tournament in Danbury, CT. Bob was there to negotiate with the D3 officials concerning how much they would pay to District 25 to be able to use the Crowne Plaza hotel there for this tournament. He resolved the issue.

We finished above average in the bridge game. We might have won a point or two.

Our second game was when Bob was campaigning for District Director. He came down to Orange for a sectional and attend the U126 board meeting. We played in the Sunday Swiss together. I have forgotten who our teammates were. We played OK, but I think that our teammates let us down.

The last time that I played with Bob was at an EMBA sectional. Somehow he found himself without a partner. So, he asked me to drive to Watertown to play with him. I was more than happy to do so. We finished near the middle.

In 2018 I had the honor of chairing the committee to elect the winner of the Larry Weiss award. A detailed explanation of the criteria of the award has been posted here. Bob was the winner. In 2022 I talked the Executive Committee into retiring the award and presenting a new trophy called the Weiss-Bertoni award. As the most recent winner of the Larry Weiss award, I also chaired that committee. The details are posted here.

Bob was closely involved in the early years of my career as webmaster, database manager, and email manager for D25. That period is explored here.

I really miss Bob Bertoni. District 25 really needed his leadership after the reopening.

1. I took the name of this widely disparaged event as my nom de plume for the “View from B-low” columns that I wrote about my exploits in District 25 tournaments and elsewhere. They were posted on NEBridge.org. I have created an index for the ones that were still available in 2023 here.

2. Mike joined the HBC in 2010. He may have played at the club a few times, but I never saw him. He dropped his membership the next year. He never came to a game at the SBC. In 2023 he was still an active member of the ACBL, but he had not won any masterpoints in years. In fact, he would still be eligible for Flight C of the NAP. I seriously doubt that anyone has ever competed in the NABC finals of that event three times.

3. For the most part I have kept to this plan through 2023. I played online with Ken Leopold and Eric Vogel a few times in preparation for the online qualifying for the GNT. I played with my wife Sue a couple of times during the Pandemic. Other than that I only have signed on anonymously to BBO to play a few hands against the robots before games at the HBC.

2008-2019 Bridge Partners at Tournaments Part 1: Steady

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Partners at regionals and sectionals. Continue reading →

This entry contains information about the partners with whom I played regularly at tournaments before the Pandemic. Many experiences with those people have already been described elsewhere. Part 2, which is posted here, is about partners with whom I played at tournaments only once or twice.

I enjoyed playing in pairs games at the clubs for the first few years when I was still working a very large number of hours. During this period I read the Bridge Bulletin from cover to cover every month and tried to make sense of the dazzling array of tournaments that were being held around the country. When I started playing at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) with Dick Benedict (introduced here), he had already put together a group of people who played in tournaments together. He asked me to join that group, and I was eager to do so.

Partners from the SBC: I am not positive, but I think that the first tournament in which I played was with Dick as my partner in a 299er (restricted to players with less than 300 masterpoints) game in the Knockout Regional at a hotel in Cromwell, CT. That would probably have been in February of 2008. I remember that it was held in a separate room across from the main ballroom. During a break Dick escorted me across the hall to see what the players there were doing. I found the vista stupefying. The place was huge, and it was full of bridge tables. At each one were seated four people, most of whom had huge heads. I have never heard anyone discuss this aspect of bridge, but it was the first thing that I noticed. I felt that this was where I belonged.

The game in the 299er room was run by Sue Miguel. She reminded me of a grade school teacher. She was very proud of the fact that the candy that she offered to her charges contained more chocolate than could be obtained elsewhere. The 299er games seemed rinkiy-dink to me. On the one hand, the games seemed less challenging than the ones at either the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) or the SBC; on the other I had a hard time understanding what the opponents’ bids meant. After just a few sessions I determined that although I found the concept of tournaments fascinating, I wanted more than the 299er rooms had to offer. In retrospect I must admit that this was probably hubris.

At first Dick’s preferred partner at tournament was Virginia Labbadia. She was, as I recall a retired salesperson for Xerox. I played on a few teams with them. Dick offered to help her make Life Master if she would help him. He was shocked that she turned him down, and so he asked me.

Eventually Dick and I had great success together playing in bracketed team games (knockouts, compact knockouts, and round robins) with Robert Klopp and Brenda Harvey. Many of our adventures have already been described here. Dick already knew Robert and Brenda when we started playing together. He probably had played against them at tournaments.

One of the regulars at the SBC, Sonja Smith2, recommended that her son, Steve Smith,3 try playing with me at the games in Simsbury. Shortly thereafter Dick, who was a Life Master by then, decided he did not want to play with me in Simsbury. Steve and I started playing there and on Tuesday evenings at the HBC. We also attended several memorable tournaments together. Most of those exploits, including our trip to Reno, NV, have already been described here.

One thing that I neglected to mention was that Steve seldom carried any cash with him. More than once I had to pay his table fees for him. Of course he paid me back. Cash to him was an old person’s money.

Steve bought a house in the Forest Park section of Springfield, MA. He rented out his spare bedrooms to other guys. When I drove there to pick him up I never knew what I would encounter. In at least one case I had to wait for him to get dressed.

Nearly all of our car trips to tournaments were interesting. I remember that Steve told me once about an idea that he had for a dating app. He was serious about developing it and marketing it. I thought that he was crazy. I never learned whether anything ever came of it.

Steve and I were both fans of Phil Hendrie, a radio host from Los Angeles, who conducted outrageous and offensive interviews of himself using other voices. After a few minutes he would invite people to call in. Many people did, and the results were hilarious. Phil’s regular listeners never called because they knew that it was a stunt.

Steve and I both occasionally listened to Art Bell on his Coast to Coast AM radio show. Steve once played for me a recording of Phil Hendrie interviewing himself as someone accompanying Art Bell on a mission to find aliens that had landed near Las Vegas.

I also played bridge with Steve’s mother Sonja a few times We were partners once at the SBC and once or twice at the HBC. We also played together for two sessions at the sectional in Orange that was held in June of 2022. That event has been documented here.

I went to quite a few tournaments with Sue Rudd. When we started playing together I was a Life Master and she was not. This was in spite of the fact that she had joined the ACBL seventeen years before I did. I have written extensively about my long relationship with Sue. You can read about many of the experiences here.

Sue stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2010. She was the only person whom I ever heard complain vociferously about the cost of playing bridge. Then again, she also complained about the cost of gasoline and just about everything else. I suppose that it was difficult for her to manage her expenses on the fixed income that she received as a former employee of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. On the other hand, one of her sons paid for quite a few foreign vacations for her, and she often mentioned how many famous ski resorts on different continents that she had visited over her lifetime.

Sue still played bridge occasionally at the end of 2023, but I don’t know of any sanctioned games in which she was participating other than occasional appearances at the SBC.

My occasional partnerships with Jerry Hirsch were documented pretty thoroughly here. As of November 2023 he still played with Sally Kirtley nearly every Tuesday morning at the HBC and Wednesday evening at the SBC. His smiling face has not been seen at a tournament for some time before Covid-19 arrived.

My last (as of November 2023) regular partner at the SBC was Ken Leopold. I have recounted some of our many adventures together here. Ken was still working as a physician as of late 2023. Since the Pandemic I have not played with him in any tournaments, although he asked me to play in the 2023 Gala Regional in Marlborough. I had to decline because of a previous commitment to another player. Most of the time he has played with his wife, Lori.

In the fall of 2023 Ken started directing the Saturday afternoon pairs game at the HBC. It was sort of an experiment.

Partners from the HBC: The stories about my partners from the HBC that are recounted here include many recollections about tournament play, as well.

I played with Tom Gerchman at quite a few tournaments, including the NABC in Boston in 2008, at which time I had less than fifty masterpoints. That experience and many others have been documented here.

After I had stopped playing with Gerch I was subjected to one more instance in which I had to sit across from him. Both of us were playing in the Individual Regional Tournament in Newton, MA, in January. In individual events players have different partners for each round. So, in a session of twenty-seven boards they would play with nine different partners. By chance one of my seven was Gerch.

On the first hand he opened 3♦, a preemptive bid that indicated a below average hand with seven diamonds. The player on my right passed. I also passed, which told Tom that I had fewer than three diamonds, and I did not think that we could take ten tricks. The player on my left bid 3♥.

Tom’s first bid had limited his hand. That made me the captain. Nevertheless, he channeled his inner Mister Christian and he bid 4♦. The ONLY excuse for doing this would be if he discovered that he had actually had eight diamonds. He didn’t.

After two passes the player on my left reluctantly bid 4♥. This raised the stakes a lot. Now our opponents might potentially get 620 points for a game contract as opposed to 140 or 170 for the three-level bid. Tom did not hesitate. He took the 5♦ card from his bidding box and set it on the table. The next player immediately doubled, of course.

I really felt like calling the director and asking him/her if I could join the opponents in the double. I had played nothing but pass cards. Now I was going to be the dummy. Why must I be punished for my partner’s reckless and totally unilateral bidding?

Now that I have had time to think about it, I should have redoubled. We were going to get a zero anyway. Why not make Gerch sweat a little more.

In fact, Tom and I ended up getting zeroes on all three hands. This was an astounding result. Of all the pairs playing these three hands—probably at least ten—we did worse than all of them all three times. I am happy to say that that was the last time that I ever had to play across from Gerch.

My first team event was at a regional tournament at the Hilton Hotel in Danbury, CT,4 in the autumn of 2008. Dick and I played together. Our teammates were Virginia and Inge Schuele (ING uh SHOO luh), one of Dick’s regular partners at the club. Our team had a total of less than 600 masterpoints. Our opponents had at least ten times that amount. We got pasted.5

Inge Schuele.

The match lasted all morning. Afterwards the four of us ate lunch in the hotel’s restaurant and discussed what to do in the afternoon. There was a 199er pairs game in the afternoon. Both Inge and I had less than 200 points, and so we could play in it. The fact that we had not played together was not of great import. We used the card that Inge played with Dick, and I adjusted. I seem to remember that Dick and Virginia played in the pairs games for seniors, which at that time was anyone over 60.

After lunch I insisted on finding a quiet place at the hotel so that I could take a short nap. In my working days I always did this.

Our opposition in the 199er event was several steps below the level of our opponents in the knockout. They made many mistakes. When all was said and done Inge and I had a score well over 60 percent, and we were first overall. We were presented with small trophies, and out photos were taken. Our pictures appeared in the next day’s Bulletin for the tournament. This was the only trophy that I ever won in bridge, and it was the only time that my photo appeared in print until the time that my image appeared on the cover of a bridge book written by a Canadian.6

Although I don’t think that I ever paired up with Inge at the HBC, I am positive that we played together at several tournaments. I learned that Inge spoke Italian and in days gone by had conducted tours of parts of Italy. Her husband, Werner (VAIR nair), was a retired airline pilot who flew for Lufthansa.

I vividly remember one hand that Inge and I played together in Sturbridge, MA. It might have been at the qualifier of the North American Pairs that was held there every year. Inge had opened 1♣. I had four clubs, but my primary responsibility was to bid a four-card major (hearts or spades). She rebid her clubs, and the opponents then entered the auction. I used the principles of Losing Trick Count7 (LTC) to determine that we could probably make 5♣, and that was what I bid. Sure enough, she was able to win the requisite eleven tricks, and there was no chance for a twelfth.

LTC does not always work, but it is a good tool for estimating the total number of tricks you probably can take in a suit contract. Inge had never heard of this technique, but she later told me that Werner, who also played bridge, had heard of it and used it.

Inge has not played in a tournament since 2018, and she stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2022, at which time she had reached the rank of Bronze Life Master. I have not seen her at the HBC since the reopening in 2021, but she might still play elsewhere.

I must close this section with a startling fact. My wife Sue told me more than once that she had been jealous of Inge and had worried that I would run off to Italy with her.

Shortly after I stopped playing with Tom Gerchman I asked Michael Dworetsky to be my partner on Tuesday evenings at the HBC. After that he sometimes worked me in when his regular partner was not available. However, we did play quite a bit in tournaments. The most memorable of those occasions have been documented here.

I recently discovered that Michael won the Barb Shaw trophy in 2011. It was annually awarded to the Flight C player who earned the most masterpoints at a designated sectional in Connecticut. The CTBridge.org website misspelled his last name, capitalizing the W and leaving off the D. I told the webmaster about the mistake a month ago, but a month or so has now passed, and it had not been rectified.

The tournament took place from March 4 through March 11 in 2011. I played with Michael all three days. We had a terrific tournament. On Friday afternoon we finished second in C in the open pairs. On Saturday morning we finished second in C in the B/C pairs. In the afternoon we won the B/C pairs, outscoring the other twenty-five teams. In the B/C Sunday Swiss we teamed up with Tom Gerchman and Linda Starr and finished first in a field of eighteen teams. All told, we won 11.49 points, which was more than all but eleven players at the tournament. All of them had a lot more experience and masterpoints than I did. I was not eligible for the trophy because I was already a Life Master, and so Michael got to keep it for a year.

The most dramatic moment that I ever experienced in bridge was when I was playing in a Swiss event with Michael as my partner. Our opponents were Jade Barrett, a professional from South Dakota, and a female client. Our teammates were Bob and Shirley Derrah, who in that match were playing against two experts from Connecticut.

The match was fairly tight until the last hand, which had remarkable distribution. Michael and I had a lot of hearts. Our opponents had spades. We bid to 4♥. The client bid 4♠.. Eventually Michael bid 6♥., and she bid 6♠.. Michael passed. I had a void in a side suit that I had not mentioned and the ♠A. I was pretty sure that, if all of the suits were distributed as seemed apparent from the bidding, that our side could take thirteen tricks as long as hearts were trumps. So, I bid 7♥., and she doubled.

Michael had to play it very carefully, but every suit was as I expected. He managed to get all thirteen tricks. At the other table our counterparts stopped at 6♥., and the Derrahs did not double. The swing was large enough for us to claim a victory in the match. It was a huge upset. What made this very special was the fact that it was not a fluke. I used what I knew from the bidding and rightly determined that we could take all the tricks.

While researching the 2016 NABC I discovered that Michael and I had played together in that tournament in two bracketed Round Robins. In the first one we teamed up with a couple from New Jersey and won our bracket. In the second one we played with the Derrahs and finished third.

Michael and his wife Ellen moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL. Michael still seems to play a lot of bridge. He even made it back to New England for the Granite State Regional in Nashua in 2023. I also saw him at an event in Auburn, MA, shortly before the Pandemic.

Dave Landsberg was not my best partner, but he was my favorite. I liked him a lot, and I admired him. Our adventures together have been chronicled here. Included there are the few times that I played with Pat Fliakos. I met both of them in the Tuesday evening games at the HBC.

On the last day of the Fall NABC in Providence in 2014 I played with Dave in bracket #7 of the RIBA Bracketed B teams event. The previous day the team that we were both on had narrowly won a similar event that is described here. On that occasion we were just teammates. On the last day we played as partners; our teammates were Felix Springer and Ken Leopold. This event was not nearly as close. What I remember most about it was that Felix and Ken filed two protests of director’s decisions, and both were rejected. That score of 114 is astoundingly high, much higher than the scores of winners of any of the other brackets.

I played with Felix Springer at many tournaments. Most often he was a teammate, but we also were partners quite a few times, especially at NABC events. Felix had played at high-level events when he was at Columbia, and he developed the same taste for national competition that I had. Our most successful pairing was for the 0-1500 Mini-Spingold in Washington that is described in the Paul Burnham section.

In the autumn of 2019 we played in the NABC in San Francisco. For some reason I did not keep notes for this tournament. So, I must rely on my memory.

Our primary objective was to do well in the Super Seniors pairs and the Mini-Blue Ribbon pairs. We came very close to making it to the second day in each, but we fell just short of both of those goals. However, we did finish fifth in the Saturday BC pairs and the Thursday BC pairs. We also teamed up with Bob Sagor and Judy Hyde to finish a very close second in bracket #1 of the Wednesday bracketed teams. All told, we won 26.23 gold points together.

When I arrived at the airport it was late in the evening, and I was very sleepy. I was tricked into using a credit card skimmer that was attached to the machine that sold BART tickets. I had to cancel the card, but I did not lose any money.

The tournament was the last NABC in which NABC events like the two that we played in were scheduled for afternoon and evening as opposed to morning and afternoon. I had great difficulty maintaining my concentration in the evening sessions. I consumed a lot of coffee. There were no concessions in the basement in the evenings. When I needed a coffee I had to race up the escalators to the first floor.

I remember several ancillary details about the tournament. The games were in the basement of one of the two Marriott hotels. One morning while I was taking the escalator down to the playing area my Goodwill Committee pin fell off and landed pin-side down between two metal bars on the step in front of me. I had a coffee cup in one hand and papers in the other. I tried to reach down to save it, but I was unable to grasp it before it disappeared into the bottom of the escalator. Felix and I walked both stayed in the Marriott across from Union Square. At the time I was still bothered by foot pain after a half mile or so.

Felix gave me a bottle of wine that he had won by winning a section in an evening side game. I saved the bottle as a souvenir. He also let me share his Uber ride back to the airport. Our driver was from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Tournament partners from outside of the Hartford area: I played a lot more tournament bridge than most of of my partners at the HBC and SBC. Listed in this section are the people with whom I had more than a passing relationship. That is, I played with them for more than one or two sessions, and we spent some time making sure that we agreed on our methods.

I met Ginny Iannini in 2013. At the time she was playing with her wheelchair-bound husband, Bill King, in some of the same events in which I participated. They won the Gold Rush Swiss in the Knockout Regional in Cromwell, CT, in February of 2014. This was the first tournament at which I launched my program of taking photos of the winners of events and posting them on the NEBridge.org website. I dutifully took the photo8 of their team with my point-and-shoot Canon camera.

Only one other winning team came to see me for a photo in that entire tournament. It made me realize that I would need to hunt down the winning pairs and teams and beg them to let me snap a photo of them. That meant that this project would entail much more work than anticipated, but I was committed to do it, and I committed to doing it for eight years.

I enjoyed working and playing with Ginny. After her husband’s death she became pretty devoted to bridge. She lived in Brewster, MA, which is on Cape Cod. She took bridge lessons there from a very fine player, Steve Rzewski..9 I learned the Blooman convention from her, as well as Spiral (which we called Q&Q, short for quantity and quality).

At one point Ginny asked me in an email if I was married. I pointed her to an abbreviated form of the journal that I had kept of one of our Larry Cohen cruises, entitled “Honeymoon for One.” The whole journal is posted here. She occasionally talked about her problems with her first husband, a doctor as I remember. She made it clear that she took him to the cleaners when they got divorced. She also told me about a dentist whom she had been dating while we were playing together.

In those early years Ginny was pretty active in the administration of bridge in New England. She was elected to the Board of Directors for the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA), she was a member of the Tournament Scheduling Committee, and she was the tournament chairman of the Senior Regional on Cape Cod at least once. The very first email that I sent out in support of a regional tournament was that one.

Ginny and I did pretty well together. We won numerous events, including one at the NABC in Providence in 2014. My original write-up of the most exciting and nerve-wracking event of my bridge career was lost in the catastrophic computer crash of 2015. I will need to try to recreate it from memory. We were playing in bracket #6 of the Mary Carter Bracket B Swiss on Saturday, December 6, 2014. Our teammates were Dave Landsberg and Pat Fliakos. We were doing well throughout the event, but a team of players from the Montreal area was only a little behind us when we played against them in the last round.

Ginny and I were playing against two ladies. Dave and Pat faced two men. The match seemed to come down to one critical hand. Ginny opened the bidding and then reversed, showing a strong hand with at least seventeen high-card points. She had that, but barely, and some of her holdings were a little shaky. She had no aces. We ended up a slam that I had to play, and I was unable to find a way to make it. When the last hand had been played, we were crestfallen as we walked to the other table to compare scores with Dave and Pat.

It was as we feared. Our counterparts had stopped in game and easily made their contract. That swing offset some small positives that we amassed on other hands. We clearly lost the match. However, because of the lead we had coming into the match, we still would be ahead by two victory points. The captain of the Quebecois team brought the tabulation card to our table for confirmation, but he claimed a significantly larger margin of victory than we had calculated. I walked with him back to their table and discovered that the ladies had made a mistake, and we did indeed win by two victory points. To put that in perspective, the two teams that tied for third were 29 points behind the Canadians. Furthermore, their score would have won any other bracket.

I always enjoyed playing with Ginny. I think that I might have been too intense or too ambitious for her. She never officially dumped me, but she stopped accepting my invitations, and eventually I got the message. Another factor was that after she remarried, she played a lot less bridge. She still seemed to be playing somewhere in 2023, but she has not attended any tournaments since 2019.

I did receive an email from her when I solicited nominations for the Weiss-Bertoni award (described here). She was the first person to nominate Joe Brouillard, the eventual winner.

We all sat at a round table at Siena.

We enjoyed several suppers together during tournaments. I remember a few distinctly. The first was at Siena, a very nice restaurant in East Greenwich, RI. Bob Bertoni, who was the D25 president at the time, was in attendance, as well as several people from the Boston area. Two of them were quite drunk. Ginny found it curious, but I found it unpleasant.

We also ate at a restaurant called Il Forno in Providence with people from the Cape whom Ginny knew and had arranged to be our teammates. The woman was named Ginny O’Toole. I have forgotten the guy’s name. That was another rather strange occasion.

We ate at least twice at Cafe Fiore, a restaurant in Cromwell, CT, near the hotel that hosted the regional tournament there for many years. On the last of those occasions I disclosed my idea for a novel about Pope Benedict IX (posted here). She had a strange and disturbing reaction: “You want to be the pope!”

I once made the mistake of admitting that when I first met Ginny I had considered her likely to be “high maintenance.” However, after I got to know her I judged that my initial judgment had been wrong. I considered this admission as a compliment to her, but I think that she was at least slightly offended.

Ginny was very active in fundraising for the preservation and/or restoration of a historical piece of property on Cape Cod. I think that it was a captain’s residence or something like that. I never learned what happened to that project.

Ginny was tall and thin. Opponents often thought that we were married. Her fingers were preternaturally long. Her span was almost a match for mine, and the span of my left hand is eleven inches.

I was astounded to learn that Ginny was ten months older than I was. She certainly did not look it. She kept in shape by doing yoga. The last thing that I remembered her saying to me was that from that point on she would always wear yoga pants to tournaments. I haven’t seen her in several years, and I definitely miss her.

Paul Burnham was a lawyer who lived and worked in the town of Wilton, CT, a long way from Hartford. Nevertheless, he has recently been a member in good standing of the HBC. He hardly ever makes the drive to play in anything except special games. I know that our first time as teammates was in the 0-1500 Mini-Spingold in Washington, DC, in the summer of 2016. I somehow set Paul up to play with Charlie Curley from the Boston area while I played with Felix Springer. We made it to the semifinals of this event. The last match was the first and only time that I played with screens. It made me quite nervous because my handwriting had already deteriorated somewhat, and my notes to my screenmate were difficult to read.

At some point Paul and I committed to play as partners in a tournament. In preparation I drove to a town in southeastern Connecticut where there was a club game that Paul frequented. The competition was tough, and we were not used to each other’s styles. We did not win any points.

I also played in an open pairs game with Paul either at that tournament or at a subsequent NABC tournament in Toronto. I used the Flannery convention, but Paul was unaware that it was on our card.

I also played with Paul for three days at the summer NABC in Providence in 2022. For some reason we were not able to click on that occasion either. The story of that experience begins here.

I am not sure why Paul and I have had so little success as a partnership. It would seem to me that are styles are compatible. I like to play with him, and I hope to get another chance to do so.

I don’t remember how I met Jeanne Martin, who lived in the Worcester area. Her husband was an expert player who died several years before I met her.

Perhaps we were set up by the partnership desk at some tournament in the late teens. We played together at several tournaments. I remember that we were in a team event in Mansfield, MA, and she finally appeared about ten minutes after the first round was scheduled to start. She said that her car’s GPS gave her instructions that sent her in circles. In the age of Google Maps it astounded me that she used a built-in GPS in her car rather than the one that comes free with every cellphone and is supported and maintained by Google.

We did not win any events together, but we both seemed to enjoy playing together. I drove up to Auburn, MA, which was the site of the sectionals and unit-wide games for the Central Massachusetts Bridge Association (CMBA). Our results seemed to get worse over time.

Jeanne once appeared in a cameo role in a feature-length move. She was in an ice cream parlor. She sent me a file that contained a video of the scene.

Before the Pandemic Jeanne was on the board of directors for unit 113 (CMBA). She told me that she did not get along with some of the other board members and wanted to resign.

Jeanne attended the 2022 Gala Regional in Marlborough, MA, but she did not win any points. She still seemed to be playing bridge online or somewhere in 2023.

The team of Trevor Reeves, Bob Weld, me, and Bob Sagor, won Bracket 2 of the Thursday-Friday knockout in Nashua in 2019.

I played with Bob Sagor at tournaments in Nashua, NH. He lived in Greenfield, MA, which is on I-91 near the Vermont state. His principal partner was Judy Hyde. They often played together at events sponsored by the Northampton Bridge Club and at tournaments. He sometimes played with me when Judy was not available.

I do not have many specific memories of the bridge games that I played with Bob. Since I had also played with Judy, it was rather easy for us to agree on a card. I vividly remember that on one occasion I was complaining something stupid that one of my partners (maybe my wife Sue) had done. Bob asked me wryly, “Am I better of worse than them?” I said that I needed more time to think about it.

Like nearly all bridge players Bob had an interesting backstory. He was a couple of years older than I was, which meant that the draft was a big factor when he finished college. He and his wife Claire moved to Nova Scotia to avoid it, and they only returned when its avoidance was no longer considered a crime. In real life he was a veterinarian.

During the Pandemic Bob was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. When the bridge world reopened in 2021 he was unable to participate in live events. However, he still was very active in online play, especially with the Noho Club. An article about Bob’s involvement with bridge in western Massachusetts that was printed in the Greenfield Recorder in June of 2023 has been posted here.

I was assigned by the partnership desk to play with Sohail Hasan in the open pairs game on Thursday, November 7, 2019, at the Harvest Regional in Mansfield, MA. We hit it off pretty well. We finished eleventh overall out of fifty pairs and fifth in the B strat. The conventions that we played were quite similar. His approach to 2NT responses was much more sophisticated than what I was accustomed to. Unfortunately, we later came to understand that we had substantial disagreements about what some of the entries on our convention card meant.

I learned that Sohail had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and had been employed at a Wall Street firm (LinkedIn page here). He had a house on Cape Cod and another in New York or New Jersey. Most of his acquaintances in the bridge world seemed to come from NYC or New Jersey.

During the Pandemic Sohail asked me if I wanted to play in the NABC in the summer of 2022 in Providence, RI. I agreed to play with him in two team games in which we did pretty well. Unfortunately, our teammates in that last event contracted Covid-19 and had to drive home early. So, on the last day we played in the fast pairs, and I had a miserable time. The details of these adventures have been recounted here.

The Ocean State Regional has been held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel for many years.

Over the rest of the summer Sohail and I maintained email communications. We committed to play together in the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI. I have explored here the miserable time that I had at what had always been my favorite tournament. I encountered several problems with Sohail. He has a fiery temper, and he unleashed it several times at me and once in even greater fury at a pro that he knew from the New York area. He insisted that the XYZ convention did not apply when the participants bid 1x-1y-1NT. I found this preposterous. He pointed me to an article by Larry Cohen that advocated playing New Minor Forcing in that situation. I replied that LC was an outlier in this regard. Furthermore, the name of the convention was derived from the fact that it could be used in any sequence of three calls that ended with a bid at the one level: most commonly 1x-1y-1z.

The biggest problems began with the fact that he played BOSTON (Bottom Of Something ; Top of Nothing) leads, but he refused to mark them on his convention card, and if anyone asked what he played, he always answered “Standard”, which was not true. He also showed up at the very last minute (or later) for every. This bothered me a lot because I wanted to make sure that we were on the same page about everything, and we played some conventions that were new to me. Finally, he had a peculiar overhand style to playing his cards, which resulted in him sometimes slamming them on the table. When others objected to this technique, he sometimes responded with unnecessary aggression.

In short, I decided after the Warwick debacle not to play with Sohail again. He has attended two NABC events since then, but no D25 tournaments.

The adventures at tournaments that involved partners with whom I played only once or twice are posted here. The new partners with whom I have played since the renaissance of bridge after the Pandemic are described here.

Virginia Labbadia.

1. Virginia Labbadia is not in my database of ACBL members, which means that she stopped paying dues before I started downloading rosters in 2014. She definitely played at the HBC rather regularly before the Pandemic. I have no way of discovering if she ever made Life Master.

2. Sonja Smith and her husband Chris moved to Chapel Hill, NC, in 2022.

3. Steve was still a member of the ACBL in late 2023, but he only had 122 masterpoints, most of which he won with me more than ten years earlier.

4. Although Danbury is definitely part of New England and therefore in District 25, the tournament there was sponsored by District 3 (northern New Jersey and eastern New York). D25 had reportedly tried to use the site for a regional at least once, but the attendance was not good. Before the Pandemic D3 paid D25 a small sum for the right to use the site. I think that the hotel is now called Zero Degrees. D3 has not used it since the reopening.

5. What I most remember from this match was the fact that the opposition used the 2♦ bid to show a hand with 11-15 masterpoints, a singleton or void, and at least four cards in the other three suits. This hand is difficult to bid with standard methods. I remember spending hours going over hand records that I had collected and projected how I would bid hands with that distribution with or without the Mini-Roman convention. I intended to collect enough evidence to convince Dick to use it. However, my research did not disclose that it had much, if any, value. One of the best defenses is just to pass. The players who used Mini-Roman often ended up one level two high.

6. The book is called Winning at Matchpoints, and the author is named Bill Treble. I use the photo (which was taken at the NABC in Honolulu in 2017) to demonstrate my game face at the bridge table.

7. Losing Trick Count is explained here and elsewhere on the Internet and in print.

8. The photo that I took, which had an embarrassing smudge on it, has apparently been lost forever. I think that the original was on an external hard drive for which I have no power cord. The photo that was posted was lost in the catastrophic computer event on NEBridge.org in 2015.

9. Steve Rzewski won the Larry Weiss award in 2010. I also dealt with Steve when I asked the experts in the district if they could supply articles for the NEBridge.org. He was a regular contributor.

2004-2009 Partners at the Simsbury Bridge Club Part 1

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Partners at Eno Hall. Continue reading →

I vividly remember my first night at the Simsbury Bridge Club. Paul Pearson had given me contact information for the director of the club, Paula Beauchamp (pronounced BOW shahmp). I told her that I would like to play on the following Wednesday, which was, I think, May 19 or perhaps May 12, 2004. She told me that the games were held at Eno Hall, located on the main street in Simsbury (Hopmeadow Street better know as Route 10/202). Parking was in the back, and the game, which was in the basement, could easily be reached from the parking lot via a handicap ramp. She told me to arrive a few minutes before the 6:30 starting time, and she would pair me up with someone.

I consulted MapQuest to try to figure out the best way to get there. I think that I may have driven on Route 20 all the way to the intersection with Route 202. There are three or four better routes, but I allowed plenty of time.

Roz Sternberg.

I located Paula, and she assigned me to play with Roz Sternberg. I had only played a few hands of bridge in the previous twenty-four years, and I remembered very little. I had relearned Stayman and Blackwood, and the course that Paul had taught at Fermi had familiarized me with five-card major openings, transfers, and negative doubles. Roz was accustomed to playing with rookies. She told me that jumps were weak, and everything else was mostly natural.

I also did not know how to keep score on the travelers. So, Roz had to sit North. We were assigned to table #3, which was right in front of the air conditioner that blasted away all evening. My South seat was directly before the fans. Cold air blew on my neck all evening as I sat there shivering. The opponents at the first table had to show me how to use the bidding box. I remember nothing about the hands; I was concentrating all my attention on following suit and bidding or leading only when it was my turn. I was proud that I had successfully avoided any director calls. I was unable to turn up a copy of the results, but I seem to remember that Roz reported that we finished about in the middle.

After that I played with Roz a few times and against her countless times. I don’t have any great stories about her play. For some reason she never came to Eno with a partner. That was a little strange because after she retired she mostly played at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) with a few steady partners.

Roz was employed as the IT director for the New Britain Public School System, which had one or two AS/400’s. Nobody there really knew too much about them. Several years after our initial game she found out that I had a lot of experience with AS/400’s. She asked me to come to her data center to see if I could help her with a problem. I can’t remember exactly what it entailed, but it was something rather tricky that I had previously encountered. Furthermore, I had documented my work-around. So, I went there, implemented the fix, and explained what I had done.

Actually she sent a check.

Roz then had me look at a few connectivity issues. I was less certain of my abilities in these areas, but when I left, everything seemed to be working the way that they wanted it. I considered this just a favor for a friend, but she insisted that TSI send her an invoice for my time. So, we did. It was for $100 or maybe $150. She probably had a budget for this sort of thing.

I was afraid that Roz would start calling me for technical support whenever they encountered a problem, but, in fact, she never asked again. My recollection is that within a year after my visit the school system replace the AS/400’s with a different system.

Peg Corbett1 also never came to Eno with a partner. On the second or third Wednesday that I attended at the SBC I played with Peg, and we actually won a fraction of a masterpoint from the ACBL. Here is the published scoresheet:

Open Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 26, 2004
 Scores after 24 boards  Average:   48.0      Section  A  North-South
 Pair    Pct   Score  Rank   MPs     
   4   57.81   55.50   1    0.60     Jean Seale - Sonja Smith
   3   56.77   54.50   2    0.42     Peg Corbett - Mike Wavada
   1   49.48   47.50                 Ellen Tabell - Tony Tabell
   2   46.88   45.00                 Don Verchick - Nancy Campbell
   5   39.06   37.50                 Carl Suhre - Dorothy Suhre
 Open Pairs Wednesday Eve Session May 26, 2004
 Scores after 24 boards  Average:   48.0      Section  A  East-West
 Pair    Pct   Score  Rank   MPs     
   2   55.00   52.80  1/2   0.51     Claire Tanzer - Alice Rowland
   5   55.00   52.80  1/2   0.51     Dorothy Clark - Roz Sternberg
   1   51.25   49.20                 Jerry Hirsch - Mel Hirsch
   4   50.63   48.60                 Maureen Denges - Pat Matthew
   6   50.63   48.60                 Marylou Pech - Russell Elmore
   3   37.50   36.00                 Louise Alvord - Carol Schaper

I am pretty sure that I played with Peg a handful of times. Most of them were not memorable, but on one occasion she seemed to be on another planet. She explained to me that she had taken her prescription allergy medication, and it made her a little loopy. Both her bidding and her play of the cards were abominable. We finished last.

Winning points with Peg was exciting. However, it was nothing compared to the thrill that I ever felt came a month or so later after I had been assigned by Paula to play with Russ Elmore a couple of times. He asked me to be his regular partner!

My first game with Russ was a unique experience. He handed me a one-page typed sheet—not a convention card—and informed me that this is what we would be playing. It was close to Standard American, the system popularized by Charles Goren, but there were a few significant differences. I remember that we did not open 1NT if we had a worthless doubleton in one of the suits.

I did not complain about the eccentricities. Russ had played much more bridge experience than I had. Maybe his approach was outdated, but at least we would agree on what we were doing. Besides, Russ was cool. He was much older than my fifty-six years, but he often came to the bridge games on his motorcycle!

I realized that the primary motive for Russ wanting me as a regular partner was to avoid being assigned to play with Roz or Peg, who would argue with him about using his sheet of paper as the basis for bidding and playing agreements. Ordinarily these are negotiated with both sides willing to give in on some things. Even so, I was ecstatic that someone actually agreed to play with me on a regular basis.

At the Christmas party in December of 2004 or 2005 Russ confided to me that he intended to open every hand with a bid of 1♠. Yes, this was a party, but no one was drunk. I, for one, still took the games at the SBC very seriously. Those Wednesday evening games were the only time that I got to play all week, and I was very conscious of how many masterpoints I had accumulated. So, I asked Russ to just bid his hand as usual, and he respected my request.

When I played with Russ I got in the habit of analyzing every hand afterwards. Since we did not have hand records (sheets of paper that shows the location of all fifty-two cards on deal), I could only go by how well we did when I played a hand vs. when Russ was declarer. We did much better when Russ played. I told this to Russ, and he laughed.

I bought a book called How to Play a Bridge Hand by William S. Root. It had hundreds of examples with quizzes at the end of each chapter. I converted these quiz question into 4×6″ cards—problem on the front and answer on the back—that I could study during lunch breaks at work. It did help; I got a little better.

I later made an interactive web page that included all of these problems for declarer play and included other interesting ones that I encountered over the years. I posted a link to it on the web site that I designed for the SBC. The problem page is located here.

If an odd number of people showed up on a Wednesday, Paula Beauchamp3 played with one of the players who came without a partner. Since she was a very skilled and experienced player, everyone who came without a partner—usually three to five of us—hoped to get to play with her. She had many chances to play with me, but she only picked me once.

I made few obvious mistakes, maybe even none. No, that was not likely. Let’s just say that I did not notice any errors. If Paula did, she did not mention it. We finished first with a very good score, and after I played one hand she said, “You played that like a surgeon!” My buttons were busting.

I once was surprised to see Paula in the terminal at Bradley International Airport. She had apparently just returned from a vacation, and I was on my way to visit a client. I don’t remember the date, and it is hard for me to place the time, too. I generally left very early in the morning, before any flights had arrived. I do remember that she was wearing a pair of those rubbery shoes with holes in them, Crocs.

Paula’s favorite movie was Life is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) with Roberto Begnini. I had also seen this film. I sometimes called Paula Principessa, the term of endearment used by Begnini’s character for his wife. She liked the way that I pronounced it.

I persuaded my friend Tom Corcoran to play with me at the SBC five or six times. He worked in Simsbury at the time, and so it was not much of an inconvenience for him. He had not played at all since he graduated from Brown in 1972.

I was surprised to find when researching this entry that we actually finished first at least twice. However, those occasions are not the ones that stand out in my memory. Once Tom opened 2♣, which showed a very powerful hand with more than half of the aces and face cards. In contrast, an opening bid at the two-level in any of the other suits show a weak hand with six cards in the bid suit. Tom had intended to show a weak hand with clubs. Unfortunately, I had a pretty good hand, and I did not give up on the possibility of bidding a slam (committing to win twelve or thirteen tricks) until he passed my 5NT bid. We ended up five or six tricks short for a big penalty.

Tom, who was only two years younger than I, stopped playing after a few months. The only remark he made was “Those people are sure old.”

When Russ moved away I had to find a new partner. I had noticed that in 2015 two guys, Roger Holmes and Dick Benedict, began playing and did pretty well. After a month or two Roger seemed to stop attending, and Dick played much less frequently and with different partners. I sent Dick an email that explained my situation and asked him if he would consider playing with me. I told him that I knew all of the conventions on the Yellow Card4, and I was willing to learn new ones. He responded enthusiastically.

June 9, 1953 could have been Dick’s last day.

Dick and I played together for several years at the SBC, at the HBC whenever I got a chance on a weekday, and at tournaments that were within driving distance. We got to be pretty close. I learned about his two ex-wives, one dead and one divorced, his two daughters, and the father with whom he had played cribbage. I learned a lot about the tornado in Worcester from which Dick’s father rescued him. I also learned from Dick that New Hampshire was the best place to buy liquor. Dick stocked up on The Famous Grouse whenever we drove up to Nashua for a tournament.

Dick and I played on many teams together. In team games5 four people form a team. One pair plays East-West and the other plays North-South. You play a match against another team. Your East-West pair plays a set of hands against their North-South pair and your North-South plays the same hands against their East-West. Two types of team games were bracketed. Between eight and sixteen teams with similar masterpoint totals played against one another in either a knockout or Swiss format. Our foursome concentrated on these bracketed games so that we did not encounter the really good players.

Usually Dick and I played together. He was good at convincing people to play with us at tournaments. Our best results came when playing with Robert Klopp6, who lived at the Duncan Hotel in New Haven, and Brenda Harvey7 from Orange, CT. I remember sending email to my dad in Kansas City from the Panera Bread in Nashua, NH, when we had won two knockouts in a row. I think that Robert Klopp may have already been a Life Master when we started, but both Dick and Brenda Harvey achieved that rank at tournaments in which our foursome played as a team.

Some of our results were spectacular. I remember that in one Bracketed Swiss at a regional tournament we won our first six rounds by such lopsided margins that we had built up an insuperable margin. We actually could have gone home without playing the final round, which we also won. However, we did not always do so well. At an Open Swiss at a sectional in Auburn, MA, we finished dead last out of twenty-five or thirty teams. Neither Robert nor Brenda played with us on either of these occasions.

Helen Pawlowski.

Dick was not sitting across from me when I made Life Master. At the time the requirement for that rank was 300 total masterpoints that had to include some number of silver and gold points that could only be won at tournaments. In late December of 2009 I had enough silver and gold, but I was a small fraction of a point short of 300. I informed Helen Pawlowski (pahv LOFF skee), the director of the SBC game at the time, about my status before the game on December 23. She immediately declared the game a “club championship”, which meant that extra points would be rewarded.

Unfortunately, both Dick and I played poorly; he was bad, but I was worse. I made a really stupid bid when playing against Claire Tanzer, who never said a bad word about anyone. She remarked that if I played like that I did not deserve to make Life Master. She was right.

However, deservedly or not, I was awarded the necessary points at the last Saturday game in December at the HBC after playing with Tom Gerchman. In those days it took the director a few minutes to enter all the scores in the computer. Everyone else had already left by the time the results were posted, and it was confirmed that Tom and I had scored well enough to earn the needed points. There was no one to celebrate with.

There was a game scheduled for that Sunday at the HBC, and, because I had set a goal of making Life Master before the end of the year, I was scheduled to play. However, the Sunday game got snowed out. So, I achieved my goal at the last possible game of the year.

Dick was, however, my partner for my Life Master parties at both the SBC and the HBC. At the SBC he gave a little speech in which he announced that I had called him up and told him something—I don’t remember what. I Immediately denounced that as a damnable lie, and asked the group whether I had ever called any of them on the phone. No one spoke up. Of course, I probably did say whatever it was that he claimed that I had said, but I never talked with Dick on a telephone. Dick and I corresponded only by email and in person. In fact, I have almost never called anyone about bridge.

My LM party at the HBC was a unique occasion for at least three reasons. In the first place it was held on a Friday evening in March 2010. I know of no other Friday evening game ever held there. Although I sat North across from Dick in the “throne” reserved for the honoree, he was only there for three hands. The format used that night involved individual scoring. Everyone played with seven or eight different partners. Only the Norths stayed at the same table. I know of no other occasion in which that format was used at the HBC.

There was one other odd thing about it. I won! Well, officially I tied with Cecilia Vasel, but I discovered later that on one hand I had made a mistake in scoring8 in the opponents’ favor. The honoree almost never does well in this game; there are too many distractions. Perhaps on that evening everyone was distracted by the weird format.

Dick and I stopped playing together later in 2010. I made a sarcastic comment when he passed what was—-to my way of thinking—clearly a control-showing cue bid. He took offense, which was not unreasonable. There was no great rancor. In fact, we did play together occasionally after that. He moved to Bradenton, FL, at some point in the teens. When he came back to Connecticut to visit we usually paired up at least once.

Inge Schuele.

Dick introduced me to tournament bridge. Four of us went to the District 3 tournament in Danbury, CT. I played with Dick, and Inge Schuele played with Virginia Labbadia. The team that we played in the first round had more than ten times as many points as we did. The guys we played against used the Mini-Roman convention. I had never heard of it, but using the 2♦ opening bid to describe a hand with three four-card suits and 11-15 points seemed to me like a great idea at the time. In fact, however, it is one of the few well-known conventions that I have never played.

I thought that Dick and I had performed reasonably well against the guys, but we lost the match by a lot. So, we needed either to drive back home or find another event for the afternoon session.

On the schedule we found a 199er game in the afternoon. Inge and I qualified to play in it, but Dick and Virginia had too many points. They played together in some kind of unlimited game.

Things went very well for Inge and me. We ended up in first place, and it was not even close. Our photos were printed in the tournament’s Daily Bulletin, and we each got a small trophy, the first bridge trophy that I ever won, and the only one that they let me keep.

I have a couple of other very vivid memory of playing with Dick. I remember that I earned my final gold points in one of the first Gold Rush Pairs events ever held in New England. In the afternoon session we bid and made 7NT on the first hand and held on to win our section.

The other memory is literally painful. We were playing in a pairs game in Danbury, and something was wrong with my neck. Every five or ten minutes I would—without any warning—experience a sharp pang there. I took some Advil for it, but it did not seem to help much. I found it very difficult to concentrate. We finished the event, but we did not do well.

The plan had been for me to stay overnight at Dick’s house in Avon and ride back with him to Danbury for another event on Sunday. I told him that I did not want to play again until the neck pain ceased. He agreed that that was a good idea. I rested the next day, and the pain disappeared, never to return.

Folded traveler in board and traveler with scores.

Over the years I have often told people that the most important thing that I learned from playing with Dick Benedict was the preferred method of folding the “travelers”, the score sheets that traveled with the boards that contained the cards from one table to the next. The only really important thing was for the board numbers (and almost nothing else) to be visible, but Dick’s method was definitely the easiest, most reliable, and most esthetically pleasing.

Mass Mutual in Springfield.

In 2009 I teamed up with a young guy named Steve Smith. I knew his mother Sonja, who was a fine tournament player and the best regular player at the SBC. Steve worked at Mass Mutual as an actuary. He was an FSA, but his main interest was finance, not insurance. Steve and I were a good match. I learned that he had been a successful debater in high school, but he did not participate in the rigorous type of policy debate that I did.

Steve lived in the area just north and west of the park.

Steve owned a house in the Forest Park section of Springfield. He rented out two of the bedrooms to other guys. It was not quite the Animal House, but I never knew what to expect when I picked him up to go to a tournament. He often forgot to bring cash, which was the only form of payment most tournaments accepted.

Playing with Steve was nothing like playing with Dick. Dick was the model of stability; Steve was up for anything.

Steve and I played together on a regular basis at the SBC and also in tournaments quite a few times. Considering how little experience we had, we had an extraordinary record . The highlight was the afternoon-evening of Saturday October 10 at the Sturbridge Host Hotel in Sturbridge, MA. Steve and I were playing in the qualifying tournament for Flight C of the North American Pairs, a national championship with three separate divisions, called “flights”. Three teams would qualify from our C Flight to represent New England in the national finals in Reno in March of 2010.

We played fairly well in the first session. I think that our score was a little above 50 percent. We ate supper at the Oxhead Tavern, which is adjacent to the hotel, with Steve’s mother Sonja, her partner David Rock, and two guys from New Hampshire, Bruce Downing and Mark Conner. Sonja, David, and the NH guys were playing in the B or A flight.

We needed to make up quite a bit of ground in the evening session to have any chance of qualifying. Fortunately, we caught fire in the second session. We actually turned in the best score of any pair.

In those days the directors still tabulated the results from scores recorded on pieces of paper. Therefore, it took them a fairly long time to enter and check the results. When they finally posted them, we had finished third. We were qualified for the North American Bridge Championships (NABC) in Reno!

Actually there was still one hurdle. Mark Aquino, who was the district’s NAP/GNT coordinator, called me and asked if Steve had qualified at a club game. I told him that he had done so at the HBC; I even provided him with the date and time. He said that it did not appear that Steve had won any points. I agreed that he had not, but he did earn a “Q” on the results page. I knew where to find it on the Internet and sent Mark a copy.

As it turned, out the team with the best score in our flight in Sturbridge—a couple of guys whom I had never seen at a tournament—participated even though they had not qualified at a club game. They were disqualified, and we moved up to second place. As I recall, the district paid us $100 each to play in the tournament in Reno.

Not the best bridge book ever.

Steve and I both were still working. In fact, he had been in college at the University of South Carolina just a few years earlier. So, we could only play one or two sessions per week to try to get better by the time that we played in Reno. I thought that it would be a good idea if we played a system that was somewhat different from what most people played. I bought two books on playing systems based on weak 1NT opening bids. We settled on an approach outlined in one of them. In those days my memory still worked, and Steve, as I mentioned, was very adaptable.

Steve and I had a great time in Reno. On Wednesday March 17 we boarded our Southwest flight to Las Vegas and changed planes. On the last leg—the short flight from Las Vegas to Reno—-I sat in the window seat and studied (or at least pretended to study) my Russian flash cards9, and Steve sat on the aisle. The middle seat was not occupied until the plane was almost ready to take off. A woman of about Steve’s age (or even younger) with enormous gazoingies settled there. Steve chatted her up a bit. I must admit that I listened; her answers to most of his queries were completely off the chart. Steve was remarkably adept at keeping a straight face during the interview.

The tournament was at a resort hotel/casino a few miles south of downtown Reno. We planned to play in three events—the NAP and Red Ribbon Pairs, both of which were scheduled for afternoon-evenings, and a compact knockout that was scheduled for two mornings. The Red Ribbon Pairs were held on Thursday and Friday March 18-19. The NAP was on Saturday and Sunday. Here are a few of my most vivid memories of the tournament:

  • The first night that we were there we were invited to a social gathering sponsored by District 25 (New England) and hosted by Helen Pawlowski and Steve’s mom. This was the first time that I ever met Rich and Sandy DeMartino. Rich was the District Director, and Sandy was (maybe not yet in 2010) chairman of the national Goodwill Committee. We told Rich which events we intended to play in. He opined that our schedule might be too difficult for first-timers. We didn’t care.
  • The Red Ribbon Pairs was the first time that I ever seen a Bridgemate, the hand-held battery-powered electronic scoring device. Tournaments in New England did not use them yet. I sat North and had to figure out how to operate it. It made me very nervous. I feel certain that it affected my play. I should have just switched positions with Steve. He was much more familiar with learning how to use new electronic equipment. We were well below 50 percent in the afternoon session. We did a little better in the evening, but we missed the cut for the second day. We did make friends with a few people in our sections, however. People thought that we were a father-son team.
  • We played in a compact knockout in morning sessions on Friday and Saturday. Our teammates were a father-daughter pair from Michigan who had only played together online. They lived in the same state, but they decided to go to Nevada to play face-to-face. Our team won both of its matches in the morning. So, we qualified to play the second half on Saturday.
  • At some point I remember going for a fairly long run in the area. There was not much to see.
  • I think that on Friday Steve and I ran into Ron Briggs and Andre Wiejacki (vee YAH skee), the other pair representing New England. Ron was a little bristly, but Andre and I became pretty good friends.
  • We played in a pairs game, I think, on Friday. I seem to remember that a woman criticized me for not explaining one of our conventions properly.
  • On Saturday morning we easily won the semi-final match of the compact knockout. In the finals we faced a husband-wife team from Texas. I made a serious mistake early in the match, and I was afraid that I had blown it for our teammates. However, we ended up winning by just a few International Match Points. We each won a clear coffee mug with the ACBL logo on one side and the tournament’s logo on the other. I still have mine. In 2021 I drink tea out of it almost every day.
  • It was really exciting to play in the NAP. The directors made everyone who had a cell phone or other electronic device turn it in before play started. The competition was not as tough as in the Red Ribbon Pairs, and once again we did better in the evening, but we did not make it to the second day of this event either.
  • We decided to play in the huge B/C/D Swiss on Sunday morning. Our teammates were a pair of guys from the DC area whom we had met in the NAP. Our team got off to a strong start, which is not necessarily a good idea for a team in the lowest strat of a Swiss. Steve and I were very tired. We both made stupid mistakes for which we had to apologize to our teammates. Steve started to set his hand down as dummy twice when he was actually the declarer. My mistakes were more subtle but also more costly.
  • Helen, who had a rental car, took us into town one evening for supper at an Armenian restaurant. I can’t say that I thought too much of it.

Our flight back also went through Las Vegas. Steve and I sat a couple of rows behind superstars Jeff Meckstroth and Mark Lair. Meckstroth boarded first and sat in the aisle seat looking ferocious. Lair boarded much later and quickly settled into the adjacent seat that Meckstroth had been guarding.

The Crowne Plaza calls it “The Garden Pavilion”.

I remember one other great experience playing with Steve. It was on Sunday at the first tournament held at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, RI. We were in the big tent playing in the bracketed Swiss with Marcia West and Paula Najarian. In the last round we played against Ron Briggs’ team, which was in first place. We found ourselves in second, but we were within striking distance. On the last hand Steve had bid an impossible 4♥ contract. I was dummy watching Steve futilely play the last five or six cards. I observed that Ron had absentmindedly discarded a club on one of Steve’s hearts and then followed suit on the next round of hearts. The dummy is not allowed to speak until the last card has been played. So, I unobtrusively moved that trick out of alignment by a fraction of an inch. When the hand was over, I drew attention to the revoke, and we ended up winning both the match and the event by the narrowest of margins.

I have not seen Steve since he accepted a job in New York City working for Goldman Sachs. I seem to recall that Sonja said that he got married. He and I follow each other on Twitter, but his account is not very active. I could find no photos of him on the Internet.

Photo of the 2004 Xmas party: Dorothy Clark is on the left; Shirley Schienman is in the seat in which I sat on the first night.

I played with at least five other people in those early years at the SBC. I played exactly once with Bob Nuckols, Dorothy Clark, and Sonja Smith. I don’t remember anything about the games with Bob and Sonja. I remember one hand in which Dorothy and I were on defense. I led a very low card in a suit that I knew that she could ruff. The fact that my card was low should have told her to lead the lower of the two side suits back to me, but she led the other side suit. When I mentioned it to her, she admitted that she was not good at noticing suit-preference signals.

I played several times with Sonja at the HBC and once or twice in tournaments. On one occasion I was scheduled to play with her at the HBC, but I had to cancel because of a severely upset stomach probably due to food poisoning of some sort. By lunch time I felt fine. This was one of the very few times that I missed a game because of illness.

I played two or three times with Paul Pearson. He and his wife came to my Life Master party at the SBC. Much more about my relationship with Paul is detailed here.

Jerry Hirsch started playing at the SBC in 2009 a few weeks before I did. We were partners a few times at the SBC, a few times at the HBC, and also at a few tournaments. I probably played against Jerry more often than any other bridge player. At the SBC Christmas party one year Jerry took a photo of me wearing a gigantic red Christmas bow as a tie. He had the photo blown up to poster size, and he gave it to me as a present. In 2021 it still is prominently displayed in our living room.

Jerry Hirsch.

Jerry and I played together in at least one qualifier for the NAP and the Grand National Teams (GNT). We never made it to either national event, but one year we finished third in the GNT qualifier, and in the last round of the Swiss we defeated the team that won the event. Our teammates were Dave Landsberg10 and Dan Koepf.

Jerry kept a small piece of paper in his convention card holder with one word written on it: “FUN!”. I occasionally needed to be reminded of the primary reason for which we all played at such a frustrating game for so many years.

Every holiday season Jerry took on the responsibility of taking up a collection for a gift for the directors. As far as I know, no one asked him to do it.

1. Peg Corbett, who was a regular attendee at the club, stopped playing suddenly. Tom Gerchman, who started each day by reading the obituary page in the Courant, informed me she had died.

2. Russ Elmore and I stopped playing together when he moved to New Hampshire. However, he must have moved back to the Berkshires a few years later. I saw him playing at a sectional tournament in Great Barrington, MA. This really surprised me because Russ never showed any interest in tournaments while I was playing with him. I approached him and reintroduced myself. He said that he remembered me, but at the time he did not seem to.

3. At some point Paula Beauchamp and Larry Wallowitz, a teacher and director at the HBC, moved to Bradenton, FL. I think that this occurred in the early teens. This raised a lot of eyebrows at the HBC. Most people, myself included, did not even know that they were “an item”. Larry died after they had been there a few years. I did not have many dealings with Larry, but I remember attending a talk that he gave to novices about opening leads. One thing that he said really hit home: “It’s OK to finesse your partner, but it is not OK to finesse yourself.” For example, if you have a king of a suit, and you suspect that the declarer (on your right) has the queen, it is a terrible idea to lead that suit. Paula remained in Florida, but she returned to Connecticut and played at the HBC a few times.

4. The Yellow Card is a piece of paper that was designed by the ACBL to provide a set of conventions that could be used in casual partnerships, new partnerships, or specific events such as individual tournaments. It is also used by a fairly large number of pairs who just do not like to memorize conventions.

5. Details about the mechanics of team games have been explained here.

6. Robert Klopp died in, I think 2014, not too long after the four of us stopped playing together at tournaments. He did not drive a car, and he brought his own food to tournaments to save money.

7. I played with Brenda Harvey at a sectional tournament in Connecticut at least once. She moved to Saint Augustine, FL. She remains an active bridge player in 2021.

8. In duplicate bridge North traditionally keeps score. Tradition at the HBC insisted that the new LM sat North at table #1. At the time I had almost never sat North.

9. In August of 2010 Sue and I accompanied Tom and Patti Corcoran on a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It is described in some detail here. I studied the language pretty diligently for several months, but I was seldom able to communicate with Russians outside of the tourist industry, and all of them spoke—and preferred—English.

10. My partnership with Dave Landsberg is described here.