In 2003 Sue and I took the “Best of Italy” tour sponsored by Rick Steves. I then wrote a journal compiled from the notes that I had recorded every day. After I was satisfied with the results I assembled them into a pdf file called “How I spent my Italian vacation” that I shared with other tour members and a few other people. That document is posted here.
The programming tools: During this same period IBM discontinued support for the Net.Data product that I had used to write the software for AxN (introduced here), TSI’s online clearinghouse for insertion orders from advertisers to newspapers. Instead, IBM had agreed to offer the php environment that had been developed by Zend1. I had previously learned about php from Ken Owen (Introduced here). He had told me that I could create and run php programs on my Windows computer for free by downloading WAMP, which stands for Windows (operating system) Apache (HTTP server) MySQL (database) php (scripting language). I downloaded it to my PC, set it up, and used it to write a little problem management system for TSI that was actually used for several years.
I had already learned that in order to do programming for the Internet that accessed a database you really need to know five languages: HTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), SQL, and a scripting language to fit all the pieces together. I had books that documented the first three. I soon discovered that books on php and MySQL were not necessary. The syntax of each was thoroughly documented online, and answers to every question that I had were easily found using google. I never had to ask anyone for help.
The first project: Sue and I had planned for another trip to Italy in 2005. This time we invited our long-time friends Tom and Patti Corcoran to accompany us on another Rick Steves tour, “Village Italy”2. I intended to take notes and assemble them into another journal. This time, however, I wanted to do it a little more professionally. I purchased a Cascio point-and-shoot digital camera, mostly using points from one of my credit cards. Since I wanted to allow others in our tour group to be able to enjoy the journal, I needed to build a website. I knew how to do that on an AS/400, but I wanted projects like this to be independent of the business, and I was not about to buy an AS/400 and try to run it from my house. I wanted someone else to manage the site for me.
I did a little research on the Internet. A company named iPower seemed to offer everything that I needed at a fairly reasonable price. Its tools seemed to be well documented, and, especially for the first few years, the technical support was excellent. My first contract with them was signed in July of 2005. I might have had a free month or two before that.
I decided to name the website Wavada.org. Wavada.com was available, but I had no intention of using the website to make money. I wanted to a place to noodle around with Internet programming (my personal computer, which at the time was a laptop) and a separate place where I could show some of the things that I had developed to the world.
I needed some tools on my PC to let me edit the text and images. I had previously downloaded TextPad, a “shareware” (free but with requests for donations) product that was better at editing text than the program that came with Windows. I purchased a copy of UltraEdit, which could be tailored for use with the color-coded and spaced text of php scripts, and Paint Shop Pro, an inexpensive program for editing image files. My plan was to do all of the development on my PC and, once everything was working, upload everything to Wavada.org using either File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or the File Manager program that iPower provided.
The first journal: My first big project used php to create one web page for each day of the 2005 trip. I created a folder named Images and inside of that folder a folder the trip (VI). Inside the trip folders were folders for each day (VI01, VI02, etc.) and one each for the full-page version of the photos3 and the page (VI00) describing the preparations and the travel day. I later wrote a php script that was included at the top of the code for each trip that. This contained all the common scripts for handling layout and navigation as well as the unique elements such as character sets for foreign words.
A separate php script for each page contained the code necessary to display the page. Most of the necessary functions were stored in a file named JournalFunctions.php. A file named JournalSetup.php contained other settings. These were all “required” on every page. Styles were stored in JournalStyle.css and JournalMenuStyle.css.
For the most part the original design worked fairly well. One difficulty that I had no way to anticipate was that the Unix version on the iPower servers was more sensitive to capitalization than the Windows version. I had to be careful with the file names assigned to images.
Twenty years later I find it astounding to report that I completed all of this within a few months. To each member of the tour group I sent an email that invited them to view the finished product on Wavada.org. Quite a few of them looked at a good portion of the journal and responded that they really liked it.
Other projects: I needed to design a home page. I knew that I wanted to have a huge wave as the background so that people would know how to pronounce the name Wavada. I found a photo of with very high density that depicted a monstrous wave better than I could have even imagined. It was on the Internet, but I don’t remember the location.
iPower offered an incredible array of free features that were associated with the website. The two that I made the heaviest use of were email and WordPress. I only needed to create three or four email accounts, but I made good use of them. I made Mike@Wavada.org my primary email account. Much later I created another account called Yoga (the name of my laptop at the time). Email sent to the Mike account was automatically downloaded to Outlook on my desktop. The Yoga account was not. So, I could send or forward emails from Mike to Yoga for activities (such as ZOOM meetings) that required the laptop.
I also set up an account for Sue, but I don’t think that she ever used it.
The other free feature that I employed a lot was WordPress, the software that I used to make this and hundreds of other blog entries. The oldest object in the WordPress section of Wavada.org is from 2010. However, I don’t think that I made much use of the product until March of 2012. That is the date of the oldest images that I uploaded. I might have written a few earlier blog entries that contained no images. An incredible number of these images—and a few other files—were uploaded during the pandemic and the subsequent months.
At first the home page for Wavada.org simply contained links to the few items that I wanted to allow the public to see. I changed the format dramatically when I discovered a widget that was available in google’s jQuery library. This allowed me to present the table of contents in an attractive tabbed manner.
I wrote a large number of programs concerning the game of bridge (introduced here) for my own use. For a while I maintained a complicated set of programs that I wrote to keep a detailed record of the bidding agreements with my partners. Eventually I decided that this was too much work (as of 2023 I had played with 141 different partners). I also created online programs for displaying an article index for topics covered in the Bridge Bulletin (posted here) and for providing game plans for challenging declarer problems (posted here).
I figured out how to parse the pdf files for hand records from bridge games. I created a database of these hands so that I could establish probabilities to associate with certain bridge situations. For example, I determined that Losing Trick Count4 was more accurate at predicting the number of available tricks at game level or lower than point count that has been modified as suggested by Marty Bergen in his Slam Bidding Made Easier book. However, the opposite was true for higher contracts.
I started to attend Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club in 2004. At some point I created a webpage for the club. It was still in use in 2023. The link is here.
As an adjunct to my job as webmaster I created a database of bridge players throughout North America on Wavada.org for District 25 of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). That story has been chronicled here.
I adapted the code for the travel journals to create online pages for each chapter of the book that I wrote on papal history entitled Stupid Pope Tricks. The book is posted here. The story of the Papacy Project that led to its creation is chronicled here. I also posted in the same format Ben 9, my historical first-person novel about Pope Benedict IX, here.
1. In 2023 this product is still offered for the i5 operating system. Zend has been purchased by other companies a few times.
3. I used the same file names that Cascio provided with the letter b at the end. For later journals I dispensed with the uploading of the smaller versions of the photos and instead uploaded a full-page version of each image and used HTML to specify the size displayed in the journal. I also changed the naming of the images in the daily folder to be meaningful.
4. Losing Trick Count is explained here and elsewhere on the Internet and in print.
The governing body for competitive bridge in North America (and a few islands like Bermuda and Hawaii) was the American Contract Bridge Association (ACBL). Its headquarters was in Horn Lake, MS, a suburb of Memphis. The ACBL sponsored three national (actually continental) tournaments in different locations every year in March, July, and November-December. These were the spring, summer, and fall North American Bridge
One of the primary purposes of the ACBL was to provide the rules for distribution of masterpoints, which, depending on the event could be black, silver, red, gold, or platinum. Nearly every player aspired to attain the rank of Life Master, which, when I started playing required an assortment of masterpoints totaling 300. In 2011 the needed total was changed to 500, and the number of silver and gold points was increased.
When I began playing in 2004 there were eleven ranks:Rookie, Club Master, Sectional Master, Regional Master, NABC Master, Life Master, Bronze Life Master, Silver Life Master, Gold Life Master, Diamond Life Master, Platinum Life Master, and Grand Life Master. In 2011 the rank of Advanced NABC Master was created for players who had achieved 500 masterpoints but did not meet the other qualifications for Life Master status. Later the rank of Ruby Life Master was inserted between Silver and Gold, Sapphire between Gold and Diamond, and Emerald between Diamond and Platinum. That increased the number of ranks to fifteen.
Geographic organization: The ACBL was organized geographically into twenty-five districts. The six New England states comprised District 25. The governing body for District 25 (D25) was the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC). Prior to 2020 each district elected one person, the District Director, who served on the ACBL’s Board of Directors.
Each district was divided into units. D25 had eight units—one for each of the less populous states and one each for western, central, and eastern Massachusetts. The unit for Connecticut was identified by the number 126. Its governing body was the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). The other units had similar appellations and three-digit numbers. The most populous by far was EMBA.
The ACBL’s districts and regions in 2020.
The lowest level sanctioned by the ACBL was the club. Most clubs were owned by one or two people. The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC), which was the oldest continuously operating bridge club in North America, was one of the few that was owned and operated by its members.
In 2020 a new geographic entity, the region, was created for the purpose of reducing the size of the Board of Directors for twenty-five to thirteen. D25, 24 (NYC and Long Island), and D3 (northern NJ and eastern NY) were combined into Region 2. The Regional Director (RD) was elected by the units within the region, but the person so elected was not supposed to represent his/her constituents. Instead the RD was charged with promoting the interests of all members.
Masterpoints: Winners and high finishers in club games ordinarily received black points. The units could sponsor sectional tournaments that awarded silver points in larger quantities than club games did. The districts could run regional tournaments that awarded red and gold points in still greater quantities. The most valuable points for achieving Life Master status were gold and silver.
The primary way to receive silver points was to attend a sectional tournament sponsored by a unit. Most units in D25 ran several sectionals per year. Three or four weeks a year Sectional Tournaments at Clubs (STaCs) could be run at clubs within the participating unit. These events also paid silver points. At some point in the teens the ACBL began to sanction sectional tournaments on cruise ships as well.
The primary way to receive gold (and much less important red) points was to attend a regional tournament sponsored by a district. Through 2019 D25 ran five regionals per year. The NABCs also included regional events that paid gold and red points. At some point in the teens the ACBL began to sanction regional tournaments on cruise ships as well. My wife Sue and I went on one in 2012 (described here). We signed up for a second one in 2020 (described here).
Administration: The ACBL and each of its units and districts were not-for-profit organizations. The ACBL itself was, in theory at least, run by the Board of Directors, who were bridge players. The day-to-day operations of the organization were run by salaried employees, most of whom knew little about bridge. Aside from running the three NABCs, the ACBL also hired and trained the Tournament Directors who administered each event at tournaments. It also tested and certified directors for club games.
The governing body of the New England Bridge Conference was its Board of Delegates. Its members were chosen by the units. It only met twice a year. Its main responsibility was to elect the four officers: president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. Most policy-level decisions were made by the Executive Committee, a group that met several times a year. It consisted of the four officers and representatives of each unit (two from the CBA and EMBA). The president appointed the tournament manager, the webmaster, the tournament coordinator, and committee chairmen and members. The most important committee was the Tournament Scheduling Committee. The district also had a director-in-charge and and Intermediate/Novice chair. Those roles were held by Peter Marcus and Sue Miguel for all the years that I was involved.
The governing body of the CBA was its Board of Directors. This group was elected by attendees at a designated tournament. It consisted of the same four officers as the distric, the past president, and twelve representatives, eight of whom were from specific regions. The president appointed the tournament coordinator, the list manager, the webmaster, the unit coordinator, and STaC chairman.
Bridge clubs had a manager and at least one director. The former administered the club, and the latter ran the individual games. At many clubs the director and the manager were the same person. The Hartford Bridge Club was administered by a Board of Trustees, all of whom were elected at an annual meeting. It had the same four officers and a set of six trustees. The Board met once a month. The manager of the club had been Donna Feir for as long as anyone could remember.
The games: All competitive bridge games are “duplicate”, which means that each pair’s results are compared against other pairs playing the same cards. The most common form was pairs, in which each pair of players competes against other pairs. The scoring was rather simple. Each pair gets one point for each pair that it outscored on the hand and a fraction of a point for each pair that it tied (one-half if two pairs tied, one-third if three pairs tied, etc.). Adjustments were made if the same number of pairs did not play all the hands. Almost all club games were pairs games.
It was also possible for four people1 to compete as a team in various formats. They were explained in detail here. A few large clubs—such as the HBC—scheduled and ran Swiss teams events. They were usually quite popular.
A third form of the game, in which persons competed as individuals, became an endangered species in this period, but I had several interesting experiences with it.
Tournaments: Sectional tournaments ordinarily lasted last two or three days. They were ordinarily held at a hall owned by a church or ethnic organization, a senior center, or some other similarly large room. Usually the last day features one or more Swiss teams event. The other days are pairs. In general they must be run by a tournament director approved by the ACBL.
Regional tournaments ordinarily ran from four to seven days. They were generally held at a hotel with a ballroom or two and featured a mix of events. In most cases both pairs and teams events were offered at the same time. Traditionally the last day was devoted to a teams event of some kind.
Each NABC lasted for eleven days and featured a large assortment of events every day. Some were held at hotels; some were at convention centers. Traditionally the last day featured a very large teams event of some kind.
People sometimes attended tournaments without a partner. The administrators of tournaments tried very hard to find a suitable match for each such person.
Equipment: Bridge was, of course played with a deck of fifty-two cards. Four people sat around a card table. Competitive bridge required a little more equipment. In a social game the cards were shuffled after each hand. In duplicate bridge the cards were kept in carriers (usually called boards) made of plastic or metal to keep the cards used by each player (North, South, East, or West) separate so that they can be played by others siting in the same direction.
At tournaments and large clubs the boards were created by dealing machines, and scores were entered on hand-held devices called BridgeMates.
In duplicate bridge the bids were made by selecting card from a bidding box. Players were also required to make available an official convention card that explains the meanings of their bids.
High-level events at NABCs sometimes positioned the players behind screens. In that case players did not talk among themselves at all. The purpose was to minimize the opportunity for cheating. Nevertheless, some players were caught doing it.
Online: At some point during the teens the ACBL recognized a game with rules and behaviors similar to those of bridge that was played on the Internet. A website called BridgeBase Online (BBO) signed an agreement that even allowed its users to win masterpoints on their website. I hated this game and refused to call it bridge.
1. In events that last two or more days teams could have five or six members.
In the spring of 2019 the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) named Providence as the site for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) in 2021. The bridge players in New England were very excited about the prospect. It had been a very long time since a summer edition of the NABC had been held in New England.
Lois and Joe.
At the time of the announcement Bob Bertoni was the District Director, and Lois DeBlois was the President of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC). Bob immediately appointed as co-chairs Lois and Joe Brouillard, who had shared the same responsibility for the 2014 Fall NABC that had been held in Providence. Their first acts were to notify the state and local officials that the tournament would be held in Providence in July and to reserve space in the Rhode Island Convention Center (RICC), the same site that had been used in 2014.
Joe, who was the Treasurer of the NEBC, also was in charge of finance. Hospitality was to be handled by Helen Pawlowski, who had the same job in 2014, and Sally Kirtley, the district’s Tournament Manager. Sponsorships were assigned to Phyllis Chase, another veteran of the 2014 event, and Megan Mihara DiOrio. Brenda and Neil Montague reprised their roles as chairs of registration and prizes. Sue Miguel was again in charge of the Intermediate/Newcomer program.
I immediately volunteered to help with the massive project of organizing, promoting, and running the tournament and anything else that they wanted me to do. I was not on the first list of committee chairs. At that point I was one of the “ministers without portfolio”. The other member at the outset were Bob, Jim Rasmussen, Meg Gousie, Paula Najarian, Sonja Smith, Linda Ahrens, and Paul Burnham.
At some point Joe asked me to write and send a few sets of promotional emails using the database that I had developed for the district. I was happy to take that on. It meant a lot of work preceding the tournament, but I was still full of vim and vinegar, and I had enjoyed working at the 2014 NABC in Providence immensely.
This was an all-star cast if ever there was one, and it only got better over time. The first meeting was held during the lunch break on Friday, August 30, 2019, at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI. The emphasis was on the need to begin planning and execution as soon as possible because July of 2021 was not that far away. I think that the logo had already been designed by then. Everyone at the meeting liked it.
I attended several of the meetings at regional tournaments, but I did not participate much. I was there to get ideas about marketing the event in Providence. I remember that at one meeting the discussion was about what type of souvenir shirt should be sold. A few samples were passed around. Someone asked for my opinion, but I deferred to the others, explaining that “I have no taste.”
On June 30, 2020, a one-year-out Zoom meeting was held with Mark Hudson of the ACBL. The only additions to the committee at that point were David Rock, who had been the Partnership Chair in 2014, and Debbie Ouelette. I did not attend the meeting.
COVID-19’s effect: At least since I had been involved with tournament bridge, the American Contract Bridge League had every year sponsored three NABC tournaments—one in March, one in July, and one in November. They were dubbed “spring”, “summer”, and “fall”. Each lasted ten or eleven days. Games were available for players of all ages and experience levels. At the beginning of 2020 everyone planned on three NABC events.
COVID-19 forced the cancellation of all three NABC events in 2020—March in Columbus, OH, July in Montreal, and November in Tampa. Even so, plans continued to be made for the July event in Providence. By the end of the year incredibly effective vaccines were being produced, and seniors—by far the dominant age group for bridge players—were among the first in line to receive them. My most pressing question was when I should start promoting the “Big Deal” in Providence.
Then in fairly rapid succession two important events took place. In an abundance of caution the ACBL canceled the NABC scheduled for March 2021 in St. Louis. The Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C., that had hosted the 2016 Summer NABC and was scheduled to do so again was no longer available. So, despite the fact that the number of new cases decreased rapidly in the late spring and early summer of 2021, the NABC scheduled for Providence was moved to July 13-24 of 2022. We received notice of this in February of 2021. No NABC was held in the summer of 2021. In fact, the ACBL also canceled all sectional and regional tournaments through the end of August, thus wiping out the Ocean State Regional, District 25’s largest tournament.
So, the organizers of the Providence tournament were provided an additional year to prepare for the big event, but the committee members would have little or no opportunity for face-to-face communication for much of that period. Because of the ACBL’s action, there would only be at most one regional tournament in District 25 in all of 2021. In fact, however, the one tournament, the Harvest Regional in Mansfield, MA, that might have been allowed by the ACBL was also canceled by a vote of the district’s Executive Committee.
The other event that dramatically affected the preparations for NABC Providence was the death of Bob Bertoni on June 29, 2021. He had been our direct link to the ACBL, a role that Lois and especially Joe had to assume.
The ACBL resumed holding NABC tournaments in Austin, TX, in November of 2021 and in Reno, NV, in March of 2022. Vaccination cards were checked at both tournaments. Masks were required in Austin, and the number of new COVID cases reported was relatively small. In Reno masks were not required, and the number of cases was much larger. By that time the protocol was determined by the CDC rating for the incidence of new cases for the county in which the event was held. Since Washoe County was rated low throughout the tournament, no masks were required1 in Reno.
Attendance at both of these tournaments was very low by historical standards. People at both ends of the spectrum were upset by the ACBL’s approach. Roughly one-third of the United States refused to get vaccinated. The percentage of the anti-vaxers was probably lower among bridge players, but it was significant. A significant percentage of the rest of the players had great difficulty with wearing masks. Some found them unbearably uncomfortable, and some just did not like the idea of never seeing a smile. On the other hand, a large number of bridge players, including me, thought that the ACBL’s policy was too lax. I thought that the event in Austin was lucky to escape with few infections and that the idea of hold a tournament in a casino in Reno was crazy. I did not attend either event, but both Joe and Lois attended both events, and Sally attended at least one.
In MailChimp you can paste your code in the window on the right, and it displays the email on the left.
The first email campaign: I exchanged a few emails with Joe about which vendor to use to process our emails. I was most familiar with MailChimp; he had used a different vendor in 2014. There were a few things about MailChimp that annoyed me, but the district already had a contract that provided an incredibly cheap rate of 800 for $1. If we used another service, it would be at least a little more expensive, and I would need to learn it. MailChimp allowed me to design my emails in HTML. I could therefore make sure that their appearance was exactly what I wanted. If we used another service that did not allow this, I would undoubtedly have felt frustrated. Joe agreed with my choice of MailChimp.
I questioned whether it was permissible to use the district’s account—which at the time contained enough credits for over one million emails—for this project. Joe assured me that it was kosher. I trusted his opinion. After all, he was also the district’s treasurer.
The database2 that I set up for District 25 contained one record for each ACBL member. It also contained records for tournament attendance at events in New England and for NABCs, including the 2014 event in Providence. My plan was to craft several emails based on whether players had attended any recent NABCs and whether they were within driving distance of Providence. New England players would receive separate emails depending on whether they had attended the previous event in Providence.
I began working on the first batch in January of 2022 and communicated my basic strategy for the first mailing on January 21:
I plan four distinct emails: 1. Attended 2014 Prov: 1,067 players. 2. D25 not in 1 above: 4,826 3. D3, D24 (at least 50 points) not in 1 above: 2,838 + 2,327 4. Attended recent NABC not in 1, 2, or 3 above: 10,107
I will send tests for approval as I finish them–probably today.
Joe, Lois, and Sue provided feedback on the four emails. They asked me to swap out a few of the photos that I had chosen. I don’t recall that they asked me to change any of the text. We had to hold off sending for a while because the ACBL had not published a schedule yet. Then when they did, the schedule for the first Saturday was obviously wrong. The emails finally were sent on February 5, 2022.
A sample of #1 can be viewed here. It was opened by 60.9 percent of recipients. 11 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #2 can be viewed here. It was opened by 46.9 percent of recipients. 2.9 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #3 can be viewed here. It was opened by 46.4 percent of recipients. 2.7 percent clicked on one or more of the links. A sample of #4 can be viewed here. It was opened by 43.1 percent of recipients. 4.2 percent clicked on one or more of the links.
The reaction was mostly positive. Quite a few people asked about the COVID-19 policy, which the ACBL did not publish until March. Joe and Lois received the following email from Joann Glasson, Grand Life Master and President of the ACBL:
Hi Joe and Lois,
I just received the terrific email about your upcoming NABC. I hope this got a wide circulation – did it go to all ACBL members?
The website looks great as well – really professional. I can’t wait to get to Providence this summer… Thanks for all your great work.
The locally maintained website3, which you can visit here, certainly was professional. Joe did all the work on it.
The one complaint was in regards to the captions on a few of the photos. There was nothing wrong with the code, but some email clients (including Microsoft Outlook, which is what I used on my desktop PC) did not interpret the code correctly. I spent several hours trying different methods of displaying the caption, but I never was able to get them to display correctly. You can see how email #3 looked when it was opened and then printed in memo form in Outlook here. So, I very reluctantly decided not to use captions on subsequent tournaments.
Hotel Reservations: On February 28 I felt confident enough that the ACBL would not cancel the tournament that I made hotel reservations. I decided that I would like to play in (or at least be around for) ten of the eleven days of the tournament. The schedule for the first Thursday did not appeal to me.
I redeemed 170,000 IHG Rewards points to pay for seven nights at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, which is about fifteen minutes south of the site of the tournament. I also redeemed some Hilton Honors points at the Warwick Hampton Inn for the two preceding nights. I had to pay an additional $155. Since the lowest bridge rate in downtown Providence was $179 per night, I felt that nine nights for $155 was a pretty good deal.
Months later Joe offered to provide a free hotel room for me in Providence. I told him that I had already cashed in my hotel points. In addition I preferred to stay in Providence while I was playing.
The Partnership System: Joe wrote a program to handle requests for partnerships and teammates. It was tested out during the district’s first regional in Marlboro, MA. Denise Bahosh managed partnerships there and deemed the programs to be working successfully. Since I was on my European River Cruise (documented here), I was not part of the testing process.
Meanwhile, the Chairs of the Partnership Committee for the NABC had been named. Jan Smola handled pairs, and Carol Seager was in charge of teams.
Partners: In the previous few NABC tournaments that I had attended I designed my schedule around playing in a couple of national (as opposed to regional) events. However, the schedule for Providence did not provide any national events—other than the GNT, which required qualification at the district level—that appealed to me. I had too many points for the Red Point Pairs and the lowest flight of the Life Masters Pairs. So, I would just try to play in as many bracketed team events as possible.
Shortly after making the hotel reservations I sent notices of my schedule to all of my usual partners and a few others with whom I had played at tournaments. Responses were very slow in arriving. The first confirmation came from Sohail Hasan. I had played with him in Mansfield in 2019, and we did pretty well together. On June 20 we agreed to play together the last three days of the NABC in Providence in team games if we could find teammates.
At about the same time Paul Burnham, with whom I had played a handful of times, agreed to play with me on Monday, Wednesday, and (the second) Thursday. That still left open Friday, Saturday, Sunday, on the first week and Tuesday.
Donna Lyons, whom I have known for years, finally claimed the first two spots. Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky had asked me to play teams with them on the first Saturday and Sunday. So, Donna and I planned to play with them on Saturday. I decided to take Tuesday off.
This was my schedule going into the tournament.
I tried to use the tournament’s partnership system to secure a partner for the bracketed team game on the first Sunday. I had to decide whether to fill out the partnership form or the team form. Since David Rock had told me quite clearly many times that the first step is to get a partner, I tried to fill in the partnership form. I was stifled when I had to specify the event, a required field that did not allow specification of a team event.
So, I filled in the team form and specified that our team was looking for one person. The only person that Carol paired me with was Abe Fisher. Here is the email that I got from him:
Hi Mike—
While in principle I’d love to play with you, if I’m reading the thread correctly, you’ve got 3 and need a 4th. I’ve also got 3, and need a 4th. So that doesn’t seem like it works.
Good luck,
Abe
I asked Carol if it was OK for me to fill out a pairs form and lie about the event. Then I might be able to persuade the prospective partner to play in the team event instead of the pairs. She said that was not allowed. I told her that, in my opinion, this was a very large flaw in the system.
So, the new partnership form failed both Abe and me. At the start of the tournament I still had no partner for Sunday. Nevertheless, I was not too worried. I expected a large number of people would have filled out cards for themselves by Friday or Saturday.
The second emailing: Here is the email that I sent to Joe and Lois about the plans for the email to be sent in April of 2022, three months before the tournament.
Joe and Lois,
I have set up segments for the next set of emails. There will be five basic emails based on masterpoints:
2-300: Emphasize 299er, Gold Mine, and Bracketed Round Robin. Sent to districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 24, and 25. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. 18,140
300-750: Emphasize Gold Mine, and Bracketed Round Robin. Sent to districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 24, and 25. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. 5,255
750-2500: Emphasize bracketed Round Robin, three-flighted events, and some national events. Sent to all districts. The D25 one will be a little different from the one for the other districts. I don’t know this number yet. 19,480
2500+: Emphasize national events. All districts, but D25 one will be a little different. 6,077
Players who have attended a recent NABC or the 2014 Providence NABC will be excluded from the four just listed.
NABC attendees (all masterpoints): Emphasize national events and why Providence is different, but D25 one will be a little different. 12,071
It bothers me that this misses a lot of snowbirds, but I don’t know how to find them.
I tried three new approaches to captioning images. All of them work fine in the displays inside MailChimp, but my Outlook client did not display any of them correctly. So I will not use captions for now.
I have almost finished the 299er version. I will send it to you some time today.
Mike
Joe, Lois, and Sue all liked the approach, but they had small but important suggestions for the photos and the copy. I incorporated them before I sent them out.
Samples of the mailings: 299er, 300-750, 750-2500, Over 2500, Attended NABC. I made an embarrassing mistake in the dates for one of the more obscure national events, and no one caught it before it went out. I communicated with a few people who noticed it, but I decided that it was not critical enough to send a correction.
Site visit and walk-through: On May 25 I received this email from Joe:
The ACBL site visit in Providence will be on June 2 at 10 am. If you will be working during the NABC please plan to attend if you are available. If your committee work will be completed prior to the NABC you are welcome to attend but not required. We will meet on the third floor which is the level the exhibition halls are on.
Please let me know if you will be attending by Friday, May 27, if you will be attending.
The Rhode Island Convention Center.
I quickly responded that I would attend. I had a few questions to ask the ACBL people about educational events at the NABC. At that point they had posted very little information about that area. I also wanted to take some photos of the site. Most of all, I wanted to see other members of the committee. I had great respect for all of them, and a few of them were good friends. I had not talked with any of them (except Sally Kirtley, the director of the Simsbury game) for more than two years. I decided to bring both my camera and my audio recorder.
My one misgiving concerned Sally. I knew that she had recently tested positive for COVID-19. I wondered if she would make the trip. Although she now lived fairly close to me, I certainly did not volunteer to car pool with her. Whether she was there or not, I definitely intended to wear my N95 mask.
I slightly underestimated how long it would take me to reach Providence. I arrived at the parking lot a few minutes before ten and parked on the fourth floor, which matched up with the third floor in the RICC. I saw the Montagues in the parking structure and said hello to them. Before I joined the group, which did include Sally, I visited the men’s room to dispose of the large coffee from McDonald’s that I had consumed on the drive from Enfield.
Sara Beth Raab left the ACBL a few months after the NABC in Providence.
In attendance were, by my recollection, all of the Chairs. That group now included Paula Najarian, who created the restaurant guide, and the two Chairs of volunteers, Linda Ahrens and Meg Gousie. The ACBL sent Sara Beth Raab and at least one other person. Lisa Watson represented the RICC. Erin Degulis of the Convention and Visitors Bureau was also there.
The traveling “Beyond Van Gogh” exhibit4 was occurring in the RICC while we were visiting. Therefore, we would not be able to see some of the playing areas. Everyone on the committee remembered them from 2014. The setup for playing was simple. The 299er and Gold Rush games would be held in one of the big rooms on the third floor. The other two big rooms would be used for team games and pairs games. The meeting rooms were on the fourth floor. The national events were on the fifth floor.
A good bit of the visit was devoted to determining the best places for the ancillary activities and exhibits—the partnership desk, the vendor area, the “In Memoriam” exhibit, etc. Others had strong opinions about these matters. Since I was only tangentially involved, I kept my mouth shut.
Afterwards we met in one of the fourth-floor conference rooms. I took advantage of this opportunity to ask about the educational programs. Sara Beth consulted her phone and then replied that the list of speakers and events had just been added to the ACBL’s version of the website for the tournament. When I returned to my house that evening I checked the website. There was no such list. I kept checking for three weeks, but nothing appeared. I sent an email to Joe to see if he could check up on this.
Eventually it did appear. They put it under the Intermediate and Newcomer (I/N) section. I guess that someone at the ACBL decided that once you have earned a few hundred points, you no longer have a desire to get better at bridge
The best part of the day, from my perspective, was the lunch at Murphy’s, a pub that was within a block or two of the RICC. I sat on the end of a long table. I made sure that Sally was far away from me. On my right was Paula, one of my favorite people. No one was on my left or across from me. Across from Paula was Lisa Watson, our contact at the RICC.
Lois and Paula won the Mid-Flight Pairs at the Presidential Regional in 2018.
Paula had not heard about my vacation in Europe. So, I actually had something to add to the conversation. I also told her about my two clients in East Greenwich, her home town.
The food was good, too. I had a huge Reuben sandwich and broccoli on the side. People were amazed that I cleaned my plate. I told everyone that if I had left food on my plate, my sainted mother would haunt my dreams.
This might have been my most enjoyable day since the pandemic hit.
Email campaigns in June: On June 5 Sue Miguel sent me the materials for an email that she wanted sent to 299ers. I had figured out how to do this for her. I opened the email in Outlook. I then took print screens of each image in the email, made jpg files of them, and stored them in the MailChimp folder. Then I saved the HTML code for the email as a text file. I removed the parts of the email that were not meant to be sent. I loaded the jpg files up to Mailchimp using the “Content Studio”. Then I replaced the URL’s on the “src=” parameters of the img statements in the email with the ones on the MailChimp server. I then enclosed the entire email in a table with one column that was six hundred pixels wide. That last step seemed to be the only way to set the width of any email in a way that all email clients recognized.
I selected all members of D25 with between 20 and 299 masterpoints. A sample of the email that was sent on June 7 can be seen here. 813 the 3,000 emails were opened, and 13 recipients clicked on a link. Those are not good results, but one must remember that most of those people had probably never played face-to-face bridge. It would not be an easy task to convince them that they should try it out at a national tournament.
On June 12 I received an email from Linda Ahrens, who was the co-chair with Meg Gousie of the Volunteers:
I was hoping you could use your creative genius to send out an email to everyone in District 25 requesting volunteers.
For every two-hour shift we will provide a $5 chit towards an entry fee. Volunteers will be able to play in any event as they will be scheduled prior to events or directly afterwards.
To sign up they should go to ProvNABC.org and then click on the blue volunteer tab on the left hand side of the page.
There is youth bridge on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the second weekend and we need volunteers for either half days or full days to work with beginners to provide support at the tables as they play. These volunteers will probably not be able to play on those days.
Meg and I will send out a schedule ten days prior. Volunteers will be asked to go to the volunteer/information desk prior to their shift where they will check in, get their assignments and upon completion of their shift they will get their chit.
If you need any more info please let me know. This might be too much info for one email so I will defer to what you think is best.
I wasted no time composing the email that you can view here. It was sent to about 6,000 people. 3,189 people opened it, and 51 clicked on the link.
Lois and Sue decided to sponsor a Zoom call that they labeled as an “Open House”. Sue designed the following image to serve as an invitation.
This went out to 6,000 New Englanders. Although only 38.2 percent opened the email, 110 clicked on the image, which allowed them to download the link.
On June 27 I finally received the email from Sue that she wanted to send to players with less than twenty points. You can view it here. I sent it out on the same day. Of the thousand or so recipients, 476 opened it, but only two clicked on a link.
In May Lois had sent me an email asking if I possessed or knew someone who possessed high-resolution photos of two recently deceased players from the Boston area, Bill Hunter or Shome Mukherjee. They were needed for the “In Memoriam” area of the tournament site in Providence. I looked through the photos that I had posted on the website, but I did not find anything that was usable.
A few weeks later she was frantic about obtaining the photos. She asked me to send an email immediately. I sent the email that is posted here on June 13. It went to about 1500 players in the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA). 824 of them opened it, and six clicked on the link. She was only looking for two photos, and eventually one of the respondents helped her obtain them.
Victor King.
In 2022 I was on the Board of Trustees of the Hartford Bridge Club. We voted to sponsor a day at the NABC to honor Victor King, a Grand Life Master who was a member of the club. He had been murdered in his own house by a tenant. I was asked by Felix Singer to send an email to people in the rest of New England who might be interested in donating to the project. I wrote and sent an email to players in central and eastern Massachusetts with over 1,000 points. Quite a few people donated. Al Muggia offered to curate the photos.
Steve Diamond, a player from Shrewsbury, MA, who knew me pretty well, sent a large check to my home address. I put it in the bottle with the rest of the donations. I overheard Felix telling someone that he could not believe that one of the participants in the novice group had been so generous. I told him that this was a different Steve Diamond.
Emails in July: Lois provided me with a list of items that she wanted to make sure that the people who were planning on attending the tournament knew about. I composed an email that contained these “nuggets” as well as the link to the ACBL’s well-hidden schedule of celebrity appearances. On July 1 I sent short emails to players in D25 and its two neighboring districts in the United States, a total of approximately 14,000 players. About 45 percent of recipients opened the email, and over six hundred clicked on one of the links. A sample has been posted here.
A week later I was asked by Sue Miguel to send an email to people in the district to promote the “Learn Bridge in a Day” program. I am not sure why the ACBL could not do this, but not enough time remained to argue about it. I sent out roughly six thousand emails. You can view the email here.
A scene from Bridge to Nowhere.
The last email that I composed and sent was designed to promote a play written by bridge teacher, columnist, and professional playwright, Adam Parrish. Bridge to Nowhere was scheduled to run for three nights in a small theater near the RICC.
This innocuous email, which I have posted here, generated as many replies as any that I had sent. Several tournament veterans challenged my claim that an NABC had never included a play about bridge. I deferred to their superior knowledge.
One person, who did not sign the email, said the following:”Remove my name from your mailing list. This email is an abuse of the bridge federation list if that is where it came from.”
Here was my reply:
I have done as you asked.
I have no interest in this play. I do not know the author or anyone associated with the theater. I sent the email at the request of the co-chair of the tournament committee in order to apprise potential attendees of a last-minute addition to the entertainments available in Providence during the NABC.
The Providence NABC Tournament Chairs: Here is a complete list of the chairs and co-chairs of the local committee. Tournament: Lois DeBlois and Joe Brouillard Hospitality: Sally Kirtley and Helen Pawlowski Sponsorships: Megan Mihara and Phyllis Chase Welcome and Prizes: Brenda and Neil Montague Volunteers: Linda Ahrens and Meg Gousie I/N and Gold Rush: Sue Miguel Partnerships: Jan Smola and Carol Seager Email Marketing: Mike Wavada.
Volunteering: I knew that I would be in the area for ten days. I volunteered to help whenever I might be useful. I also said that I had had a lot of experience working at partnership desks. When I filled out the form on the website, I indicated that I would be available from the first Friday through the second Sunday, but I would like to take Tuesday off. On July 1 I received the following email from Meg Gousie.
Thank you very much for volunteering at the Providence NABC. Your assistance will go a long way to helping make this event a big success! We notice that you have generously offered to volunteer, and have taken the liberty of assigning the following shifts to you:
Saturday, July 16. 1:30pm. Registration Desk Sunday, July 17. 8:30a, Partnership Desk Tuesday, July 19. 1:30pm. Partnership Desk Thursday, July 21. 8:30am. Partnership Desk
Please review and confirm your availability ASAP so we can plan accordingly.
Please plan on going to the volunteer desk 15 minutes before your scheduled assignment. The desk is located on the third floor by the escalators. After your scheduled shift, please come back to the desk to pick up your $5 chit which is good for $5 off an entry fee in Providence. You will also receive discounted parking.
I persuaded them to remove me from the Tuesday afternoon assignment. Shortly before I left for the tournament I checked my emails again and sent the following to Meg and Linda:
The email that you sent on 6/30 had me listed two shifts on 7/16: registration in the morning and partnership in the afternoon. The email sent on 7/1 had me working on registration in the afternoon on 7/16.
Two questions: 1) What is my schedule for 7/16? 2) Do I have any additional responsibilities other than the ones for 7/17 and 7/21 that are on this email?
By the time that I shut down Outlook my desktop computer5 before leaving for Providence I had not received a reply. I figured that I could check on it when I arrived.
My adventures at the Providence NABC itself are chronicled here.
1. Of course, only a very small percentage of the players at the tournament in Reno were from Washoe County. More than a few were from Europe or Asia. Using the rating for the county was like the old joke about the drunk looking for a lost coin under a lamppost that was a block away from where the coin was dropped—because the light was better. Furthermore, the event was held in a casino.
2. Starting in 2014 I designed and implemented every aspect of the database using MySQL and php.
3. The ACBL also had a webpage for the tournament, but it could not hold a candle to the one that Joe designed and implemented.
4. No one in our group went in on June 2. A description of the exhibit is posted here.
5. Incoming email was configured to download automatically downloaded to the Outlook application on my desktop computer in Enfield. If I did not close down Outlook, I would not be able to get email on my laptop for either of my email accounts.
I kept pretty good records of what my activities during 2021. I decided to arrange this entry in chronological order with separate entries for a few startling or momentous events.
January: 2020 was widely considered the worst year ever or at least in my lifetime, but it appeared that 2021 might wrest that crown away. It had the usual 365 days, but it felt like the longest year of all time. I had rather enjoyed the tranquility of the isolation in 2020, but by January of 2021 I really wanted to play bridge and see all of my friends again on a regular basis.
During the first few days of the new year no one talked about anything besides the election. I had become convinced early in the election campaign that Trump would try to start a coup if he lost. I was right. That story has been told here.
On the Pandemic front the big news in late 2020 was that three different vaccines would soon be available, but the schedule had not been published. The priority would be given to health care workers and then to those over 65.
We sufferers from trypanophobia were relentlessly subjected to photos of people with their sleeves rolled up as someone near them administered the shot (or “jab” as they called it in England).
On January 1 I played bridge online with Ken Leopold. We scored over 65 percent, one of my best scores ever. I still did not enjoy it.
Senators Manchin and Sinema.
On January 4, my sister’s 65th birthday, both of the Democrats were declared winners in Georgia. The Democrats seemed to be in control of both houses of Congress, but two of them, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, were not reliable votes. The former was in bed with Big Coal and conservative for even a Blue Dog, and the latter was just a narcissist.
On January 6 I played bridge with Ken again. This time we did horribly. When I get nervous playing online (sometimes because I am not yet used to the BBO interface), my left hand begins to shake.
Almost none of the rioters that stormed the Capitol wore masks. Deaths from Covid-19 were still averaging 4,000 per year. So, on top of everything else the insurrection was also probably a super-spreader event.
Ken and I had another awful game on January 8. This time I had an excuse. While we were playing, Sue was in the other end of the house and had a heart attack. She called 911, and an ambulance took her to the emergency room of St. Francis hospital. The doctors put in a stent. In January of 2021 hospitals were a very dangerous place. I was quite worried. I had long known that a day like this might come. Sue was quite overweight, and she knew that she had a mild case of diabetes for a long time. She never exercised, and her eating and sleeping habits were deplorable.
Almost all my horror stories involved Unite.
Expedia sent me an email that said that I had a credit with United Airlines. I had absolutely no idea what caused this. I looked at the header for the email; it seemed legitimate. At that point it seemed pretty unlikely that I would ever fly on United again. Unfortunately, the email got lost when I cleaned out my Outlook folders before moving to the Asus computer (details here) in 2023. So, I probably will never know any more about this.
I drove Sue home from the hospital on January 11. For the rest of her life she was required to administer insulin shots to herself and to take several types of heart medicine and a few other drugs for other chronic issues. She was on a fairly strict diet aimed at getting her weight down and her blood-sugar level under control. She could walk without assistance, but she had no stamina. She seemed worse a couple of days later.
She made an appointment with her primary care physician. The appointment with the doctor seemed to go OK. There might have been an adjustment to her drugs. I was required to wake her up every morning at 9 a.m. and to remind her when it was 6 p.m. After a while she figured out how to give herself reminders on her phone, but I still needed to awaken her every morning.
On January 20 Joe Biden was sworn in peacefully. At this point some right-wingers were claiming (with no evidence whatever) that the rioters (or at least the instigators) were actually from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or even the FBI. The FBI had begun searching for participants. There was an unbelievable abundance of video. Evidently for a lot of these bozos this was the culmination of a great deal of training and effort, and they wanted to make sure that they had mementos. Many of them would come to regret that decision.
On the 23rd I wrote in my notes that Sue seemed a little better, but she was still quite weak. She said that she could cook some, but she requested that I do the dishes. I agreed, of course, and there were several delicious but easy meals that I was comfortable preparing and cooking. I shopped for them, and she learned how to order groceries online.
February: On February 5 I played on BBO with Eric Vogel. We scored better than 54 percent.
Sue has rehabilitation therapy scheduled for the 8th, but she canceled it. She did that a lot when she had her knee replacement surgery a few years earlier. For a little while she tried to walk around on Hamilton Court. I joined her for a few of these jaunts. The cold air bothered her breathing for some reason. When it got warmer she went on little walks by herself, but she eventually stopped doing them. That was just the way she was. It would have done no good to nag her to exercise.
On the next day I played with Eric again. This time we scored better than 57 percent. I was starting to feel more relaxed playing online, but I still hated it. It was also the day that Trump’s trial in the Senate began. The first vote was on whether the process was constitutional. That passed 56-44 with six Republicans voting in favor. However, 67 votes will be required for conviction, and so it appears that he will walk again.
On the 10th Sue went back to her heart doctor. He put her back on Lasix to reduce the buildup of fluids. This seemed to help her a lot, but it made her go to the bathroom. It took her a bit of time to learn how to control this situation.
On the same day I went downstairs to walk a few miles on the treadmill1. It made a horrible sound, and I had to unplug it. After I thought about it, I became pretty sure that this was caused by the cats, Giacomo and Bob. They both took naps on the treadmill after visiting the litter box, which was also in the basement. A bit of litter might have stuck to their paws, then fell into the treadmill’s mechanism, and somehow made it jam up. In any case fixing or replacing it was not a job to be undertaken when all of society was under lockdown.
I always watched an opera or a streamed TV show or movie on my laptop situated on the ping pong table.
On the very next day I spent 100 minutes on the rowing machine that Sue had bought for me many years earlier. It gave me a sore tailbone. I brought down a small pillow and strapped it on top of the seat. I also brought down a pair of grey sneakers and permanently tied them into the footrest. It had bothered me that my feet slipped while I was rowing. This solved the problem.
Sue at some point in February had an anxiety attack. This was really the worst symptom yet. She had difficulty breathing for several minutes. This development meant that I had to keep bottled up my feelings about everything (including but not limited to my disdain for the pigsty in which we lived) or risk killing my wife. She got a prescription for this from one of her doctors. It seemed to work.
Over the next few days I spent some time doing our income taxes. I filed them electronically using “Free File Fillable Forms” and almost immediately received a refund from Connecticut. The federal refund did not arrive for several months. I can’t complain too much; the IRS did send a “stimulus” check of $2800.
At some point I dropped my Pixel 2 cellphone and cracked the screen. It still seemed to function correctly. This device, which I came to hate, continued to function until May of 2022. Its demise occurred somewhere in Germany and was described in detail here.
March: The 2nd was Sue’s 70th birthday. She was planning on throwing a big party, but she was definitely not up to it, and not many people would have been able to come anyway.
On March 15 Sue and I drove to a huge parking lot on Runway Rd. in East Hartford. There we received our initial Pfizer mRNA-based vaccine. It was a very quick and well-organized process overseen by members of the National Guard. The vaccine was reportedly more than 90 percent effective, which was incredibly high for a vaccine of any time. The number of new cases was already dropping in response to its availability.
A meeting of the District 25 Executive Committee (EC) was held via Zoom. Not much was decided. The big issue was whether the district would follow the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), the locality, or nobody with regards to requirements for vaccination and/or masks.
On March 16 the weather was nice enough to walk five miles outside. However this was the last time in March that I was able to achieve that distance. Subsequent walks were cut short by pain in my right foot that seemed somehow to be related to the chronic tendinitis that I had in the IT band that ran from my knee to my hip (described here). This was quite upsetting to me.
On March 21 I posted the pre-registration form and deposit for our team for the Grand National Teams (GNT) qualifying tournament: Felix Springer, Trevor Reeves, Ken, and me. The qualifying games would definitely be held online on BBO. The national finals were scheduled for the summer NABC. Because that tournament had been canceled, the GNT finals would be held online.
On March 22 the Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) met on Zoom. The plan was to hold the Ocean State Regional in Warwick on the week before Labor Day, if possible. The ACBL was planning to make a decision about sanctioning tournaments on May 22.
On the last day of March I made a long overdue appointment with my dentist, Dr. Coombs in Suffield. I later canceled the appointment because of fear of Covid-19.
April: No April fool jokes on April 1: The last blossom on the Christmas cactus appeared. The most remarkable story of the year concerned the mysterious injury to Sue’s cat, Bob. The details have been posted here.
April 5: I sent out an email composed by Sue Miguel to promote the online GNT qualifying tournaments that will be held at various times.
April 7: Bob seems nearly fully recovered.
April 13: Frances Schneider, the outgoing president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) asks me to take over her job at the end of her term. I declined because I was still doing a great deal of work for the district, and no one seemed to be taking seriously that I planned to resign those duties at the end of the year, and a great deal of effort would be required to replace me.
April 15: Sue and I drove back to East Hartford to be given the second Pfizer shot. I was once again amazed at how easy it was. I have always absolutely hated even the idea of shots, but this was not a bad experience. A fairly sizeable percentage of the population, however, has bought into the idea that the vaccines are some kind of plot generated by the Big State.
No screens online.
April 17-18: The GNT qualifier was held over a weekend online on BBO. In the first round on Saturday our foursome played in a four-way, which was necessary because there was no way to do a three-way on BBO. Because it was so easy to cheat on BBO, we were supposed to provide our own way of communicating visually (via Zoom or some other device). There were no instructions as to how this should or could be done. It was left up to the players, each of whom was paired up with an opponent in the way that is done in matches that used screens. .
The Meyerson team. Bernie is on the right.
In the first half of the first round we met Steve Meyerson’s team for a twelve-board match. I was supposed to set up some kind of communication with Bernie Bendiksen. I had played against Bernie a few times at tournaments, but I did not know him well. He didn’t know how to do it, and neither did I. So, we just played. I think that the other six people figured out a way to do it.
We won easily. The margin was 30 victory points. That meant that we did not need to play in the second half of the first round. We did not need to come back until after lunch.
Meyerson’s team won the second half of the morning. So, they got to play in the second round after the lunch break
Stay away, Fluffy.
In the afternoon we had another four-way. In the first twelve-board match our opponents were the team captained by Dana Rossi, who was also the person with whom I was supposed to establish verbal communication. Dana was from southwest Connecticut; I had played against him quite a few times at sectionals, but I had never been friendly with him. He provided me with a link to a Zoom feed that he was controlling. I signed in on Yoga, my convertible laptop. I played the match online on my desktop computer. I was uncomfortable listening to Dana Russo talking to a little girl, presumably his daughter. He told her that they take dead animals to the incinerator to burn them.
Not in Flight B.
We won again, this time by 35 victory points. So, we qualified to play in the quarterfinals on Sunday. We were matched up against Brad Mampe’s team. I was paired with his long-time partner Steve Willner. I had played against them once or twice, but I had not conversed with either of them. They seemed to play very little except in this event. Steve ran the Zoom feed. They had previously played a version of the Polish Club (as, in fact, so had Dan and his partner, Adam Lally). In this match they played a fairly standard version of 2/1.
This was a twenty-four board match. We lost the first half by 11 victory points. Steve was not around when the second half began, but he showed up a few minutes later. Ken and I had some chances in the second hand, but we each misplayed one hand. We lost the second half by 24.
Eric and Victor Xiao in 2019.
The Mampe team defeated the team captained by Dan Jablonski in the semifinals. Their opponents in the final match would be the Xiao team, whose captain was Victor. They would play a 48-board match for first place at some later date, but they were both guaranteed to qualify for the GNT.
On April 19 I sent out another email on MailChimp for Sue Miguel. When I attempted to remove everyone from the audience that I was using so that I could replace them with C players, Donna Cone’s record did not move. In an online “chat” someone from MailChimp told me it was because her record had been “cleaned”, which meant that the email address was no longer valid. I had obtained this address from the Rhode Island Bridge Association (RIBA) several years earlier.
After I sent out the email I undertook to print a coupon for $3 off of a box of cat litter. Thus began the great encounter with the Geek Squad that has been recounted in detail here.
On April 24 I walked 2.5 miles, but I had to quit at that point because of the pain in my right foot. The pain persisted throughout the evening.
The next day I sent out another email for Sue Miguel.
On April 26 I listened to a very disturbing podcast on This American Life about how right-wingers are sabotaging the effort to get the nation to a state of “herd immunity”, in which enough people have immunity that new infections cannot find new hosts. It has been posted here.
May: On May 2 I sent the following email to my friend, Bob Sagor (introduced here), the captain of the team that finished third: “The Xiaos won C. They can’t play in both flights. You may get to play in the NABC!”
On Thursday, May 6, I mowed the lawn for the first time in 2024. As usual, the Honda lawnmower started on the first or second pull. I needed to stop after completing the parts of the yard that face Hamilton Court or North Street. I sat, stretched the IT band on my right leg, and rested a bit. I then mowed the rest of the lawn.
The flowers on the daffodils and tulips in the neighborhood were withering. New Englanders said that the plants were “going by.” I had never heard this expression before coming to Connecticut, and I have never seen it in print.
Bob Sagor.
On May 8 Brad Mampe’s team beat Victor Xiao’s team in the final match of the Flight B qualifying tournament by 50 Victory Points! The third-place match was won by the team thrown together at the last minute by my friend and occasional partner, Bob Sagor. In fact, Bob’s team did attend the tournament, which was held online. They added Felix to their roster.
On May 11 Sue somehow hurt her left foot. I gave her the ankle brace that I had used a couple of times when I had sprained my ankle. Also, her ears were stopped up. Neither of these conditions lasted very long, but they made her even more miserable.
On May 13 I walked five miles with only two stretch breaks in 70 degree weather. I considered that a big improvement! Giacomo was having trouble getting up the steps from the basement to the house. I hated to do it, but I was going to need to bring the litter box upstairs.
The was the day that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) eliminated the mask guidelines “for most”. This was strictly a political move. Hundreds were still dying every day, but an incredibly large number of people resented being told to wear them. Good masks were an effective means of reducing the spread of the virus. The CDC had fumbled the ball when they said that any sort of face covering would do. Only later did their spokesmen indicate that the N95 masks were many times more effective than ordinary cotton ones.
Yoga and Big Bubba.
On Wednesday, May 26, I had placed my convertible computer, Yoga, on the floor next to the nightstand in the bedroom just before I took a nap. I then set my Big Bubba mug on the nightstand. It fell on the computer. Even though Yoga was closed, the impact cracked the screen. It was no longer functional.
Two days later I ordered a Microsoft Surface Go laptop from Best Buy. Before the Pandemic there was a Best Buy store in Enfield, but it had been closed. I had to drive to Manchester, CT, to pick it up. I did not give it a name.
On May 31 the Hartford Bridge Club reopened. Eight pairs played in a Howell. Masks were required (thank goodness!) because of the policy of West Hartford.
June: On the first day of the new month my new laptop would not operate. The screen was all black or dark grey. I could see the cursor, but i could not get it to operate. I made an appointment and drove to Best Buy in Manchester. The guy at the Geek squad desk was sanguine. He told me that “It uploads changes every Tuesday; something must have happened so that it could not reboot.” I asked him if I should make an appointment now for the following Wednesday. He advised me to hold the power key, which was the second one from the right on the top row, down for ten seconds.
On June 3 the TSC had a Zoom meeting. The district will try to hold a tournament in the week before Labor Day in Warwick, RI. This was exciting news. I sent out three big emails about Warwick.
That evening I found Bob in the basement. I deduced that he was able to climb up and down the stairs. I moved the litter box back to the basement.
Sohail Hasan, a partner from a tournament in 2019, sent me an email that asked me to play with him in Warwick.
On June 5 Chen’s team beat Mampe’s in a close match in the Flight A final of the GNT qualifier. That would really have been something if Mampe’s team had won both A and B.
The internal modem on my desktop computer stopped working, but I got the Belkin external modem to function. 52 people unsubscribed to my emails. That was a very high number. It was 94 degrees outside that day. I found that I could no longer tolerate long walks in temperatures above 90. When I was in my fifties I had no problems running in 100+ temperatures. It was still very hot the next day.
Sue told me that she has seen a white circle in the middle of her field of vision twice. This could be very bad. I certainly hoped that it didn’t happen again.
On June 8 I committed to play on July 1 with Felix Springer at the Hartford Bridge Club. I needed to avoid getting too many masterpoints because my total was very close to 2500, which was the cutoff for the GNT in 2022. I needed to be under that total for the roster that was published on August 6, 2021.
While researching for the blog entry about the Mark Twain writing contest (posted here), I discovered that Dorothy Clark was one of the judges. I played against her many times in Simsbury, and I was also her partner one evening, as described here.
Me, Felix, Eric, and Trevor.
June 12th was my third straight day of pain-free five mile hikes. I committed to play on 6/21 with Eric Vogel in club qualifying game for the North American Pairs (NAP).
The next day I committed to play at the HBC with Trevor Reeves on June 29. That game got canceled later.
On June 14 I discovered that Sue’s cat, Bob, was able to use the ramp that led from the basement to the cat door and thence to the back yard. So, he evidently no longer needed the litter box.
I played with Eric online on June 21. We were horrible.
I learned on June 27 that I did not need to report for jury duty. In 2023 I would be 75, which would allow me to avoid jury duty forever. I never served on a jury. I came close once. I was selected as an alternate for a civil case about an automobile accident. It was scheduled for two days, but one of those was canceled because of a bomb threat. I was unable to attend on the rescheduling date, and so I was excused.
6/29 Bob Bertoni (introduced here) died at 5:45 AM. This was very hard to take. Bridge in New England will have a very difficult time recovering without him. Over the subsequent years I have thought of him very often. His obituary was posted here.
John Willoughby.
Sue played bridge at the HBC with John Willoughby. After the temperature topped out at 97 degrees, a front came through with a thunderstorm.
6/30 I played with Felix at club. There were nine tables. We won with 62+%, and I earned my Q for the NAP qualifier.
July: A lot happened in July. On the first Sue and I drove to Bradford, MA, for Bob Bertoni’s wake. I had to let Sue off and park several blocks away. I saw Peter, Lois DeBlois, Carolyn Weiser, and Paula Najarian, who, to my great surprise, had white hair. A lot of the bridge players from the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA) were also there. I introduced myself to Beth Bertoni and told her that I did not know what we were going to do without Bob. I really meant it, and in the ensuing months and years I learned that my concern was justified.
Sad news: O’Connor’s closed for good at the end of 2022.
On the way back to Enfield we stopped for supper at O’Connor’s Irish restaurant in Worcester. I had to let Sue off again before I found a parking sport a good way from the door. This was our first night out in over fifteen months. We wore masks until the food came. Most of the other diners acted as if the Pandemic had never happened.
Mrs. Brown’s giant chicken and vegetable pot pie.
I had the chicken pot pie and a Guiness. It was good, but not a lot better than what could be purchased at the grocery store and reheated. It was nice, however, to be in public and see people who were having a good time.
It was raining lightly when I walked out to retrieve the car. By the time that we reached the Mass Pike there were torrents of rain. I drove almost all thee way home with the windshield wipers on at the highest speed. Most of the time I had great difficulty seeing the lane indicators. This was the worst occasion for summertime driving that I ever experienced.
It continued to rain very hard on the next day. Enfield seemed to get more rain than nearby locations. The back yard was flooded, and a few puddles were evident in the basement. Never in the more than thirty years that we had lived in Enfield had water seeped into the basement. I struggled to understand where it came from. Evidently concrete is slightly porous, and when the soil is very wet the water finds its own level.
Sue borrowed (or otherwise procured) a Sears Wet/Dry Vacuum and showed me how to use it. The puddles were eliminated rather quickly.
Stuart Whittle and Saul Agranoff.
On July 9 Saul Agranoff asked me if I could help with the EMBA website. It had been designed and supported by Bob Bertoni. I supplied him with the email address of the contact person at Bob’s company, Megahertz Computer. I also explained that I had never worked on the EMBA website, had no credentials for it, and was pretty certain that it was significantly different from NEBridge.org.
On July 10 I received emails from District 25 officials who were concerned about new ACBL rules for tournaments. They evidently required masks on all players and a distance of nine feet between tables.
My notes said that on the next day the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) announced a sectional in Stamford. I could find no details about when this was scheduled to occur. This struck me as very peculiar because I was a member of the board in 2021 (and the previous eight years). To my knowledge we had no meetings whatever during the Pandemic.
My notes also indicated that on the next day that I sent email to my steady partners. Because a large number of emails were deleted when I converted to the Asus box in the fall of 2023 (described here), I cannot locate a copy of this email, but my recollection is that I wanted to set up a regular schedule for online play at the HBC on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
On July 13 I played bridge at the H
I kept a couple of these masks to use while mowing my lawn in allergy season.
BC with Felix. Quite a few players had difficulties with the masks. The most common complaint was that they caused glasses to fog up. I had bought ten masks for $10 at Shoprite. They were sold by Hanes and made of cotton and were washable. They probably stopped not even one infected particulate, but they did not bother me even a little.
Ben and Ginny Bishop provided decorated masks for members of the HBC. Sue ordered one. I don’t know what happened to it.
On July 15 I renamed the blog entries that chronicled the story of my life as The 1948 Project. It was a takeoff on the somewhat controversial 1619 Project that was sponsored by the New York Times in 2019 concerning the role of slavery in the development of the United states.
On the same day a $63.75 charge from Slice appeared on my American Express card. This was for three pizzas that the cellphone that was in my pocket apparently ordered while I was on one of my five-mile walks. The pizzas were delivered, but I had refused them because I did not place or confirm the order.
In an open pairs game at the HBC on July 20 Donna Lyons (introduced here) and I scored 62%. It was Maria Van der Ree’s 90th birthday.
On July 22 I played at the HBC with Joan Brault (introduced here). There were a lot of wild hands. Joan and I did not deal with them very well.
On July 24 Sue and I attended Maria’s birthday party. We found the event somewhat scary. No one was wearing masks. People had had enough of Covid-19, but the threat was a very long way from over.
Ken Leopold’s teenage son Sam had died at some point in July. I never learned the details. Sue and I attended the burial service in Avon. It was the first Jewish burial service that I had attended. A few people from the HBC were there: Ronit Shoham, Geof Brod, Y.L. Shiue, Marie Abate, and Felix Springer and his wife Helene. Ken gave a very touching speech about his son’s baseball heroics.
The virus had been raising its ugly head. On July 30 the ACBL responded by canceling all tournaments scheduled for August, which included the tournament that D25 hoped to old in Warwick. I immediately sent out an email with the same selection criteria as the on that I had previously sent to announce the cancellation of the tournament.
August: On August 2 I received an email from Viking (the cruise line) moving the departure date for our Grand European Tour to October 23. That would preclude attendance at the scheduled tournament in Mansfield, MA. I began investigating the alternatives.
My notes for August 5 say “Stood up by Joan. Had to drive back to pick up Sue Rudd.” I do not remember either of those events or what caused them. American Express reinstated the charges for the pizzas. I called, and they reopened the dispute. In the end I had to pay for one pizza. It was not worth it to fight this any more, but I deleted the Slice app from the Pixel 2. I have told this story many times, and I have yet to meet anyone else whose phone ordered anything for them.
After a Zoom call in the evening with Mark Aquino, who, after Bob Bertoni’s death, had decided to run for Regional Director, I felt very depressed about the future of bridge in New England and elsewhere.
On August 6 I rebooked the Viking tour to depart on October 11.
Brenda Montague.
On the next day on behalf of Brenda Montague, the chair of the Nominating Committee, I sent out a set of emails to bridge players in New England soliciting volunteers for the job of vice-president. Trevor Reeves later talked with me about the possibility of applying. I don’t think that he went through with it.
On August 11 I attended the Zoom call with the three Regional Director candidates, David Moss, Mark Aquino, and Allan Graves. David was the District 24 Director from New York City. Allan Graves lived in St. Johnsbury, VT, but for years had only participated in NABC’s and international events. No one mentioned the word tournament. Allan argued that we should concentrate our efforts on trying to get people to play rubber bridge. I found the whole event very depressing.
After the bridge game on my 73rd birthday a bunch of people who had played in the game joined Sue and me for lunch at Effie’s Place. In attendance were Lea Selig, Susan Seckinger, Lois McOmber, Jeanne Striefler, Maria Van der Ree, and Fred Gagnon. We ate outside. I think that I had a Reuben sandwich. It was nice to have any kind of a social occasion.
The next day a “war room” Zoom meeting of D25 officials was held. Carole Weinstein, Carolyn Weiser, Jack Mahoney, Peter Marcus, Sue Miguel, Joe Brouillard, and Sally Kirtley atttended. Peter wanted D25 to cancel all tournaments for 2021 and 2022! Nobody took that suggestion seriously. The qualification tournaments for the NAP would be held online. Carole called the decision a “no-brainer”. I thought that it was a bad idea to decide that anything would be played online if an alternative was possible.
On August 19 I reluctantly voted for Mark Aquino for Regional Director. He won.
I learned on August 20 that airline reservations had been made by Viking for the trip in October. I started doing some serious research about the ports of call on the cruise, which would start in Amsterdam and end in Budapest.
SBC games were played at Eno Hall, the Simsbury Senior Center.
On August 21 I sent an email to players in the vicinity of Simsbury to determine whether they would be interested in resuming the games of the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). It is posted here. I received a lot of positive responses.
The next day Hurricane Henri passed through Connecticut. Enfield received only a little bit of rain, but floods were reported in Vernon and Manchester.
On August 24 I learned that the SBC will have been turned over to Sally Kirtley as of September 15. Ken did not want to direct the games. I asked her to verify the schedule with Eno Hall before I announced it.
On August 25 I sent an email to SBC subscribers that we would not be allowed to validate vaccinations on site. I definitely did not want to play bridge with anyone who had not been vaccinated.
Med Colket.
On August 30 Med Colket came up with a work-around. We could change SBC games to invitational instead of open so that I could validate vaccinations that were sent to me through emails. I could also automatically register players whom I had seen play at the HBC.
Aaaaargh! The U.S. has been removed from the white list by the European Union because of the recent uptick in the number of Covid-19 cases here. I began to wonder whether the cruise would be called off and, if not, whether we would be quarantined before boarding the ship.
September: On the first day of the month tropical depression Ida arrived in CT late at night. The rest of this heroic story has been told here.
On September 3 three European countries (Norway, Sweden, and Italy) began requiring tourists from the U.S. to quarantine. The problem was the new Delta variant was nearly twice as transmissible as the original strain, which had spread at an incredible rate before the vaccinations began. .
On September 5 the leaders of D25 were considering—via an exchange of emails—whether to cancel the tournament in Mansfield in November. Most people seem to be leaning in that direction.
On the following day Tom Corcoran, Sue and I decided to postpone the cruise until the spring because of the threat of quarantining in Europe. This would also allow Tom to spend his 70th birthday with his family in Vermont.
On August 8 the cruise was changed to begin on May 5 and end on May 22. Sue made the arrangements while I was playing bridge at the HBC. This period was chosen because no bridge tournaments were scheduled then. The new cruise started in Budapest and ended in Amsterdam. The other ports were the same or nearly so. This was not the last change in our plans, but I actually did go on the cruise on those dates. The bizarre details have been posted here.
On September 10 the HBC restarted the Saturday afternoon game. Peter Katz, my long-time Saturday partner, agreed to play with me.
On September 10 Sue and I went to the picnic for the Locke cousins. I sat by myself because I heard that some of the attendees had refused to get vaccinated, and no one in attendance wore a mask.
On September 14 for the first time ever my Honda lawnmower would not start. I later learn that there was gas or oil in the air filter. On the next day it started, and Sue hired a local guy to pick it up, change the oil, and check it out.
The inaugural Friday afternoon open game at HBC on September 17 drew only six pairs. I played with Trevor.
On the next day the first Saturday afternoon game at the reopened HBC was held. Both Mike and Susan Smith and Ken and Lori Leopold attended. There were five tables.
On September 20 I learned that changing the date of the trip had cost Tom $3K. I did not understand why, but there was not much I could do about it.
Giacomo surprised me by climbing back up on the couch. In his younger days he nonchalantly walked up onto the couch. He also executed a very tentative “mighty leap”2.
On September 21 the mechanic delivered the lawnmower and only charged $125. It ran very well. It was (and still is in 2024) the best lawnmower by far that I ever bought.
I realized on September 23 that I officially had exceeded my life expectancy at birth (73.1 years). I told people this at the HBC. No one seemed interested at all.
The cats had been acting weird for the last week or two. They no longer associated with each other. Bob stayed outside all day and night. He only came in only for meals or storms. Giacomo has returned to his throne on the back of the couch. He has taken to biting at his back legs and spine area. Who knows why?
On the same day the EC voted 9-3-1 to cancel Mansfield. I was the 1.
On September 24 the forecast on WTIC radio at 4:30 AM predicted a low of 75 and a high of 69.
The next day I discovered a sensitive spot on Giacomo’s back. For the first time ever he bit me.
Me and Ann.
On September 26 I was on the winning team of the first Swiss event at the reopened HBC. I played with Ann Hudson. Our teammates were Trevor, and Felix. We won by four victory points with a blitz in the last round against weak competition. I made made three bidding errors, but none of them cost us, and one helped us. 1♣-1♠-1NT-2♣–♥-2NT made 3; 2♣ by Ann was a relay to 2D (XYZ)3.Ann wanted to sign off in diamonds.
On September 27 I walked five miles without stopping for first time in months in perfect weather.
On September 30 I changed dentists because Dr. Peter Coombs did not take ConnectiCare. My new dentist was Dr. Bill Cummiskey.
October: On October 11 I canceled Chewy.com order of Advantage II, but it was delivered four days later. The charge was refunded on October 18.
On October 13 I saw Boris Godunov (an opera by Modest Mussorgsky recorded live in HD at the Met) at Cinemark4 at Enfield Square. Only one other person attended. Since that person was at least thirty feet away from me I took off my mask. I also saw two employees and one other person who was there to see a movie.
On October 15 I sent out the invitations for the first Simsbury game to 72 vaccinated people.
The next day Linda Starr helped me make boards at the HBC for the first game at Simsbury. Peter Katz and I finished first. There were only five other pairs, but it was a strong field. So far 4.5 tables are committed for the first game at the SBC.
On October 19 I got the points that I needed to finally make Gold Life Master even though I played poorly with John Calderbank.
Sally Kirtley set me an email that Eno “cannot accommodate SBC” on October 20. I had to postpone the first game, for which we had five tables.This was hard to take.
On October 20 I checked to make sure that everyone saw my email about the cancellation. Felix and Trevor agreed to play with Ken and me in the GNT qualifier next spring. HBC announced that it will drop mask requirement as of Friday. I had absolutely no intention of abandoning my mask.
On October 22 I discovered that Bob had a bump on his right shoulder that he did not like being touched. Sue was convinced that it was a bite. It did not feel like that to me.
I played with Sally Kirtley and learned that Eno Hall canceled our game because it did not have a janitor scheduled for October 20. Eight pairs had so far agreed to play on October 27.
On October 24 the HBC held its annual meeting on Zoom. Trevor had asked me to serve as a trustee, and I had agreed to a three-year commitment.
Donna Feir.
On October 27 Donna Feir let us use the boards that were made for the Tuesday night that was canceled because not enough people registered. It was Tom Corcoran’s birthday. Sue and I talked with him and his kids on Zoom. I copied the wrong .pbn5 file onto my thumb drive to give to Sally. I was ten minutes late at Simsbury because of Sue Rudd. Ken and I tied for first (out of eleven pairs) with Felix and Trevor.
On October 29 I discovered that Bob had one or two ticks.
November: We assigned November 1 as the birth date for two of our cats, Giacomo, and Woodrow. So, we celebrated Giacomo’s eighteenth birthday on 11/01/21. This was a big one. Both Woodrow and Rocky had made it to 18, but each died shortly thereafter. So, from now on Giacomo was playing with the house’s money.
In other cat news: Bob would not come into the house. Sue put food and water in bowls outside for him and made up a bed for him among all of her junk piled up outside of the blue door to the kitchen. Maybe he was afraid of Giacomo. Maybe he was afraid of me. Maybe he was just crazy.
On Tuesday, November 2. I drove into the HBC before the morning game and used the HBC’s dealing machine to make boards for the SBC game the next evening. John Calderbank and I then had a 59 percent game, a real coup for us.
I somehow managed to pull a huge tick off of Bob’s right shoulder. Sue claimed that he still had a smaller one on the left side of hs neck, but I had not seen it.
On Wednesday evening we had 3 1/2 tables at the evening game at the SBC. I had used the correct pbn file this time.
On November 6 the grey cat that sometimes roamed our neighborhood appeared. Bob stayed inside.
On November 7 an astounding sixteen teams played in the Swiss at the HBC! Food was provided, and the players were definitely ready to party.
I picked a second tick off of Bob’s right shoulder. I could not find anything on his left shoulder. This might have been the best day of the year at the Wavada household.
On November 12 Bob returned to the family. He got up on Sue’s chair without help while she was sitting on it. Sue was absolutely delighted.
On November 23 the first meeting of the new HBC Planning Committee was held on Zoom. John Willoughby, the new vice-president, ran the meeting. I learned that there would be a “rainbow” event for clubs in January. Gold, silver, red, and black points would be awarded 6
Sue has taken to sleeping on my chair in the living room because Bob would not leave her chair. Why, you may ask, does she sleep prefer to sleep on a chair rather than a bed?
On November 24 I sent a long email to the people on the EC to explain what I had been doing in my role as webmaster, database manager, and other things before the Pandemic. The rest of my frustrating but ultimately successful attempt to resign from these responsibilities has been described here in excruciating detail.
November 27 was another great day. U-M defeated Ohio State 42-27. Michigan had no takeaways and only punted twice. They had seven drives that ended in touchdowns. Needless to say, I did not watch the game, but I wished that I had. I feasted on lots of replays of the many highlights. Michigan finished the regular season 11-1 and would meet Iowa on December 4 for the conference championship.
11/29 For some stupid reason the TSC announced that it would meet on Zoom on December 15, a Wednesday evening. My protests that this was the ONLY time all week that Sally and I could not attend fell on deaf ears. I don’t know if Sally emphasized this, but I certainly did. was really upset about this.
December: Sue and I got our booster shots for the Pfizer vaccine at the local CVS.
12/3 I had a minor pain in my shoulder and neck; the only reason to mention it was because I had no known injuries there. The passport that I planned to use on the October trip would expire before I needed it for the rescheduled one in May. I had researched what was required. I took a photo of myself in the size and format required. I mailed it with all the other materials, including my old passport. The State Department did not accept the photo and sent the package back to me.
On the next day Michigan beat Iowa 42-3. The Wolverines were champions of the Big 10 for the first time since they started the championship game.
On December 6 the new stove that Sue purchased arrived and was installed. The burners are, in my opinion, much too hot, but I didn’t know what we could do about it. My neck felt much better.
12/7 I went to Walgreen’s and bought a new passport photo. They guaranteed that it would be accepted. Evidently there was a website that examined the image and validated it. I could not find my old passport.
The next day I found the old passport under my chair in living room. It had apparently dropped through the cushions. I mailed the forms back in.
Ken and I scored more than 72 percent at the SBC bridge game. That might have been the best score that I had ever recorded up to that point.
The space to the right of the Gold LM certificate will probably always be empty.
On December 10 I received Gold LM certificate from the ACBL and attached it to the east wall in my office below the other ones. I don’t expect to win any more
On the next Tuesday Donna Feir needed me to make boards for the morning open pairs game while she got the room set up. I did so. I only had time to make 5 boards for the Wednesday night game at the SBC. I made the rest of boards by hand. Unfortunately, when I did so I made boards #21 and 22 the same. Ken directed and Margie Garilli kept score on the BridgeMate.
On December 16 the EC voted on Zoom to move the Royal STaC to April of 2022, to cancel the Presidential Regional ordinarily held in February, and to hold two four-day regionals in May. One would be a free tournament structured along the lines of the Gold Mine held in 20197. The other would be open.
On December 17 President Biden postponed closing U.S airports to people from countries that were infected by the Omicron virus.
On December 22 I could not get dealing machine to work. At the SBC game we played using an old deck that had been given to me years earlier. The players did not like this much.
Discontinued but not forgotten.
In the little shelf on the north wall of my office I found a package of McCormick’s Meat Marinade. On Christmas day I used it to marinate a spoon roast that Sue and I feasted on. I put Bob up on my lap both in the office and the living room. He really liked the former when I petted him with both hands, but I was not able to get much work done when I did so.
By December 26 Omicron accounted for 71 percent of the cases of Covid-19 in the US. The number of new cases eclipsed 200,000 per day. The holiday season turned into a super-spreader event.
I realized that I must be allergic to Bob—sneezing and blowing nose all day. I bought ten N95 masks at Home Depot for $23. The CDC finally admitted that simple face coverings were better than nothing, but the N95 masks were tremendously more effect
I encountered no problems whatever in making thee boards for the SBC game. I played with Felix in the open pairs game at the HBC. We almost won; one different decision against Tom Joyce would have done it.
On December 29 I had a 64 percent game in the open pairs at the HBC with Eric. In the last game of the year at the SBC 3 tables, Ken and I scored 65%.
On December 30 at an emergency meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) on Zoom. Carole Amaio was a riot: “Can you hear me? I broke my wine glass. Shit!” We decided to require masks starting on Monday.
On December 31 over 500,000 new cases were reported, the most of entire Pandemic. The only good sign was the fact that hospitalizations and deaths were not as prevalent as with the original virus. However, both vaccinated people and those who had already had Covid-19 were susceptible to Omicron.
U-M lost to Georgia 38-11. The football team had a great year, but they were not (yet) in Georgia’s class. Four bowl games were canceled in 2021.
1. This treadmill was given to me by Tom Corcoran. My first treadmill was purchased second-hand from someone who had never used it. I found them on Craig’s List. The belt on that one broke after I had used it regularly in the winter and foul weather for several years. Tom brought the second one from his house in Wethersfield. His wife Patti had used it for a while. He somehow arranged for removal of the old one and installation of this much better one. Incidentally, I claim to be the only person who has ever broken two treadmills. Prove me wrong.
2. Giacomo was the only cat that we ever had who attempted to make the “mighty leap” from the couch on which he tended to spend his days to my easy chair where he liked to sit on my lap while I was watching television. When in September 2021 he executed the “tentative” version of the leap, I realized that his legs and body were so long that he could actually reach the armrest that he landed on by just stretching out to his full length.
3. XYZ is a kind of new-minor forcing. After any three bids 2♣ is a relay to 2♦, usually to show invitational values. A ♦ rebid is an artificial game-force.
4. In December of 2023 the twelve-theater Cinemark complex in Enfield Square closed for good. At that point it became a twenty-minute drive to see a movie or, in my case,an HD opera.
5. Files with the extension “.pbn” (portable bridge notation) can be read by the Dealer4 software that runs the dealing machine at the HBC. At first I had Linda make some of these files for me using software on the HBC’s computer. In 2023 I discovered free software available for download that allowed me to make them on my computer. In both cases the files generated were completely random.
6. I am pretty sure that the “rainbow” event was later called a Royal STaC.
7. The free Gold Mine never happened. I do not remember why.
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.
