2025 Bridge: Sectional Tournaments

Posted on February 13, 2025 by Mike

Still under construction.

The first tournament of the year was held in Johnston, RI, on the weekend of February1-2. I had no interest in playing in the pairs game on Saturday. Abhi Dutta asked me to team up with him and his partner, Vipin Mayar. I was pretty certain that Eric Vogel would not want to play on Sunday, and so I asked John Lloyd again. The four of us had played in a sectional at the same location in September 2024. That adventure has been described here.

John and I again agreed to meet at the Park and Ride lot on Route 32 near I-84, this time at 8:45. Since John had driven from there to Johnston in September, I volunteered to drive this time. I was a little worried about the return trip. My cataracts had recently been diagnosed, and some kind of precipitation was expected.

I arrived at the lot seven minutes late. It was completely my fault, and I apologized. I left a minute or two after I planned. I planned on stopping at the McDonald’s in the Scitico shopping center, but I missed the turn from Taylor Rd., and when I passed it on Route 190 there was a line. So, I decided to keep going and stop at the one in West Stafford.

Unfortunately, I found myself two cars behind a NETTTS truck². We only followed it as far as Somers, but its still cost us another five minutes or so as it poked along at 25-30 mph on Route 190.

There was also a slow-moving line at the West Stafford McDonald’s as well. I lost at least another five or ten minutes there.

The worse news was that they messed up my order. Instead of the sausage biscuit with egg that I always ordered, they gave me a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit. The bacon was tasteless, I don’t like McD’s cheese, and the biscuit had been hardened by time under the heat lamp.

I drove as fast as I reasonably could the rest of the way, but I did not arrive at the parking lot until 8:52. The rest of the trip was uneventful, but it was 9:55 by the time that we reached the Johnston Senior Center. I gave my credit card to John and parked the car. I then got my materials from the back seat. The lunch that I had prepared was there, but I could not find my convention card holder, which contained our convention card, old scoresheets, and my mechanical pencil. I was almost certain that I had remembered to place it there, but I could not find it, and I had no time to spend searching.

We were, of course, the last of the twenty-four teams to register. After a fair amount of effort I found our table, which was U12. John gave me back my credit card, and I then went back to the registration area to obtain a scoresheet and little golf pencil.

One opponent informed us that he had only played in one or two previous team games. His partner did not even know how to keep score. We were scheduled to play eight rounds of six boards. In the first round they bid and made several games that seemed unremarkable to me. Afterwards I told John to compare without me; I intended to search for my convention card holder. My scoresheet was unreadable anyway. I could not write legibly with that tiny pencil on bare paper.

I could not find the convention card holder. Our second assignment was at the same table. I was shocked to learn that we had decisively lost the first round. Usually I am a good judge of our performance. We did, however, win the second round in a close match.

I could not believe the team that we drew for our third round—a team of A players from the Hartford Bridge Club. John and I played against Tom Gerchman and Lesley Myers. Our teammates faced Doug Deacon and Bob Hughes. I did not think that we played well enough to win. I was shocked that our teammates had scored +1700 on the first hand. Evidently Doug and Bob had a disastrous misunderstanding that got doubled. So, after three of eight rounds we had two wins.

We lost the fourth match. I made a serious error in the play. I then ate lunch by myself.

We won only one match in the afternoon. We played against two ladies. John was late getting to the table, and I had painfully shuffled at least one deck at every table. I refused to shuffle again and left the deck for John. He arrived a minute or two later, during which time I had to listen to my LHO declaim about shuffling in spite of the fact that she had arthritis.

That one victory was taken away from us by the director, Tim Hill. On the crucial hand John opened 1♥. The lady to my right bid 2♣. I doubled. When the arthritic opponent asked what my double meant, John hemmed and hawed and then said, “I think that that was a support double for my hearts.”

They ended up playing in a notrump contract. After the play ended, I announced that they had received erroneous information. I had made a negative double showing at least four spades, not a support double showing three hearts. I told them that they could call the director if they felt damaged. They did. Tim took the board to see if their claim as being damaged was legitimate. This took such a long time that we ended up playing on five of the six boards. The ladies complained loudly about this.

Tim later explained to me that there were so many ways that the hand could have gone that he could not determine whether they were damaged. He said that the law said that in that case the party that gave the wrong information gets an average minus. We ended up losing three imps and the match.

At the end of the last frustrating mach I was just ready to hit the road immediately. Fortunately there was no bad weather for the drive back. I had no difficulty whatsoever.

Connecticut’s first tournament was scheduled for the last weekend in March, beginning on Friday the 28th, in Orange. I was on the tournament committee, chaired by Cindy Lyall, that planned and marketed this event. The marketing part was previously handled by the communications director, Ken Steele, who had resigned. Bill Segraves, the president of the Connecticut Bridge Association, said in an email that the communications committee, of which I was a member, was no longer functioning. That was news to me.

I did not really care what was sent to the players with more than 500 masterpoints. They were probably familiar with CBA sectionals. They just needed to know the dates and where to find the flyer. I volunteered to write an email to be sent to the players with less than 500 masterpoints in February. I composed them in HTML for my MailChimp account. I sent a test version (posted here) to the other members of the committee. They all seemed to like it a lot. Well, almost everyone liked ti. John Lloyd thought that it was too long, and Cornelia Guest did not like the phrase “less than 500 masterpoints”³.

Unfortunately, Bill wrote that “Mike is not authorized to send the email.” So, I had to rework the text to use Pianola to send it. Since I never received the email itself, I was not able to post it. The text is posted here. I asked for the photo of the playing area to be included. Even with that, I think that the final version was better than nothing, but it was a poor substitute for my original submission.

Early in the year Eric Vogel agreed to play with me in both pairs sessions on Friday and Saturday. I sent emails to the usual suspects concerning a partner and teammates for the Sunday Swiss. Joan Brault agreed to play with me, but the only nibble that I had for teammates was an email from Cornelia Guest, the CBA’s tournament coordinator, that Joel Wolfe was looking for teammates. I immediately sent him an email to see if he was interested in teaming up with Joan and me, but he never responded. That was quite disappointing. Prior to the pandemic I had always played in the team game on Sunday, and nearly always I had a very enjoyable time.

On Friday morning I fixed myself a sandwich of corned beef, Swiss cheese, and lettuce and inserted it into my backpack along with a bag of Utz potato chips. I left the house at 8:15. The traffic was lighter than I expected, and the construction area south of I-84 posed no difficulty. I made my usual stop at McDonald’s in Cromwell. The price was $.11 cheaper than in Hartford and much cheaper than at any of the three stores in Enfield. I arrived at St. Barbara’s Church in Orange, CT, at a little after 9:30. Eric was already in line to purchase our entries, the cost of which had risen to $18 per person per session.

Eric and I had recently revised our approach to slam bidding when we had a fit in a major suit. Previously we had leapt to game to show a minimal holding. Instead jumps in the major suits would show Picture Bids—a high honor in the trump suit and a strong side suit. Our approach to bidding of controls was also changed slightly. This approached was recommended by Vic Quiros in a series of columns in the Bridge Bulletin.

In the morning session on Friday we sat East-West. We had two opportunities within the first six hands to put our new methods into practice. On hand #12 I opened 1♦ in the West chair. Eric bid 1♥. I bid 1NT. Eric could have put in the game force by bidding 2♦, but he elected to bid 4♣. I was not sure what it meant. I bid 4♥, and he just jumped to six. This was exactly the kind of thing that we wanted to avoid. We got 79 percent of the masterpoints, but we could have done better.

If he had bid 2♦, I would have bid 2♥, and he would have known that we had nine hearts. Then after a couple of exchanged cue bids, he could have visualized thirteen tricks and bid the granny.

On hand #16 I opened 1♥, Eric bid 2♦. I rebid hearts. He used Kickback to determine that I had the three missing key cards. He then bid 6NT.

Since we were already forced to game, I think that he should have bid the cheapest control, which was in spades. I could bid 3♦ to show the ace. He has the ♣K to show, but he must bid at the four-level. I would bid 4♥ to show a control. After he bid 5♦, it would be time to put up or shut up. I have not yet told him about my other two heart honors, had he still seemed interested in continuing. I was in a bidding mood that day. I think that I would have bid 7NT.

The other interesting hand in the morning was #22. Eric and I got am undeservedly good score on it because not only did our opponents not find the game in spades, they also took only nine tricks. Don’t ask me to name the tricks that we took.

Shekhar Rao asked me how he and his partner, Shashank Srinivasamurthy, could have bid the spade game with the North-South cards. They had been playing in the limited point game. After examining the results I told him that only one of the fifteen N-S pairs in the open section accomplished that feat with 22 points and a seven-fit, and they were not considered one of the better pairs when it came to bidding.

I took advantage of the opportunity to explain to the guys that they needed to have an agreement about what a preempt in the fourth seat would show. It cannot be strictly preemptive because both of the opponents have passed. So, it should probably show a minimum opening hand with six pieces. Bidding at the one-level and then rebidding the same suit at the two-level would show at least one trick extra. So, if responder had invitational values, he should be looking for game after that sequence.

For the morning session Eric and I scored a little above 51 percent, which was rewarded with 1.14 silver points.

Eric also had brought a sandwich for lunch. We ate together and discussed a few of the hands. Joel Wolfe came by and asked if he could have some of my potato chips. I said, “Of course.” He did not say anything about playing on Sunday.

Bill and Linda Green, the Vice President of the CBA, announced the winners of some of the awards over the last year. Linda was actually standing on the chair at which I ate lunch. I found this method of distributing awards annoying, but, then again, I have become a real curmudgeon since the pandemic and especially since the last presidential election.

Our first two hands in the afternoon session were against Bill and Paul Proulx. I knew that they played an unusual system in which the 1♣ opening had multiple meanings and could be made with only one club. The responses were transfers. Eric and I had discussed this at lunch. We decided that our interference at the one level would be transfers, at the two level DONT for two-suited hands, and natural at the three-level.

As it happened, I, sitting South, opened the bidding on both hands, but Eric had two weak hands. On the first one Paul, East, played 3♣ and made it. On hand #6 I opened 1NT and Bill overcalled 2♥, which was followed by two passes. I probably should have just passed. If Eric had a suit, he would have bid.

Bill redoubled, but I did not see it. I rarely miss a bid, but I definitely missed that one. Eric took his time, but then passed, as did Paul. I was somewhat upset that the bidding was over and picked up my cards.

Before Eric Bill led, Bill asked to see Eric’s convention card. He asked Eric whether our doubles, which the card says are negative at the three level were also negative at the two level. Eric incorrectly stated that they were negative at both levels. I began to correct him, but Bill stopped me. The whole thing was embarrassing.

In the end Bill made the bid, we received another very bad score, and I was flustered. If I had seen the redouble card, I would have bid 2♥, and the result would have been better. It took me several rounds to regain my equilibrium.

I found out in the evening about the redouble, and I apologized to Eric on Saturday morning about my pass.

I made one other costly miscue in my opening lead against Mike Heider and Mark Blumenthal on hand #16. They had bid 3NT.

The standard lead in this situation was fourth from longest and strongest, which in this case would have been the ♣7. However, the stronger hand would be on my right. I did not want to give away what might be the setting trick. Also I did not have a likely entry outside of the spade suit.

Instead I selected the singleton ♥10. Since East did not use Stayman he was unlikely to have four hearts. So, my partner probably had at least five. My 10 might be good enough to set up the suit for him.

As you can see, my lead allowed them to take the first ten tricks. If I had led the spade, we would have taken the first five.

We did much better on the other hands. We finished with a 55 percent game and won 1.52 silver points. It had been a long time since I had scored above 50 percent on two consecutive sessions of Open Pairs at a CBA sectional.

The drive home was uneventful. I did not sleep too soundly. I found myself awake at 3am. I got up for a while, read a chapter or so of Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty, and went back to sleep.

On Saturday morning I fixed myself a sandwich of the remainders of a roast beef dinner before I left. I arrived at the tournament at about 9:30 and bought our entries.

Our results on Saturday were remarkably similar to what we did on Friday. In the morning our score was 51.74 percent, which left us just our of the money because the three top scores in our section were registered by B players.

We got off to an unbelievably good start on the first hand I somehow convinced myself that Eric, sitting East, had a very good hand. Since I held a six-loser hand with support for his clubs, I used Blackwood to ask for key cards. When his response indicated that he had 0 or 3, I figured that we had all the key cards and bid 6♥ without even asking about the queen of trump.

As you can see, Eric actually had a minimum opening bid. The opponents held three aces. Fortunately, South decided to lead the ♥A, which allowed him to pitch his spades on diamonds. He also led hearts from his hand, which allowed him to finesse the ten. So, we got 100 percent on this hand. Incredibly, one other pair stumbled into this horrible contract, but they were defeated by two tricks.

By our new method of bidding these hands our auction should have been 1♥-2♣; 2♥-3♥; 3NT (non-serious game try)-4♥ (very reluctant).

One of our worst hands was #8, played against two players whom I did not know, Paresh Soni and Justine Robertson. I was in the West chair declaring 4♠. The same contract was played by all of the other pairs in our section.

At trick 1 Paresh led the ♣4. I counted my losers—two possible in hearts and one in clubs. Then I thought again. What if South had four clubs? If I ducked, she could give him a ruff at trick 2, and I would be down if the hearts were poorly placed.

Then it occurred to me that North was leading fourth-best, I would still lose a trick to North’s king. The only times that playing the ace was wrong was if North began with the king and one or two others. Who would lead low from either of those holdings? No one that I played with. I would be willing to bet that no other North player selected that card to lead. Anyway, I played the ace.

Eric bought a lunch at the tournament. We ate together again. I explained why I only took ten tricks on hand #8. Bill gave out more awards.

Our best session was the last one. We scored 56.47 percent, which was good for fifth, but it was only 1.51 percentage points before the pair in first. We received 2.9 masterpoints.

The most astounding hand of the tournament occurred in the fourth round of the second session. We were sitting North-South. Eric was awarded the privilege of bidding the hand shown at the left. Our opponents were Victor Xiao and Lin Li.

After I opened 2♣ Eric bid 2♥. We played Kokish relays, and so his response indicated a bust—no aces, no kings, and at most one queen. I bid 2♠. Eric thought that his four trumps and a singleton was enough to raise to game. It wasn’t. I only made three. The field was pretty evenly divided between the game bidders and those who stopped at (and made) three.

When Eric lay down his 4-4-1-4 masterpiece I exclaimed “Wow! Eight high!” I then proceeded to count the pips in the center of of the cards: 17 (7+5+3+2) in spades, 19 in hearts, 7 in diamonds, and 16 in clubs for a total of 59. I told the table that this was the second-worst hand that I had ever seen.

After the hand Victor asked me about it. He was struggling to compute the lowest possible total. I explained that it was three sets of 2-3-4 combinations plus one 5 for a total of 41.

We bid and made one slam, but I thought that we might have bid another on hand #16. Eric, sitting north, opened 1♠. I had enough to bid Jacoby 2NT, but I was determined to take it slow. I bid 2♣. I don’t remember the details, but eventually Eric jumped to 4♠.

If he had shown his diamond singleton, I would have bid 2♠ to set trump. He could then show a club control. I would bid 2NT to show a high spade honor and no more controls. He could then bid 3♠ to show both a heart control and a club control. I would bid 4NT, and after he showed 0 or 3 key cards, I would know all fourteen of his points and have no worries about trumps. I would almost 4certainly have bid 6♠.

Afterwards, Eric asked why I did not just bid 2NT to start with. He would have shown his singleton by bidding 3♦. I would be forced to use Blackwood immediately or bid 4♦. The former is a big non-no with a worthless doubleton. The latter will probably induce him to sign off at 4♠.

I checked the results to see if this would have made a significant difference. We finished in fifth place, which was pretty good, but if we had bid 6♠, we would have vaulted past everyone in front of us, including the winners, who were the only pair that found the slam.

Cindy Lyall called for a “debriefing” meeting of the tournament committee. The only bad side to the tournament was the poor showing of the 499er group on Sunday. I volunteered to ask the director, Tim Hill, whether I could get a file of the results for specific events. He never responded, but I figured out how to “scrape” the web page that provided “recaps” of the events. I shared the information with the rest of the committee.

A big problem for the tournament in August is that no one on the committee wants to act as tournament manager. I remarked at the last meeting that I did not understand why anyone would want the position. I wonder what the other units do.

Since I was no longer on the HBC board, I tried to keep Linda Starr (who was) apprised of the board’s attempt to nail down dates for sectionals in 2025 and 2026. There were conflicts with the HBC’s annual meeting in the fall of 2024.

1. For the first time in recent memory the time for the Sunday Swiss event was moved from 9:30 to 10:00. So we arranged to meet a half-hour later than previously.

2. NETTTS is the New England Tractor Trailer Training School, which was the bane of drivers in northeastern Connecticut. Trucks driven by students are often seen struggling to reach the speed limit on heavily traveled roads. I once saw one that was in the first spot at a stoplight with its right turn signal blinking. When the light turned green the truck executed the turn successfully, but not one of the six vehicles behind it was able to enter the intersection before the crossing traffic had the green light.

3. My opinion was that the 0-500 group needed to be persuaded to attend. The other players merely needed information. Since we were essentially offering the same product as on previous recent occasions, presumably they would come if they wanted to. The phrase “less than” is stylistically appropriate for anything that is not countable, in the sense of 1, 2, 3, not in the sense that rational numbers are countable. Thus, one would say less than $50, but fewer than fifty one-dollar bills.

4. The worst was a 53-pointer that I held at the Simsbury Bridge Club back when I was playing with Dick Benedict.

2023 May 12-December 31

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Mike

My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here. On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my … Continue reading →

My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here.

On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my responsibilities in these and other matters involving communications are detailed here. This was a great relief for me. Some of the emails that I had sent in the previous few months promoted online events that paid gold masterpoints. Each one made me cringe.

On the same day Dan Jablonski finally sent me an email casting the deciding vote in the Weiss-Bertoni award. You can read the details and discover who won the award in this blog entry.

On the 17th I mowed the lawn for the second time. The high pollen content of some areas of the yard made it somewhat difficult, as it has in every May for the last decade or two, but I completed the task without resting.

June

On June 1 I tried to beat the heat by departing for my 5-mile walk at 8:30AM. I nevertheless found it as much as I could bear,¹ and there was precious little shade. I noticed that the SmartFuel gas station on the north side of Hazard Ave. near the South Road intersection had closed after only a few months of operation. It replaced the Shell station that had occupied the location for decades. Signs said that it would become a Big Y Express station.

Raveis Realty, located in a house a little bit to the east of of the station, has also apparently one year. A few years earlier a spectacular display of tulips appeared near the west side of the Raveis building.

The corner house on Park St. (the street address is 2) is somewhat mysterious. It had appeared empty with no “For Sale” sign for months. I saw two girls there the previous week. It seemed empty again on this occasion.

In the last quarter-mile I was passed by a female walker. I was pretty sure that that had never happened to me before. I did not like it, but I was too exhausted and hot to try to hold her off. My speed and endurance both decreased noticeably as I got older.

It was still very hot on the 2nd, but then it turned much cooler with a misty rain. I attended both days of the sectional in Johnston, RI, and played with Abhi Dutta. Details have been recorded here.

On June 7 forest fires in Canada were causing in the local area thick haze from the smoke. It was quite eerie and absolutely unprecedented, at least in my lifetime. Two days later the air quality still poor.

I learned that day I should have closed my dad’s IRA account at Country Club Bank in Kansas City earlier. There was not much money in it, but it took weeks to get them to send me a check. .Deidra Tossato finally sent me the form fifteen days after I requested it.

The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) scheduled an individual game for June 20, the first day of of the regional tournament in Nashua, NH. I played at the HBC, but I did not enjoy myself, and I did not score well. My adventures in Nashua are recorded here.

On June 28 I played with two new partners—Jim Macomber at the HBC in the morning and Barb Gallagher at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in the evening.

On June 29 and 30 my nose ran all day. Despite this I had no trouble sleeping. I had no fever or any other symptoms of Covid-19.

July

I woke up on July 1 after ten consecutive hours of sleep, close to my all-time record. I experienced a little dizziness when I arose from bed, but it disappeared shortly thereafter. I tested negative for Covid-19 using the rapid antigen test that the federal government supplied for free.

Sue’s cousin from Michigan (on the Locke side) was in town. Sue visited with her, but I did not go. We visited her, her parents, and her sisters on our trip to Michigan in 2008, as described here.

Up to nine inches of rain fell in sections of western Connecticut on July 10, but Enfield received hardly any. The weather definitely seemed more extreme in the twenties, but it is still rather mild in southern New England.

The next morning the temperature dropped to 66° at 4:30. It was the first time that it had been below 70° in weeks. It rose to 90° that day and much hotter on the next. There was no bridge game at the SBC on either the 5th or the 12th.

On July 13 at 5:44AM the bookshelf in my bedroom came crashing down. It missed my head by about two inches. If it had hit me, I would have been seriously injured. The shelf disappeared into the black hole of Sue’s “sewing room”.

On July 14 thunderstorms began at 2:30AM. Flooding wreaked havoc in the northwest part of the state. The Connecticut River was 6′ above the flood level. Damage, however, was minimal.

John Willoughby, the president of the HBC, died on July 14. Both Sue and I had been his occasional bridge partner. I worked with him on the Planning Committee when he was the vice-president.

On the following day I heard Steve Jarmoc, a local farmer and ex-politician, on the radio complaining that the flooding in Enfield had caused him crop damage. The land around our house, which was perhaps two miles from his farm, was absolutely dry. Furthermore, Jarmoc mostly grew tobacco—an addictive drug that caused cancer and other ailments. In the previous few years he had converted much of his land to fields filled with solar panels. I seriously doubt that he suffered much damage, and what if he did? Every business suffered occasional setbacks.

I had a horrible bridge day on July 23. Donna Feir reported that the HBC now had 415 members². It was 89° and sunny when I left after the conclusion of the Board of Trustees meeting. Up to 91° on I-91. By the time that I reached home it had fallen to 68°, and it was raining buckets. I was very relieved to find that there was no flooding in our basement.

August

On August 3 I discovered a document with my notes about the San Diego vacation that Sue and I took with Sue in March of 2006. In the evening I also found a paper bag with flyers and souvenirs from the same trip. I deleted the 1,000+ words that I had previously written about this adventure and started the entry, which you can read here, anew. It was rather thrilling to relive that week.

On the next day I walked five miles in the Enfield Square Mall. A strange new store, Da Money Pit, had opened. They seemed to sell sneakers, ball caps, and sweatshirts.³ The sneakers on display were wrapped in plastic, for no obvious reason that I could see. My “ghost walks” in the mall have been detailed here.

On the 5th the HBC held a memorial to honor John Willoughby. One dog and lots of people, including a surprising number of children, who were relatives or friends of John’s attended.

The next day I learned that Maria Van Der Ree, who was over ninety, had Covid-19. She recovered within a reasonable period of time.

At the HBC John Calderbank and I had a 54 percent game on August 8. That was by far our best performance up to that time. On the next day I scored 58% at the HBC with Barb Gallagher. There was no game in Simsbury because we only five pairs registered to play.

On August 9 the big news was about the devastating fire on Maui. The most destruction was in my favorite town, Lahaina, where 217 buildings destroyed or damaged. The gigantic tree that was the symbol of the town was badly damaged, but there was hope that it would recover.

On the same day I learned that Mark Oettinger had “resigned” as vice-president of the New England Bridge Conference. I later learned that Peter Marcus and his friends had pretty much forced him out at a meeting of the Tournament Scheduling Committee that I was unable to attend. This news saddened me greatly. I liked and respected Mark.

On August 12-13 I played in the Western Mass sectional in Great Barrington. That adventure has been described here.

On my birthday I played with the woman whom I had been mentoring. Fran Gurtman (introduced here). We did not do well. Sue bought me three shirts and some shorts from Kohl’s. Sue and I ate supper at Francesco’s in Suffield. I ordered Linguini d’Alessandro, which was chicken, sausage, peppers, mushrooms in wine sauce. I really enjoyed it.

On August 23 Sue brought cake to Eno to celebrate my birthday, but she did not arrive until just after 6:15. We had 4 tables.

On August 24 Fran and I had a 52 percent game, which was an improvement of 18 percentage points in our previous game. I made a costly mistake on the last hand.

On August 26 fifteen pairs came to the HBC for the Saturday afternoon game. We played a Swiss with 7.5 tables. It was the biggest turnout on Saturday by far since the pandemic. Peter Katz and I had a 76.1 percent game, by far my best score ever. More details can be found here.

The Ocean State Regional tournament was held August 29-September 1 in Warwick, RI. My adventures there have been cataloged here.

September

September must have been a boring month. The only notes that I recorded concerned the loss of my Costco Visa card from Citi. The details of this remarkable event have been recorded here.

The University of Michigan football team, one of the favorites for the national championship, started the year with five easy victories. They defeated East Carolina 30-3, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas 35-7, Bowling Green 31-6, Rutgers 31-7, and Nebraska 45-7.

Coach Jim Harbaugh did not participate in the first three games because he had purchased lunch⁴ for a prospective player. Four interim head coaches were assigned. Jesse Minter coached the first game and Sherrone Moore the second. Jay Harbaugh (Jim’s son) and Mike Hart each coached for one half in the third game. A random co-ed could have coached for all three games, and Michigan would still have won them all easily.

October

On October 3 and 4 I moved all of my programs and data files from my Lenovo desktop that was running Windows 10 to the Asus computer running Windows 11. I documented the experience here.

On October 10 I discovered that Windows did not want me to use Shuffling, the Dutch program that I had downloaded to creates pbn files. I did anyway. However, I also received an error in Dealmaster Pro. I had to reconnect the Lenovo box and run it there. This problem was fixed, but I did not record how.

I decided not to play with Alan Godes at the regional tournament in Marlborough. It turned out that he could not play on the only day that I needed a partner. I asked Ros Abel to play in the sectional in Orange, but she was not available. .

As usual, I started my preparation for lunch by boiling water for ShopRite’s store brand of chicken noodle soup. I was shocked to discover that the package contained no noodles at all. I have opened hundreds of these packages over the years, but this had never happened before.

This box in question bore the ShopRite brand, but at some point in the year the store stopped selling the product. A short time later a new brand called Bowl & Basket appeared. The price of a box containing two envelopes of soup was $.99 before the pandemic. As of October of 2024 the price had not changed, and the quality and quantity of the contents remained the same, at least apparently. I could not name another food item of any description that maintained its pre-pandemic price.

I woke Sue up at 6:30AM on October 11: She was scheduled for jury duty in Hartford. She left the house at 8:08. When she arrived she learned that her service was not needed. That evening Kathie Ferguson returned to the SBC on that same evening after a lengthy illness..

Throughout the last few months my car had repeatedly flashed the message that one of my tires was low on air. In the past this had happened once or twice a year. On those occasions I had just brought my car into Lia (without an appointment), and told them about the message. They checked all four tires, filled whichever one was low, and I drove away. The process took perhaps fifteen minutes.

On October 23 I brought it in to Lia Honda again. Because it had happened several times in the recent past, I asked the mechanic to tell me which tire was low. He reported that one of the tires needed patching and told me to sit in the waiting area. After 2.5 hours the work was completed, but the attendant told me that there was a problem with the brakes. I made an appointment for three days later to address this problem, which necessitated spending another few hours in the waiting area.

On October 27-29 the Connecticut Bridge Association held its fall sectional in Orange, CT. The details are posted here.

After only one day of rest I attended the regional tournament in Marlborough, MA. It ran from October 31-November 4. My thoughts about this event have been recorded here.

The Wolverine juggernaut continued with three more easy victories. They defeated Minnesota 52-10, Indiana 52-7, and Michigan State 49-0.

November

On November 16 I sent a recap of the attendance at the sectional in Orange. I have posted it here. The only person who responded to it was Cindy Lyall, who agreed with my assessment.

From left: Jan, the drummer, Peggy, the bass player, and Patty.

On the next evening my wife Sue talked me into attending a concert by the Patti Tuite band at the public library in Ellington. Although I was not crazy about the music, which was mostly blues, I definitely appreciated the skill of the two main musicians—Jan on the synthesizer, flute, and key-tar and Peggy on the alto sax, violin, and harmonica.The band also had a guy on bass guitar and a female drummer. The one number that I really liked was an instrumental with a complex melody that was unlike anything else that they did. Sue liked the entire performance. Patti announced the name of it, but my notes did not record it.

On November 18 I emailed to members of the Executive Committee my attendance analysis for the tournament in Marlborough. It has been posted here. Both of these reports required quite a bit of work because I no longer had access to the ACBL’s files that provided attendance information in a comprehensive fashion.

On the next day Sue and I decided not to drive up to Burlington, VT, to visit with the Corcorans on Thanksgiving. They had invited us much earlier. However, their house would be full of relatives, and we would probably be “fifth wheels.” We felt our of place the last time that we joined them.

On November 22 my Honda warned me that the battery on the fob was low. Over the next two days Sue located a suitable batter. I managed to replace the old one without much difficulty.

November 23 was Thanksgiving. Sue cooked a turkey. We ate our meals on TV trays and tried to think of something that we should be thankful for. I did not record that anything occurred to us.

A very strange thing happened in the last round of the game at the HBC on November 29: Eric Vogel and I were playing against Tom Gerchman and Lea Selig. After the bidding Tom announced that his integrity was intact because his partner Lea Selig bid 6♥, not he. He then disclosed that he had previously overheard Mike Carmiggelt talking about the hand.

I put my cards in the carrier, said “I quit”, got in my car, and drove home. Tom later sent me an email in apology. I replied, “No harm, no foul.”

That same night Ken made many strange bids at the SBC game. He invited to game knowing that we had a maximum of 24 points and only 8 trumps. I recorded that I did not see how the SBC would be able to hold any games in December. I was right. All of the games for the month were canceled.

Michigan finished its Big 10 season with four more victories to finish the regular season undefeated and ranked #3. They defeated Purdue 41-13, Penn State 24-15, Maryland 31-24, and Ohio State 30-24. Sherrone Moore was the head coach on the sidelines for the last three games because Harbaugh was suspended because of a ludicrous sign-stealing incident engineered by a rogue staff member named Connor Stalions.

December

The new month was welcomed by the first flower on the larger Christmas cactus that had been in Denise Bessette’s office. The other one displayed its first flower on the 18th.

On December 2 Michigan shut out Iowa 26-0 in the Big 10 Championship game. It was U-M’s third consecutive win in that game, and the tenth consecutive win for the team representing the East Division. Michigan, now seeded #1, was scheduled to play Alabama in the College Football Playoff semifinals in the Rose Bowl on January 1. There was some controversy because Alabama was chosen to play over undefeated Florida State despite the fact that the Tide had lost to Texas in September.

The temperature on December 15 and 16 reached the fifties. I walked five miles outside on both afternoons.

I learned on December 17 that Eric Vogel had contracted Covid. I wore a mask at bridge all week.

On December 20 the electrical connection for my cellphone’s charger stopped working. I had to plug the cable into a USB port on Asus. This was only a minor inconvenience; Asus has many ports, four of which are in front. I was astounded to learn that Sue had no recollection of my previous phone dying while I was on the 2022 cruise that has been described in detail here. We went to the Verizon store together, and the salesman showed me that the Pixel 2 I had been using was swollen in the middle. He said that it was probably dead. A little later Sue bought me a refurbished Sony Galaxy. I found this lapse of memory quite concerning.

On December 29 I received an mail from someone named Frank Wilson⁵ asking about downloading a zip or pdf file of Stupid Pope Tricks. I tried to reply to his reply address, fdmw@gmail.com, but it was blocked because the address was not valid. I had no idea what that was about.

On the next day I (and many others) received a shocking email from Peter Marcus that indicated that he was resigning from all his posts in the New England Bridge Conference. This reportedly had something to do with scheduling conflicts with another district”s tournament.

1. At least once in the nineties I ran more than five miles when it was over 100°. When I was in my twenties I considered no temperature to be too hot for any athletic endeavor. Boy, has that changed!

2. It was incredible to me that the HBC did not actually know how many people were officially members. Eventually, I wrote a set of programs that would allow the club to keep track of the membership—dues, contact information, and other things. The story of that system is documented here. The number of members exceeded 500 in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.

3. The store is still open in October of 2024, but in all my trips to the mall I had seen fewer than a handful of customers.

4. This infraction was widely ridiculed by Michigan fans and called Hamburgergate. It was common knowledge that many large programs arranged for players to be paid under the table. By 2023 the NCAA had ceded the rights to the names, images, and likenesses (called NIL) of the players to the players themselves. By the next year some of them were earning upwards of $1 million to play their favorite sport for a few months out of the year.

5. Of course, I immediately thought that this might be J. Frank Wilson, who, with support from the Cavaliers, in 1964 recorded the remake of Wayne Cochran’s “Last Kiss”. It made it to #2 on Billboard.

2022 Return of the Variants

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Mike

Dairy for 2022. Continue reading →

My notes from 2022 are rather comprehensive. Tournament bridge finally started again in that year. My experiences at the sectional tournaments in New England have been recounted here. The events sponsored by District 25 (D25) are described here.

I decided to organize this blog entry chronologically. Several other major events that occurred during the year received their own entries. Links to those entries can be found in the appropriate month.

I was looking forward to 2022 with hope of a return to some degree of normalcy. Both of the bridge clubs in which I played regularly seemed to be doing fairly well, and tournaments were scheduled nearby at the unit (state), district (New England), and national level. Furthermore my wife Sue, my friend Tom Corcoran, and I had an exciting trip planned for May. Finally, although the U-M football team lost its last game of 2021 badly, it was a gigantic improvement over the team that won only two games in the first year of the Pandemic.

January: On New Year’s Day the temperature reached 50 degrees. I walked five miles outdoors with only one stop. I also found René Conrad’s (introduced here) LinkedIn page.

Ohio State was lucky to beat Utah 48-45 in the Rose Bowl. Both teams had great offenses and terrible defenses.

On the next day I received an email from René. I wrote back to her, but there was no further interaction.

On January 3 I brought the car into Lia Honda because the windshield washers were not squirting. The service guy told me that mice had chewed a hole in the hose. He put in a new one and advised me to put traps in the garage in which the car was stored.

On the morning of the 4th I used the Dealer4 machine at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) for the Wednesday evening game at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). I encountered no problems that I could not immediately resolve. On the way home from bridge I bought some mouse traps.

At the Zoom meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) the big news was that Linda Starr, the director who had sent out so many clever emails during the shutdown via MailChimp, was resigning from communication duties. I thought about volunteering, but at that point I was still busy with my work for D25.

On January 6 I caught a mouse in a trap that I had set near the wooden chest on the northern wall in the garage.

I suspected that I might be charged by the BoT with finding and/or training a replacement for Linda. So, I asked for and received copies of Linda’s write-ups of what she did in MailChimp. It was certainly nice (and unusual) to work with someone who had thoroughly documented her responsibilities.

The traps for the first two mice were set just to the left of this chest.

On January 7 I caught a second mouse in a trap set in the same spot.

I had ordered a blue sweatshirt with Michigan spelled out in yellow (actually maize) from someone on Espy. I received it on January 8. I already had on that I liked a lot, but the collar and the cuffs were quite frayed, and it was a little too big. The color was right and it seemed comfortable, but the letters were not precisely yellow. They had blue specks in them. I decided that it was close enough, and I did not send it back.¹

On the 10th I caught a third mouse. By then Bob (the cat) seemed to have moved into the new bedroom with Sue. Bob and our other pet for 2022, Giacomo, were black cats. They were both introduced here.

The plain old mousetrap of decades gone by still worked perfectly well.

I cooked carne asada tacos using a seasoning packet that Sue had purchased, but I did not think much of them. In the national championship game Georgia beat Alabama with s fourth-quarter rally. U-M finished third in the final voting, the highest that they have been since the shared national championship of 1997-98.

On January 11 a fourth mouse was executed for illegal residency in the garage.

The computer in the office at the HBC was on the fritz. I had to make the the boards for the SBC game on Wednesday manually. John Calderbank and I somehow finished first out of twelve pairs.

On the next day I trapped mouse #5. In the morning game at the HBC the boards did not match the hand records. Somebody messed up when making the boards

I caught no more mice in the garage, but on the fourteenth I trapped one in the kitchen. They can run but they love cheese too much to hide.

On January 18 Giacomo had trouble getting to his feet. That was also day on which I learned that after the latest rebooking of the cruise for May, Tom was not on the same flights as Sue and I. Tom remembered that we had paid extra to be on the same flights.

Linda had made .pbn files on Tuesday evening for me to use when making the boards. On Wednesday the 18th at 9 am I made boards for the Simsbury game. We had four tables at the SBC.

On the 20th Giacomo was frantic when he could not get to his feet, but he finally made it. He could get around OK after that. Obviously his 19th year is going to be a difficult one for him. He had never been ill or injured. Occasionally he coughed up a hair ball, but that affliction is common to almost all long-haired cats.

On the next day I made a MailChimp “audience” (the MailChimp word for contact list) for the HBC using my laptop. I had to reuse the audience that I had previously created for emails from the president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) that welcomed new members.

On January 22 Sue’s cat Bob had for some reason spent the last three nights in the bathtub in which I take a shower every evening. This morning he left behind a turd when he departed. I did not thank him for it.

Tom negotiated with Viking and got us all on the same flights: SwissAir to Budapest and British on the return.

On January 23 I walked nine laps (five miles) wearing a mask in the Enfield Square mall to investigate using it as an option for exercising in foul weather. What a sad place! Hardly anyone was shopping in the few stores that were open. The two restaurants each had one table occupied. No one seemed to be in the movie theater. I encountered a dozen or so walkers, some with dogs! An obese guy in a white strapped undershirt with a shopping cart full of stuff was at the Asnuntuck kiosk. He had plugged in some kind of weird machine. This trip inspired me to keep a rather complete log of my subsequent walks. It has been posted here.

On the next day my left lower back was sore in the morning, but it did not prevent me from walking another five miles.

On January 25 both sides of my lower back were sore when I woke up. If I did not know better, I might conclude that I was getting old.

The Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) scheduled another meeting for Wednesday night, the only time all week that I cannot attend! This infuriate me. I complained, but I did not know whom to be angry at.

I learned that Unit 126 (Connecticut) was facing the possibility of holding two major face-to-face STaC² games a week apart.

On the 26th I could barely walk with the pain in my left lower back. For some reason lying down made it worse. I immediately took an ibuprofen tablet. It helped a lot.

On the next day I spent an hour and a half on the rowing machine; the back felt OK.

On January 28 a “bomb cyclone” was predicted to arrive at about 10 pm. I forgot to pay the bill for the Chase credit card because Sue was “checking” the charges. I received a nice email from Rick Cernech. He was living in Florida and was either working as or had worked as a cruise planner.

There was plenty of snow on January 29. I decided while using the rowing machine that the creaking sound that I could hear in my bedroom was really coming from the shelves in the basement directly below it.

Joe Brouillard, a co-chair of the committee that was running the event, reported that the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) had finally posted the schedule for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) that was scheduled for July. The preparatory work that Joe and his team (of which I was in charge of email publicity) did for the NABC has been documented here.

On the last day of the month I decided to try to bleed as many of the radiators in the old section of the house as I could. Since boxes, bags and furniture were virtually everywhere, this was not an easy task. One that I was able to get at in the living room started pissing after I bled it. It was extremely difficult to get the screw back all the way in. The hot water burnt my hands pretty badly, but I finally prevailed.

I watched episode 1 of season 2 of the series “Resident Alien.”³ It didn’t seem as good.as the first season, but I still enjoyed it.

February: On Groundhog Day only five pairs registered for the evening bridge game at the SBC. I had to cancel the game. Eric and I were first at 68% in the morning game at the HBC. In the afternoon game online Sue by tied for first. Her partner was John Willoughby.

In the evening I went to see Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Cinemark in Enfield Square. About ten people were in attendance. I thought all of the performances were quite good, especially Rosa Feola’s portrayal of a more Gilda who was more mature than usual. However, I hated the production decisions in the last act.

On February 5 I sent 20,000 emails for the NABC. I played pretty well but got a bad result at the HBC game with Peter Katz. I realized that I had forgotten to send the invitational email to SBC players on Friday. I set Outlook up to remind me to do so on Fridays and Mondays.

On February 8 I received the toner that I had ordered from Ink Technologies LLC.

February 11 was astoundingly warm—55 degrees. I walked 3.5 miles outside. Sue’s left big toe was very sore from gout.

The next day was 60 degrees! I finished the blog entry on Enfield Square, but I planned to update it as stores closed and (hopefully) opened.

On February 13 I received a mysterious email from Floyd Smith in response to my query about the name of his boss at Stage Stores (introduced here). It said “Sure. She is also on Facebook. Good luck and great to hear from you!”

Two inches of snow appeared on the grass, but the surfaces were clear. I drove Sue to the Urgent Care place on the north side of Hazard Ave. for her toe. They prescribed some drugs for her.

On the next day Sue’s toe was much better. I drove her to heart doctor. The appointment was for 10:15. I made sure that she was awake by 7:45. Nevertheless, it was 10:50 by the time we reached 1699 King St., which is just north of East Windsor. They would not see her. We were home at 11:30. The temperature only reached 20 degrees, which made it one of the coldest days of a very mild winter.

On February 15 I received this email from Floyd: “Suire is her last name. Sorry about that; spell check changed it last time. “

That evening the HBC’s Planning Committee held a Zoom meeting. Earlier I had committed to playing in the Swiss game at the HBC on February 27 with Ken Leopold, Y. L. Shiue, and Frank Blachowski. Frank and Y.L were very good players with a lot of masterpoints.

On the 17th the temperature reached 60 degrees, but it was very windy.

At a Zoom Meeting the D25 Executive Committee (EC) approved the Gala tournament on May 19-22 (coinciding with the dates that I planned to be in Europe on the cruise). The plan was to charge full price for events with lots of hospitality. I abstained; the other representative from Unit 126 (U126), Sonja Smith, did not attend. She may have already moved to North Carolina.

On February 18 the temperature hit 55 degrees in the morning but it fell throughout the day. I had to return the toner to Ink Technologies. I ordered the wrong thing. The company gave me a partial refund of $31 out of the original charge of $78.

On February 21 Russia sent troops into breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. I walked four miles outdoors in the rather warm 52 degrees. Rob Stillman and Y. C. Hsu agreed to play as the third pair for the Wednesday evening game in Simsbury. Sue will play with Maria Van der Ree.

On February 23 it was 72 degrees when I left the HBC after winning the open pairs game with Eric in morning. An email at 3:00 from Judy Larkin informed me that Ida Coulter could not play. Minutes later Renee Janow and Lucie Fradet asked to play. Sue was too tired to play, and so Judy ended up playing with Maria. I played terribly. I was stressed out from juggling the schedule.

On February 24 Russia invaded Ukraine. I walked nine laps in the mall.

In the Swiss on the 26th we lost our first two matches on flukes. We came back to win the last three by 18, 18, and 20 victory points to finish second out of twelve. YC made 6NT after he underled his ♠A.

March: For Sue’s birthday party on March 2 at the SBC she brought cupcakes for everybody. There were only 3 tables, but we had a good time.

On the next evening Sue and I went to supper with Tom at the Puerto Vallarta Mexican restaurant. The tacos al carbon were not as good as I remembered them. Tom ordered his usual gigantic bowl, which was no longer on the menu. I don’t remember what it was called.

On March 6 I walked 5 miles outside. The temperature was 62 degrees, but I needed to circumvent many puddles from the snow melting.

On March 9 about two inches of snow was on the lawn. The streets had been cleared, but Eno Hall was closed, and so the SBC could not hold a game.

By March 10 I had read the following books from the Enfield Public Library: T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk; Max Barry’s The 22 Murders of Madison May and Lexicon. I liked Lexicon the best, but they were all good.

On March 18 the temperature hit 76 degrees, a new all-time record for the date. I walked five miles in a tee shirt. I learned that the Xiaos (aged 10 and 13) won the 0-10K Swiss at the NABC in Reno. The two youngsters

On March 20 Sue and I played in the “8 is enough” Swiss with Mayank and Aarati Mehta. Finished in the middle because of a hand in which Rob Stillman and Ronit Shoham bid 4♥ against Sue and me, but the Mehtas let Y. C. play 3♦.

On March 27 there was no pee or poop in the litter box. I brought the box upstairs, and Giacomo took a pee and then lounged in the box. He had never done this before. It was not a good sign.

On March 30 Ken and I won a five-table STaC game at the SBC. Sue and I could not find Giacomo when we returned to Enfield.

The cat’s door as seen from the back yard.

On the next morning I found Giacomo’s body lying in the back yard just outside of the cat door. He had not gone outside in weeks, maybe months, and he had not been downstairs for days. Nevertheless, he must have used up all of his remaining strength to descend the stairs, walk over to the ramp, climb up the ramp to the cat door, and exit through that door.

He was a wonderful cat. I really mourned for him, and I still miss having him on my lap while I watch television. More details about long relationship with Giacomo before the Pandemic can be found here.

In the last few years of Giacomo’s life I apparently became allergic to something about him. Several times I had rather severe outbreaks of hives, and I got the sniffles when he sat on my lap. After he died these symptoms disappeared.

I did the income taxes using FreeTaxesUSA.com. My federal tax was $0, and I received a refund of over $900 from Connecticut.

A lot of other things happened on the last day of March. An oil bill for $780.52 arrived. I brought the litter box, which now is officially Bob’s, back downstairs. While I was doing so, I fell into some empty boxes and bruised my left hand. It hurt, but it was not fatal. The Sony audio recorder that I ordered for the cruise arrived. I played with it enough to feel fairly comfortable using it.

April: On the 2nd of the month M&T Bank took over our previous bank, Peoples United Bank, which had a few years earlier purchased United Bank. United had purchased Rockville Bank, from which I negotiated our final mortgage, as documented here. This changeover seemed to go rather smoothly, and I like the new website slightly better than the old one.

Bob has found the litter box. Thank goodness.

Peter and I won the six-table STaC game at the HBC. On consecutive hands grand slams could be made in hearts. We only bid one of them, but no one else took all the tricks on the other one.

On April 6 the switch for the lights in the basement did not work. Two days later I got it to work, but it was difficult. Eventually this problem disappeared or maybe I just adjusted to the toggle.

On April 11 I received the second booster shot at a pharmacy in Springfield. Sue had already gotten hers

On April 15 I downloaded the VeriFly app that Viking had recommended for my phone and eventually got it to work. This was a complete waste of time, and it stressed me out. It was never needed or, for that matter, useful on the entire trip.

On April18 Ken and I learned that we had been dumped as teammates for the upcoming Grand National Teams (GNT) online qualification tournament by Felix Springer and Trevor Reeves again. Details can be found here. I was not looking forward to the online part again, but I thought that we would have a pretty good chance of qualifying. Playing in the GNT in Providence in July had been my goal for many months, and I had avoided accumulating masterpoints throughout the Pandemic in order to maintain my eligibility. I ordinarily do not hold grudges, but I still feel bitter about this more than a year and a half later.

On April 29 Peter Katz and I won the last Saturday game at the HBC before it went on hiatus. There were only three tables. I faked out Y. L with a terrible overcall.

The huge hump of hair on Bob’s back was an embarrassment to all of us.

May: Something incredible happened on May 2. Sue took Bob to the veterinarian. She learned that the big clump that had been on his back for years was just hair. The vet shaved it off, and it never grew back. How can this be? He would not let us touch it; why was it so sensitive? What cat has that much hair? What made it keep growing for such a long time? Sue said that the vet said that it was just bad grooming. He also said that Bob was at least thirteen years old.

That cat never ceased to amaze me. After his haircut he suddenly liked to be petted, he also became more friendly to me. One untoward result was that I developed very small bumps around my ankles that were itchy and a little painful. I must have been allergic to him or at least his dander.

I downloaded the Uber app for possible use in Vienna to get back to the ship from the opera. The rest of the bizarre preparation for the European cruise has been catalogued in some detail here.

I learned that thirty staff members of Henry Barnard School have Covid-18! I did not realize that the school even had that many employees. The state of Connecticut was showing a 9.4% positivity rate. The good news was that Germany’s level, which I had been following closely, was down by quite a bit. The other three countries on our itinerary were also improving.

The European cruise trip began on May 5. The incredible story of that day and the rest of the journey is well documented here. One thing that is not related there is the fact that the little bumps on my ankles cleared up while I was in Europe. The ones on my right ankle began to reappear in June or July.

On May 23 I mowed the lawn, which had by then become a jungle. While doing so I realized that I had to attack the poison ivy, which was much more prevalent than in 2021. I ordered some Roundup that could be sprayed on the plants from Amazon.

Only five pairs had registered for the Wednesday night game in Simsbury, but I had not yet heard from Lori Leopold. She could usually find a partner on short notice.

The next morning brought another frustrating bridge game. When I got back to the house I needed to cancel the Wednesday evening game at the SBC because only five pairs had registered.

I brought to the Verizon office on Hazard Ave. the Pixel 2 cellphone that had failed me on the cruise. The tech guy at Verizon showed me that the phone was considerably thicker in the middle than on the edges. He explained that this was a symptom of overheating. So, the phone was officially dead. In retrospect I concluded that the transformer in the cable that connected the phone to the outlet in my cabin must have failed to convert the current to 110 at least once on the cruise, and the European current fried the battery or something. I kept the phone plugged in virtually all of the time that I was in my cabin.

We planned on eating at the Kebab House before entering the Cinemark at Enfield Square to see the opera, but it was not open. We watched the rust-belt production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The character of the priest just did not work. Otherwise, the first two acts were very moving, but the third act was a total mess until Javier Camarena’s outstanding performance near the end. The many interviews during the breaks. were insipid. Sue and I settled for popcorn for supper. Incredibly she stayed awake throughout the performance.

On May 25 I discovered that our mortgage on the house was completely paid off! I was not expecting this news for several months.

June: At some point in June Sue purchased for me a new (well, new to me) cellphone. This one was a Samsung Galaxy S7. It was similar to Sue’s, and so she could sometimes help me with it. A year and a half later I still hated it, but not as much as I loathed the Pixel 2. The Samsung had not ordered any pizzas for me, but, then again, I had not downloaded the Slice app. I could almost never figure out where the app that I wanted to use was hiding, and it randomly plays YouTube videos and other stuff from the Internet. I figured out how to answer the phone in a minute or two, but it took me eighteen months to figure out how to hang up.

On the 1st I learned that Sally Kirtley, the director at the SBC, had tested positive for Covid-19. Ken had to direct at the Wednesday night . Ken and I won easily.

On the very next day Sally came to the ACBL’s walk-through in Providence. I very much enjoyed talking with old friends like Paula Najarian.

On June 13 I received two bottles of Roundup that I had ordered from Amazon. I immediately went outside and sprayed the poison ivy that was growing along the fence on the north side of the yard. Two days later I sprayed the poison ivy again. I wore a mask during both sprayings, and I was careful not to get any on my skin or clothes.

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat the serious inflation that began after the country reopened. Any moron could see that the main culprit had been pent-up demand from the shutdown, and the secondary cause was shipping holdups. Nevertheless, I had to peel a sticker off of a gas pump at Costco that claimed that “Biden caused this.”

I met Mike Barke, a geography professor at the Northumbria University, and his wife Vivienne on the cruise. Mike had recently published a book entitled Newcastle upon Tyne: Mapping the City. As soon as I got back to the U.S. I ordered a copy. It finally arrived on June 17. It was both beautiful and interesting. It made me want to visit the Tyneside area.

The Longest Day game on June 21 at HBC very annoying. There was much too much noise. Donna Feir pressed everyone to play faster and then canceled the last round because the pizza had arrived. This turned out to be a super-spreader event for Covid-19.

From an email from Cindy Lyall, the treasurer of the CBA, I earned that U126 lost $4,000 on the tournament in Orange. Ouch!

On June 23 Mary Whittemore reported that her name was missing from the “Top 200 List” on the CTBridge.org website. I asked the CBA board members if anyone knew why. Don Stiegler sent me a correct list. It showed that many names were missing from the one on the website. Evidently no one knew how that page got updated on the website. Bob Bertoni, who died in 2021, set up the website and, because the unit had no webmaster at the time, did all of the updating.

On June 29 Sue and I attended a potluck supper at Sue’s church, the Somersville Congregational Church. I always feel very uncomfortable at these religious gatherings, but this one was tolerable. After supper we listened to Graham Van Keuren’s presentation on his vacation with his spouse Eric in Israel. I recorded it on my audio recorder. It was a good presentation, but it certainly did not make me want to visit what I considered to be an apartheid country.

On June 30 Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he had Covid-19 for the second time. This news astounded me. Did he take no precautions? The Pandemic was finally running rampant at the HBC. Only five tables were occupied on Tuesday morning, and the evening game was canceled. Only three tables appeared on Wednesday, and the Simsbury game was canceled. Both of the games at the HBC on Thursday were canceled.

July: The big event of the month was the Providence NABC. I attended most of the event, but Sue decided not to go. I kept notes on my laptop and wrote them up a little later. They have been posted here and here. It was good to see some familiar faces, but the bridge games were not much fun.

The tournament was another super-spreader of Covid-19. Almost everyone with whom I played or associated caught the virus. I almost ripped the driver’s side mirror off of my car, and the hotel rooms were never cleaned. However, I avoided getting the disease. So, in a period of about two and a half months I had survived three super-spreader events—the cruise, bridge at the HBC, and the NABC. I credited my collection of free N95 masks that I had amassed from giveaways at various retailers.

August: I was hoping to have a party at the SBC to celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday. Not enough people were able to attend on the 17th. Instead, I decided that the SBC would have a Christmas party on August 24. Twenty people attended, and so we had five tables and lots of food. The players gave me a $100 Amazon card and $20 in cash. I was a little upset that Sue and I arrived so late because she, as usual, was not ready on time. I had made beef Stroganoff that needed to be heated up in the slow cooker. I crawled under the table and plugged in the pot, but I neglected to turn it on.

On August 26 the refrigerator stopped working. Panic set in. Sue and I resolved to deal with it the next morning. By then it had resumed functioning. If we ever figured out the cause of the outage, I made no note of it.

Throughout the period from my arrival back in Enfield after the cruise up to the end of August the weather had been hot, and I had spent every spare minute working on the journal for the Grand European Tour. On August 28 I finally finished it and sent an email to quite a few people announcing that the journal had been posted on Wavada.org. I was quite pleased to hear back from both the Barkes and the family from Saskatchewan.

A Big Y Express replaced the Shell station.

I noticed that the Shell station on Hazard Ave., which had been operational since we moved to Enfield in the late eighties, was closed.

On August 29 I received a long email from Tom Caputo, whom I had worked with at both Lord & Taylor (described here) and Saks Fifth Avenue (here). He was looking for a job at the age of 60. He asked me if I knew about anything being available. Since he knew very well that I had had nothing to do with retail for at least eight years, he must have been desperate. Maybe he thought that I had kept in touch with people more than I had.

I also received an email from Mike and Vivienne Barke.

August closed with an incredibly disappointing Ocean State Regional tournament in Warwick, RI. I had a rotten time, the attendance was abysmal, and the district lost money. The details have been posted here.

September: On September 13 Bob decided to take over Giacomo’s old position atop the back of the couch in the living room. On the next evening he lost his balance (something that Giacomo had never done in eighteen years) and tumbled off the back. He was in a panic and tried unsuccessfully to climb up the drapes to regain his perch.

On the following evening Bob had clambered back into Giacomo’s old spot. When I seated myself in my chair a few feet away, he obviously wanted to come join me, but he was evidently afraid to land on the pillows that were arrayed on the couch’s cushions. I moved them out of his way. He then descended to the sitting level and, after executing calculations in his walnut-sized brain, made the “mighty leap” to the armrest of my chair. He sat peacefully on my lap for a few minutes. Then he got nervous, peed on me, descended frantically to the floor, and did his “breakdance.” Much more has been written here about the misadventures of this very strange feline.

After sleeping comfortably for a month or more on beds in hotels and cruise ships, I judged that I needed a new mattress. The one that I had been sleeping on was more than thirty years old and was a little too short for me. Sue selected one for me as a late birthday present. It arrived on September 14. The delivery people set it up and took away the old one. Sue, of course, kept the obsolete pieces that held it off the floor. I found them leaning against the bookcase in the hallway. The new mattress was considerably better than the old one, but I still woke up with a backache more often than not.

On September 16 I talked with someone from the town of Enfield about the tax bill that I had received that day. It contained a significant interest charge because I did not pay the July installment. The simple reason for my delinquency was that I had never received a bill. It turned out that the mortgage holder, Peoples United Bank, had payed the portion due in January. The mortgage schedule indicated that five payments were remaining when the bank declared that it was fully paid. I was sent a notice of this, but I was never apprised of the bill from the town that the bank must have received. The lady with whom I talked refused to waive the interest charge. Since the bank that held the mortgage at the time that the bill was sent no longer existed, I did not have any recourse except to pay.

On the same day using my free MailChimp account, I sent an email that I had previously composed to try to improve the attendance of the players with less than 500 masterpoints at the upcoming sectional tournament in Orange.

The bookshelf fell onto the bed in 2023. The light is now attached to a screw in the wall.

On September 17 two items that I had ordered from Amazon were delivered. The first was a reading light that I would be able to clamp to the bookshelf above the new bed. The second was a book by Daryl Gregory entitled We are All Completely Fine. I liked this book much less than the one by Gregory that I had read on the cruise, The Spoonbenders.

Bob had mysteriously disappeared on September 16. He returned two days later and spent all day and night by the stove. Something was apparently wrong with him, but we were not too concerned. His behavior had always been eccentric.

Eric, Motoko Oinaga, John Debaggis, and I finish second out of ten in the Swiss event held at the HBC on September 18. We were the #8 seed. Eric and I bid and made slams on two of the last three hands to win the round by 24. We lost only to the winners—Lesley Meyers, Laurie Robbins, Felix, and Trevor.

Sue made an appointment at the vet for Bob on September 20. I heard him at some point after 4 a.m. on the 19th. At 5:45 I brought the litter box upstairs and shut the door to the basement, but when Sue woke up Bob was nowhere to be found. I opened the door to the basement. He came in about 9:30, and I shut the door to the basement again.

Before my bridge game on September 20 I placed Bob in the cat carrier, but at some point he somehow escaped. Sue was able to get him back in and took him to his 12:30 appointment. We found out that he had a tumor in his mouth or throat. There was not much hope for him, but the doctor gave Sue some medicine for him. Sue gave him the drops when I got back from bridge and could hold him. He needed them twice a day. I was so involved that I forgot about my Zoom meeting of the HBC Planning Committee.

We probably should have put Bob down when we heard about the tumor. He had always been Sue’s pet. She had to make the decision, and she could not do it.

On the last day of the month I sent a second email for the CBA.

October: On October 3 Sue started giving Bob antibiotics and steroids. He started eating a little better. Sue took him to the vet again on the 18th. He was still not eating much even though Sue was diligent about preparing meals that were both nutritious and easy to swallow.

Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.

The October 19 Simsbury game was canceled. I drove Sally to Southbridge to check out the hotel that we would be using for the tournament in October, which was named the Spectacle Regional because the hotel was the administration building of the defunct American Optical Company. The ground floor was very modern, but the the playing area not very large. The restaurant, which was called Visions, was not open except for groups.

On the same day Sue’s cousin Robby Davis was found dead in his apartment.

On October 21 I had breakfast with Sue and Mark Davis. Mark was very involved in a gigantic project involving his ancestry. For some reason I have almost no interest in exploring mine. Someone from the Spokane branch of the Wavada sent my dad a lot of research that she had done. Sue got it from him and put it somewhere. I have never seen it.

On October 22 there was no game at the HBC. I went by myself to see Cherubini’s Medea at Cinemark at the Enfield Square. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an outstanding performance in an opera that had not been performed since Maria Callas played the title character. A carnival was set up in the mall parking lot.

On October 24 I drove to the mall for a walk. I forgot my little blue mp3 player, and I wore the wrong shoes. I had to drive back home and start over.. A girl in a red suit made of balloons and a small backpack was walking stiff-legged around the mall. I think that she was supposed to look like an astronaut.

November: The first week of the month was unseasonably warm. On the 7th it was 67 degrees at 5 a.m. and 80 as I drove through Hartford at 1 p.m. after playing with Nancy Calderbank for the first time in the mentorship program. She had asked me to teach her 2/1.

On November 8 I finished writing the Bulletin for Southbridge and sent it to Sally for printing.

In the mid-term elections the Republicans, as expected, won the House of Representatives, but the Democrats held onto the Senate after Senator Warnock won another runoff.

I received a bill from Somers Oil for $798.86!

The hilarious postscript to the Grand European Tour occurred on November 8, almost six months after I departed. Sue and I were in the living room when we heard the unmistakable sound of claws shredding paper. Sue rose from her chain, hurried into the kitchen, and yelled, “Bob, what have you gotten into now?” She snatched a paper bag from beneath his claws. When she looked inside she found the passport for which she had searched for several days back in early May. She should have just asked Bob where it was.

11/23 Sue and I spent Thanksgiving alone. I sent the following email to the Barkes and Steve Flamman:

I hope that you are all doing well.
I thought that you might be interested in this. Two weeks ago my wife Sue and I were watching TV in our living room in the evening when we heard the unmistakable sound of our cat Bob shredding something made of paper in the kitchen. Sue sprang from her chair to prevent further damage. She found that Bob had somehow discovered a small paper sack and had pulled it out onto the floor. Sue retrieved it from him and discovered her current and expired passports as well as a few other items that had been missing for over two years.
Incidentally, I included two photos of Sue unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a deal with Viking on the Day 0 page of my journal and one that she took of Bob on Day 12.
Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is hard to find things to be thankful for lately, but I am definitely thankful for the friends that I made on the cruise in May.

I had more to be thankful for three days later. Michigan defeated Ohio State 45-23 at the Horseshoe in Columbus to win the eastern division of the Big 10 for the second year in a row. They did it without the Big 10’s best running back, Blake Corum. Donovan Edwards filled in for Corum very well. The Wolverines finished the regular season 12-0.

December: A week later the Wolverines beat Purdue in the Big 10 title game 43-21. They have qualified for the four-team College Football Playoff for the second year in a row.

December 8 was the tenth anniversary of our wedding ceremony. Sue and I are about as unhappy as we have ever been. Sue blames her health and various inanimate objects. I blame the house.

Curtis Barton, the president of D25, sent an email to members of the Executive Committee indicating that all senior employees of the ACBL had been fired. He then sent a correction that said that, according to Mark Aquino, who as Regional Director should know, “fired” is not the right word.

On December 9 Sue suddenly screamed, “I hate my life!” I was thinking that I hated our house, which was a pigsty. I also resented that almost whenever I needed something I must ask her where it was. Usually she did not know and said that she would look for it. In addition, we had so much junk everywhere that every time I that I went to get something I must remove four or five other items and then replace them in the right order. The refrigerator, for example, was always full to overflowing. THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF US!

However, as always, I said nothing because I did not want to trigger a tearful reaction or a panic attack.

December 12 brought the first snow of the season.

At 5 a.m. on the next day the weatherman on WTIC AM reported that it was 8 degrees in Granby and 19 in neighboring East Granby.

On December 17 I bought a rib roast. Sue forgot about Tyesha’s confirmation. Then she also bought a rib roast because she forgot her shopping list, and my phone was off because I forgot to turn it back on after bridge.⁵ I discovered that for weeks she had been leaving me voicemail messages that I did not know about. We have become two incompetent old farts.

On December 21 we had five tables at the SBC game. Sue and I arrived too late for the holiday party because Sue went to the store at 4:30 p.m. to buy the fruit that she had promised to bring. The players gave me $130.

On December 23 very strong winds uprooted the pine tree in the front yard. I heard a loud crashing sound at about 5 a.m. The tree fell straight towards our house, but there was no damage at all because the top section landed harmlessly on the patio between the old section of the house and Sue’s garage.

The high temperature the next day was only 19. I got a letter from ConnectiCare. The premium for my dental policy went down from $79 to $56.

We did nothing special on Christmas day. Sue may have watched It’s a Wonderful Life,⁶ but I didn’t.

Crystal Lake Construction, the company that cleared the snow from our driveway and sidewalks chopped up and removed most of the fallen tree. They came back later for the stump.

On the same day I received an email from Mark Aquino about the new training required for directors at sectionals, On the 27th I met with the HBC directors after the bridge game. Peter Marcus, who generally knew these things, had reported that the new rules applied only to events with masterpoint limits in excess of 500.

On the last day of the year Michigan lost to TCU 51-45. Early in the game J. J. McCarthy threw two interceptions that were returned for touchdowns. It was a wretched end to an awful year.

A week later TCU got clobbered by Georgia in the championship game. U-M would have done better, but they probably would have lost.

1. By the fall of 2023 a small spot had appeared on the front of the sweatshirt. It looked like a grease stain, but on closer inspection it was obvious that the exterior had worn thin. I could hide the blemish with ink from a Sharpie pen, but that was not a good permanent solution.

2. STaC stands for “sectional tournament at clubs”. These were games held at clubs that awarded more points, and the overalls included all of the participating clubs. Regular STaCs paid silver points. The points in Royal STaCs were evenly split between black, red, gold, and silver points.

3. “Resident Alien” was originally shown on the Syfy channel. Sue and I watched season 1 and season 2 on the streaming service called Peacock. At the time it was free on Cox cable. Eventually they wanted people to buy monthly subscriptions and restricted the free option so much as to make it worthless.

4. Apparently Peoples United Bank wanted our mortgage off of its books when it was taken over by M&T bank. The five mortgage payments that I saved by this action more than covered the cost of the July tax bill, but someone should have told me that that amount would be due.

5. I did not learn how to put the Samsung cellphone on “vibrate” until much later. It was easy to do but not a bit intuitive.

6. All year long Sue watched TCM during every waking (and many sleeping) moment.

2023 Bridge: Sectional Tournaments

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Mike

Silver-point tournaments in 2023. Continue reading →

The problems: Unit 126 of the ACBL, i.e. Connecticut, ran three sectionals in 2023. All three were held at St. Barbara’s Greek Orthodox Church in Orange. I attended two of them. The third was scheduled at the same time as the sectional in Great Barrington, MA. Since I had already made commitments to play in that event, I did not go to the Orange sectional in August.

How, you may ask, could such a thing happen? Aren’t Connecticut and Western Mass (Unit 196) adjacent, and is not the scheduling of competing sectionals in adjacent units prohibited.

The heart of the problem is that the unit has not had a tournament manager for some time. Cornelia Guest asked to be relieved of her responsibilities before the Pandemic, and no one had been found in the interim. So, the president, Peter Marcus, had been performing these duties. This was a terrible situation. Peter had three other jobs in the bridge world: Director-in-Chief of District 25, Tournament Coordinator for District 25, President of Unit 126. In addition, he was a very active participant in both of the district’s important committees and he had a firm commitment to attend every New York Mets game.

So, Peter the U126 Tournament Manager selected the dates for the August sectional and sent them to Peter the D25 Tournament Coordinator. The latter Peter ignored the conflict and scheduled the tournament. The U126 Peter later told Peter Samsel, the president of U196 that he would compensate him for lost attendance. I have no way of determining if he did or not. If he did, he probably took it from his own pocket. He often solved problems that way.

The Board of Governors of U126, of which I was a member, did not meet at any of the tournaments. We had one or two Zoom meetings that focused mainly on nominations for the officers for and representatives for 2024.

The other problem is communications. Our emails are decidedly pedestrian. They do a poor job of motivating the players with fewer points to attend. The ones that I composed and sent for the first limited sectional (documented here) brought in fifty-seven tables in one day. Compare those with the figures in the following sections.

April 21-23 Sectional in Orange. Two months before the tournament I committed to play in the Sunday Swiss with Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky. I could not find partners for that event, and I also needed partners for the pairs game on Saturday. Mike suggested that I try Ros (short for Rosalind and pronounced as Roz) Abel, who lived in Southington, CT. I did, and we agreed to play on Friday and Sunday in Orange. Ros could not play on

In preparation for the event, we worked on a card that we both could tolerate, and we played together once in the open game at the the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). She has subsequently become a member of the HBC, which is actually the closest club to her house.

I learned that Ros had recently moved to Southington from the New York area, where she had run a club. It died during the Pandemic. Somehow she found the club in Newtown, but not the HBC.

We did not score too well at the HBC, but our results on Saturday at the sectional were promising. We finished seventh in both sessions out of thirty-nine and forty. We won over four silver points. We had a chance to place in the Swiss as well, but we were defeated badly by a team from the HBC. I remember that on a critical hand Ros made a bid that made it clear that she did not know how to bid controls when looking for a possible slam.

The attendance in the open games was pretty good, especially on Friday, but there were only 25 tables in the two days of pair games for the 0-499 group. The Swiss on Sunday had eighteen tables, but there was no score given for the 0-499 group.

August 11-13 Sectional in Orange: I wasn’t there, and so I can only report on the table count, which was much worse than in April. Here are the totals by day:

Friday: Open: 15 in both sessions; 0-499: 5 and 4.

Saturday: Open: 13.5 and 13; 0-499: 5 and 5

Swiss: 15.

August 12-13 Sectional in Great Barrington: I played with Abhi Dutta. On Sunday we defended our title in the Swiss with our teammates, Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider.

On Saturday morning Abhi and I were eighth our of forty-two, quite a good showing. In the afternoon, however, we were barely above 50 percent. Our combined score was not good enough to place in the overalls. Only sixteen tables were needed in the afternoon.

In the Swiss we got off to a terrible start. There were sixteen tables. By winning the last match in a blitz against a bad team we jumped up to sixth place. We did not play any of the teams that were ahead of us.

September 23-24 Sectional in Johnston, RI: At some point in August Abhi Dutta asked me if I wanted to play in the Rhode Island sectional in September. I agreed. I like going to this sectional because I have a lot of friends in the RI bridge community, and the sectional has always been well run.

On Saturday Abhi and I did what we always seemed to do in pairs games. We had one pretty good session and one awful one.

Our teammates for the Sunday Swiss were Ken and Lori Leopold, who had won the second session on Saturday. We drew Mark Aquino’s team in the first round. On the very first hand Mark opened 1NT. His partner, Andrew Chesterton, announced it as 12-14, a “weak” bid. I had thirteen points and a flat hand. I doubled for penalty.

Andrew redoubled to indicate that he had a long (at least five cards). Mark considered this for at least one minute, and then passed. So did I. In fact, Mark had a strong NT opener and forgot that he and Andrew were playing 12-14. He made exactly seven tricks for a very high score. Andrew said that if Mark had bid 2♣ (as he was required by their runout to do), he would have passed and gone down. Mark admitted that he had been lucky.

Our luck did not improve until the third round. We ended up with three wins and five losses. We could easily have won all of those matches except the first.

The table count put Connecticut’s to shame:

Saturday: Open: 20 and 20.5; 0-749: 8 and 7.

Sunday Swiss: 27! 0-299 pairs: 3.

Recognition Committee: At one of the Zoom meetings Bill Segraves, the webmaster for the unit’s website, CTBridge.org, proposed the idea of four committees to address the problems that the unit faced. One of those was a Recognition Committee to address the various awards and trophies for performance at regionals and perhaps to create new ones. I paid little attention to this because I did not consider it a very important problem, but I was not averse to someone else putting some time in on it.

On October 18 Bill sent the following email to Sandy DeMartino and me:

One of the committees we discussed setting up at the last CBA Board Meeting was the Recognition Committee. Basically, the idea was to set up publicity for our awards and trophies and make them more relevant to the membership, maybe even generate some excitement for the races.
I don’t think this should take a lot of time and I would hope the committee would come up with idea but then others could actually do some of the work, such as authoring emails to go out about trophies being given out at the next tournament, etc.
OK to do this?

I did not immediately respond, but John Lloyd said that he would like to be on the committee. Sandy declined, and so the committee consisted of Bill, John, and me. Bill set the criteria in the following email:

The main things on my mind for attention soon are the following, as they all affect what we post on the website and what will go into the upcoming edition of The Kibitzer as we approach the end of the year.
I thought some of these had already been decided on by the board, but then questions were re-raised and it seems a good idea to resolve them with some real clearity.
1) It was my understanding that the Barb Shaw Trophy would be awarded to the player who earned the most masterpoints in all of Connecticut’s I/N sectionals during the year. Only the I/N sectionals count, not points earned in limited games of the open sectional, STaC’s, or anything else. I don’t think anyone else is going to have an I/N this year, so that’ll he Hartford I, Branford, Newtown and Hartford II. We basically ratified this by posting it on the web that way after the board had discussed it, but I think it’s good at least to affirm that among ourselves, and then I think we can just report on it at the next board meeting. (I don’t know that we’ll have the official winner and standings yet, but I can easily determine the unofficial winner.) Side note: I am aware of no restriction saying that this is a member of the Unit.
2) There was somewhat less clarity on the Monroe Magnus Trophy. This has traditionally been awarded to the highest masterpoint winner in all Connecticut Sectionals. (STaCs do not count for this.) As far as I have understood it, it is not restricted to Unit members. At one of the board meetings, someone (I don’t recall who) said that they thought that the I/N sectionals should not count for this. I don’t think this received wide support, and I certainly don’t agree with it. A sectional is a sectional. At that time, it actually mattered, since there was a pair who did very well in the Harford I/N and then in the Open (!) in the CBA Spring Sectional, but it’s no longer relevant at this point. I do suggest that we go ahead and present to the board a motion that the Magnus trophy race counts points in all Connecticut Sectionals (exclusive of STaCs). Make sense? We will know the Magnus winner after the sectional next weekend.
3) It was proposed in one of our board meetings that there be a new award/recognition for something like a Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year. I quite like this idea, but the devil is in the details. The basic idea is that eligible people would be anyone who met the rank criteria at the beginning of the year and was geographically eligible throughout the year. Maybe I am making this too complicated but I think it’s best to spell out all this stuff in advance.
1) Is it open to any Connecticut resident or just Unit members (this can easily matter – we have some Connecticut residents who are members of the New York unit)? I’m open to either answer.
2) Does the person have to meet criterion #1 for the whole year or just at the beginning, just at the end? People who move in or out? Part year, e.g. college students or snowbirds eligible? I would tend to recommend something like anyone who has had a substantial presence during the year by any of a) completing a semester of school, b) living in-state for at least 6 months, c) maintaining a home here and living here on an ongoing basis for at least four months a year.
3) What events count? Connecticut sectionals? All Connecticut events? And District 25 events? All events? All f2f events? All pigmented events? I would propose all pigmented events (this eliminates the BBO ACBL games but not the VACBs). If you want to limit it to f2f events, I’ll investigate how difficult this is. It may not be too hard. I think there’s a way to filter for VACB leaders and then subtract that.
4) Is there a MP limit? We have some non-LMs who have well over 1000 MP. I would recommend that we restrict this. Not only does it defeat what I see as the purpose (encouraging newer players) to be recognizing players who already have a pile of masterpoints (maybe even twice as many as I had at the beginning of the year!), but if a player never gets their black or silver, e.g., they would never become an LM and would remain eligible indefinitely. I suggest non-LM under 750 at start of the year.
5) Can a person win it more than once. I’d suggest no.
6) Any other criteria?
7) Do we award it for 2023? I would suggest we do.
8) What do we call it? Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year for now? I think we can come up with something more evocative of success but see no point in waiting.
9) What’s the award. For now, I think it’s fine just to get it on the website. The sooner we do it, the sooner we can publish the standings and start giving it a little publicity.
This latter award is complex enough that I’d suggest we ratify the status quo on the other as soon as we can and then talk by Zoom or three-way phone to hit the NLM award issues, come up with a proposal and present it to the board. My schedule pretty flexible Sunday through Thursday.
Anything else you guys would like to have the committee address sooner rather than later?

I only skimmed most of this, but I objected to a few of the items in the first few paragraphs. I sent the following response:

I strongly disagree with some of this, and I don’t think that anything has been decided by the board. At least there was no vote on it. You can proceed this way if you want in 2023, which is a transition year, but we should have policies that are voted on for 2024. That means a motion and a count of votes, not the “silence must mean approval” method used this year.
The primary purpose of the awards has always been to promote the bridge activities of the UNIT. The trophies were bought and managed by the unit’s government in some distant day. The secondary purpose was presumably (I was not around when any of these were established) to honor the name on the trophy (well, maybe not the governor).
A sectional is NOT a sectional. The I/N sectionals are club activities that, like STaC games, happen to pay silver points. They are sponsored, financed, and promoted by the clubs. It is fine and probably necessary to help the clubs in any way that we can, but that was not part of the design of any of the awards. If I had known that attendance at the HBC sectionals was going to help someone win an award, then I would have trumpeted that in the emails for the award. There is also the problem that the I/N sectionals do not have the same rules about who can play as the unit events (or even one another). Surely, the criteria for eligibility should be set and announced before competition begins. There are other small problems that have to do with players changing residences and points awarded to foreign players by the ACBL. I know that those can be addressed because I did so when I ran the “Best in Class” awards for the district.
At this time I think that the main goal should be promoting play at unit-sponsored sectionals by the I/N group. Our record on this so far is, in my opinion, miserable. Awarding the Barb Shaw trophy for persistent performance as opposed to performance in one tournament is also problematic, but the problems are probably addressable. I am not opposed to this change, but the standard for eligibility should be the player’s standing as of January 1. We should be encouraging players to graduate from the I/N game to the open one when they reach the limit, not discouraging them by removing their eligibility for the award when they achieve success.
I do not have strong feelings about whether we should limit participation to members of the unit. I enjoy seeing people from other units at our sectionals. Some have won the trophies in the past, but in at least some cases they didn’t bother to take them.
I do not have strong feelings about the other awards. The nice thing about the way the awards worked was that it gave us something novel to promote for each event. I don’t think that we ever took advantage of this as much as we could have in the past. I have been attending board meetings for ten years, and the only thing mentioned about the trophies was in the form of “Does anyone know who has the _____ trophy?” The number of people who actually care about the other trophies is probably small, but I always have, and I know a few others who do.
In any case the principal problem to be addressed is the promotion (i.e., emails and other advertising), which has always been meh. The board did not care much because attendance without promotion had been good (go look at the 2019 results) and increasing over time. The unit’s finances were so good that we were actively looking for ways to spend our excess money. That has changed dramatically, and we need to react.

Bill then tried to schedule a time for the three of us to meet or have a Zoom meeting. I agreed to meet before or after the games on one of the days of the Orange. So, we agreed to meet before the game on Saturday at 8:30. I started the meeting by mentioning that I had never won the Barb Shaw Trophy and that Michael Dworetsky’s name was horribly misspelled.

Shirley and Bob Derrah, Tony Norris and me in 2015.

Bill could not understand how the first mistake happened. I explained it to him. He asked me what he should do if he could not find out why I was listed. I said that I would prefer to change it to Bob and Shirley Derrah¹, the people who were given the trophy.

Bill provided a summary of what we agreed to:

Barb Shaw Trophy

Traditionally, the Barb Shaw Trophy was awarded to the top Flight C masterpoint winner in the CBA Winter Sectional. The award was last made in 2020. There has not been a Winter Sectional since then and the award was not made in 2021 or 2022. For the transitional year of 2023, the CBA Board approved the award of the Barb Shaw Trophy to the top masterpoint winner in all of the Connecticut I/N Sectionals combined. With the end of 2023 and the first planned I/N Sectional of 2024 (Branford in January) rapidly approaching, the Recognition Committee discussed criteria for the award of the Barb Shaw Trophy in 2024.

The Committee does not recommend continuing the 2023 practice of awarding the Barb Shaw Trophy to the top masterpoint winner in Connecticut I/N Sectionals but would instead prefer criteria that recognize or at least include recognition of performance in Connecticut’s Open Sectionals and “graduation” into progressively more challenging events. We present two options for Board consideration, with a very mild Committee preference for the first option.

Option 1: The 2024 Barb Shaw Trophy will be awarded to the player who begins the year with <750 masterpoints and wins the most total masterpoints in all Open and I/N Connecticut Sectionals.

Option 2: The 2024 Barb Shaw Trophy will be awarded to the player who begins the year with <750 masterpoints and wins the most masterpoints at one designated Sectional.

For Option 2, in the likely absence of a Winter Sectional (acknowledging that March may currently be a formal possibility), the award could be made to the top masterpoint winner at the first sectional of the year. The Committee recognized, however, that if the Scott Loring Trophy (normally awarded at the Spring Sectional) were awarded at the the same tournament, it is possible that the same person or pair could win both the Barb Shaw Trophy and the Scott Loring Trophy. The Committee also considered it desirable to spread out the recognition of developing players over more than one tournament. One way to address this, if the Board prefers the single Sectional option, would be to award the Barb Shaw Trophy to the <750 masterpoint winner at the Summer Sectional. (Pushing the Scott Loring Trophy to the second Sectional, expected to be the Summer Sectional, would have disadvantages including increasing the likelihood that the same person would win both the Scott Loring Trophy and the Governor’s Cup.)

While we continue in this transitional period, the Recognition Committee would plan to re-evaluate the criteria for award of the Barb Shaw Trophy approximately one year from now and make recommendations for 2025.

New Recognition Awards

The Committee also considered potential new awards to recognize the success of our developing players. There are a number of ways in which this might be done and the Committee considered the relationship of any such awards to the Mini-McKenney awards and the Barb Shaw Trophy. The Committee recommends that the Board consider two new categories for recognition, Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year and Connecticut Newcomer of the Year.

The 2024 Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year would be that Unit member who begins the year as a non-Life Master with <750 masterpoints and earns the most masterpoints in all face-to-face play during the year.

The 2024 Connecticut Non-Life Master of the Year would be that Unit member who begins the year as a non-Life Master with <50 masterpoints and earns the most masterpoints in all face-to-face play during the year.

These two awards would be clearly distinguished from the Mini-McKenney award by including only points earned in face-to-face play (the Mini-McKenney criteria include points earned in virtual club games and online regionals). And the former award would be distinguished from the Barb Shaw full-year option by the inclusion of all face-to-face club and tournament play at any location, not just in Connecticut’s Sectionals.

The Committee has investigated the technical aspects of applying these criteria and received confirmation that the application of any of these criteria should not present any particular technical challenges. The most complex question related to the proposed new Recognition Awards is how eligibility would be determined for people who may only be Unit members for part of the year. Should such a case arise, the Committee recommends that the Unit rely on the established ACBL criteria for GNT eligibility as the basis for a case-by-case determination as to eligibility.

The Committee has begun what will be a broader discussion of how all of our trophies and other awards are made, including when and how they are awarded and whether there is a physical trophy and will solicit input from the Board and other unit members on this subject. We consider it essential, however, that the Unit take full advantage of all opportunities to publicize these awards widely and to use them to recognize achievement and actively to promote Connecticut bridge.

The Committee also began discussion of other questions for Board consideration during 2025 and welcomes input from the Board and other Unit members about any matters potentially under the Committee’s purview.

October 27-29 Sectional in Orange: On October 25 Bill sent the following email to all of the members of the unit’s Board of Directors:

Thank you again to everyone who pitched in to make the August tournament a success. We should be in much better shape hospitality-wise for this tournament with Stacy Herbert working the mornings and with all of us having had a little more experience.
It would be great if a few of you could help out with some things this weekend. On Friday morning, my wife Carol will bring me and help with getting stuff out of our car, but I won’t be able to carry much myself (broken leg for those who may not know – healing well but limiting my ability to walk without crutches). Stacy will help, too, but a few additional sets of hands will be great. I’ll arrive at 8:15 and Carol, Stacy and and I can get the coffee stuff out so Stacy can get that running, but another set or two of hands by around 9 would be great.
The bigger challenge this weekend will be getting stuff back into the car on Sunday. Carol won’t be able to come get me until about 7:30 on Sunday evening, and I don’t want her to have to load it all by herself, so if anyone can hang around for a bit or if someone who lives close by can come back to help, that’d be great.

I said that I would get there as early as possible on Friday. I did not volunteer to stay late on Sunday. The drive to St. Barbara’s takes at least an hour, and I would be mentally exhausted after three days of bridge.

Eric Vogel agreed to play with me in the pairs games on Friday and Saturday, and Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky asked me to play with them in the Swiss on Sunday. I had a very difficult time finding a partner. Linda Green, a board member, said that Terry Lubman of Riverside, CT, wanted to play. I contacted her, and we eventually agreed on a convention card.

I arrived at the church at about 8:30. Everything was pretty much already set up. Renee Clift and I distributed BridgeMates for the director, Tim Hill. Otherwise, I twiddled my thumbs for an hour and a half.

I did not think that I played too badly, but I did not have a good tournament at all. Eric and I scratched in only one of the four sessions. I might have been off my game because of the distractions.

Terry and I were almost never on the same wave length. The worst one was when she doubled an opponent’s 2♥ bid when their wie3 2qw vulnerable. Although I held Q10xxx of hearts (enough to leave a double in according to the Rule of 9²), I did not want them to play for 650 points needing eight tricks in an eight-card fit. So, I bid 3♣ even though I only had three. It turned out that Terry only had the QJ of clubs. The opponents drew our trumps and then took their hearts. I managed only four tricks for -500. It was small comfort that the opponents could easily have managed eight tricks in hearts. We only won three of the seven matches.

It was a long lonely ride home. Worst of all, I had only one day to rest and prepare for the regional in Marlborough that has been described here.

Here were the table counts:

Friday: Open: 17 and 17.5; 0-499: 2.5 and 0!

Saturday: Open: 16 and 18; 0-499: 3 and 0.

Swiss: 19. For the third consecutive tournament, the unit advertised a 0-500 event that did not attract enough people to play.

1. Bob Derrah, who worked for Monsanto for decades, died in 2018. His obituary has been posted here. Shirley died two years later. Her obituary can be found here. I played on teams with them several times. We also worked together to teach bridge to young people in the Springfield area. I documented that effort here.

2. The Rule of 9 was invented by Mel Colchamiro as a way of gauging whether it is OK to pass a takeout double. He advised not to unless the total of three things was at least nine: 1) the number of cards held in the trump suit; 2) the number of trump cards higher than 9; 3) the level of the bid. In this case the numbers were 5, 2, and 2. Therefore, I could (but was not required to) have passed.

2021-? Bridge: New Partners During and After Covid-19

Posted on October 23, 2023 by Mike

New partners. Continue reading →

As of May of 2024 I had played with 144 partners in at least one complete session of a sanctioned game. After thee reopening in 2021 all of the games that involved new partners were held either at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) or at a tournament.

HBC partners: Linda Starr (introduced here) was a director at the HBC. Before the Pandemic, she undertook a program of reserving the Sunday afternoon game as a high-low game, in which at least one of the participants must have less than 750 masterpoints. This was an especially good way for someone with a lot of points to play with the person whom they were mentoring. At some point in the winter of 2022-2023 my wife Sue decided that she wanted to play in the high-low game.

I enjoyed playing with Joanne Amenta, but I don’t remember the result or any of the details of the hands that we played together.

I definitely remember one hand in which she was playing in a team game at the HBC. Her partner was John Calderbank. I don’t remember who my partner was.

On the very first hand of the match I made a terrible bid that kept us from reaching a makeable slam. I immediately started whipping myself with a wet noodle.

Joanne had never played against me before. She expressed surprise that I became upset about one lousy hand. John explained that in team play some hands are much more important than others. Missing a slam would probably cause us to lose the whole match because of the difficulty in making up the difference in the other four hands.

Joanne is still an active player. She has attended both regionals and sectionals since the reopening.

I also played with David Brandwein one Sunday in the high-low game. He was a pretty good player, but the bidding system that was used by him and his regular partner, Bernie Selig, was archaic. I suggested a few things that he could add to modernize it and allow him to play more comfortably with more players.

David was elected vice-president of the HBC in 2023. That meant that he was also the chairman of the club’s long-range planning committee, of which I was a long-time member. The first meeting was scheduled for early in 2024.

For a few weeks in the fall of 2021 the Simsbury Bridge Club. (SBC) was not able to run games on Wednesday evenings at Eno Hall. I signed up to play one Tuesday evening at the HBC. Doug Deacon, who had been a regular on Tuesday evenings when I started playing in 2008, needed a partner. So, we worked on a card and played rather successfully (around 55 percent) for two or three weeks.

Paul formerly played with a man from Ukraine named Igor and then with Paul Tungatt.

At the end of 2023 Doug still was still working and playing regularly on Tuesday evenings at the HBC.

One Sunday afternoon Fred Gagnon (GAN yun, rhymes with canyon) drove down from his house in Springfield to mine in Enfield. He had asked me to play with him in the High-Low game and volunteered to drive both of us to the HBC. I had previously referred to him “Boom Boom”, but he said that he had never heard of Freddy (Boom Boom) Cannon or his biggest hit, “Palisades Park”. So, I had downloaded it to my MP3 player and let him listen to it in his car before we left. He said that the song sounded familiar, but he might have just been placating me.

Fred did not play very well that day. He might have been having health issues. He is still quite active in the bridge community.

Barb Gallagher was from Denver. She was in the Hartford area during the summer of 2023 to visit her daughter. I was lucky enough to hook up with her for a few games at the HBC and SBC. Our lists of conventions had a lot of overlap, and so we were able to piece together a rather sophisticated convention card.

I remember that we had one pretty good round, around 50 percent. I had a really good time playing opposite her. I wish that we could have worked in a few more games.

Barb left at the end of September to return to Denver.

YC Hsu has played with various partners both at the HBC and, occasionally, at the SBC. I played with him once in the open game on Thursday morning. Since he sometimes played with one of my regular partners, John Calderbank, it was easy to agree on a convention card.

We had a pretty good game together, and I felt sure that I would play with him again.

Y.C. is from Taiwan. I have seen him many times at the bridge table, but I do not know much about his background.

I played with Diane Tracy in one Sunday afternoon High-Low game at the HBC. She must have enjoyed it; I overheard her singing my praises one day.

Diane is relatively new to the club, but she became a member of the board in 2022. So I have seen her at board meetings once a month. She has offered a valuable perspective because she spent a lot of time in Naples, FL. She has provided us with insights about how the other half lived.

I only played once with Andrea Yalof in the High-Low game, but I was quite impressed with her approach to the game. She and her husband David, who is also a bridge player, moved to Williamsburg, VA, in 2023. David worked at William & Mary. I have it on good authority that Andrea was still active in bridge in late 2023.

The “good authority” is Fran Gurtman (introduced here), who was Andrea’s regular partner when she lived in the Hartford area. Fran and Andrea still play together online.

On Sunday, May 4, 2024, my wife Sue went to a concert in Willimantic with Maria Van Der Ree. So, I volunteered to play with anyone who needed a partner at the weekly High-Low game. I was matched up with Joan Hultquist, a player who joined the HBC when it reopened after the pandemic. I did not learn too much about her. We had a 51 percent game and finished just out of the money. Joan played a high percentage of the hands, one of which was a somewhat challenging slam. JoAnn Scata, sitting to her left, put her to the test on the third trick by underleading her K♦. The dummy had the ace and queen, but Joan elected to play the ace and ended up going down.

SBC Partners: The game on Wednesday evening at the SBC on August 1, 2024, was plagued by last-minute cancellations. We ended up with only five pairs in attendance. The 2.5 table game is deplored by everyone due to the five-board sitout and the fact that results are only compared with one other table on every hand. I therefore suggested that, if two players agreed to go home, we would play a two-table game with International Matchpoint scoring, something that we had not done since the pandemic. Donna Lyons, who had been scheduled to be my partner and YC Hsu agreed to go home. Howard Schiller, who had been scheduled to play with YC, was my partner. We clobbered the opponents in all three of the matches by 31, 19, and 15 IMPs.

Tournaments: For quite a few years John Farwell had served as the one-man partnership program for sectional tournaments in Connecticut. In that capacity I had interacted with him several times when I was in need of a partner or teammates.

The first sectional in Connecticut after the reopening was held in Orange, CT, in June of 2022. I was unable to find a partner for the Swiss event on Sunday, June 5, but I needed to attend the tournament anyway because of the board meeting before the game. I ended up being paired up with John and a pair of people I had never met before and have never seen since. Somehow we clicked together and we ended up fifth out of seventeen overall and first in the B strat. The details of the tournament have been chronicled here.

In 2023 John was still acting as partnership person at every sectional.

When he was a novice Abhi Dutta played with my wife Sue at least once. Ken Leopold and I had also teamed up with Abhi and a partner at one of the qualifying tournaments for Flight B of the Grand National Teams (GNT). Although that was not a pleasant experience I responded positively when Abhi asked me to play with him at the NABC in Providence in July of 2022. The details of that adventure have been described here.

Our next outing together was our most successful. Playing with Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider we won the Sunday Swiss at the sectional tournament in Great Barrington, MA, in August of 2022. You can read about it here.

I have played with Abhi in several other pairs and team events in both regionals and sectionals. I also played against him in a memorable knockout that was described here.

I was paired up with Phyllis Bloom for the Flight B Swiss event on Sunday, July 17, at the NABC in Providence. Our teammates were Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider, who both came down with Covid-19 a few days later. We finished slightly below average. Phyllis made a couple of very costly mistakes, but I still enjoyed playing with her.

Phyllis was married to Ken Bloom, an expert player. They lived in Sudbury, MA. Ken’s father, Irv, was an expert player. He and his partner, Bob Hoffman, invented the Blooman convention as a defense against 1NT.

I had committed to play with Jim and Mike in the Sunday Swiss event at the sectional tournament in Orange, CT, in April of 2023. I had a very difficult time finding a partner. Eventually Mike suggested that I contact Ros Abel, whom he knew from the Newtown Bridge Club. Rob agreed to play with me in that event and also the pairs event on Friday. We also arranged to play once at the HBC, which was actually closer to her house in Southington than the Newtown club was.

For a new pair we did quite well in both sessions on Friday, well over 50 percent. We also were doing well in the Swiss until the last round, which was against two players from the HBC whom I knew very well, Peter Katz and Tom Joyce. We had bid to 4♠. Ros then bid 5♥. We had not discussed what kind of control bidding we were using. In the one that almost all good players used that bid would show a first-or-second-round control in hearts, but it would deny controls in the two suits that she had skipped. So, I signed off in 5♠ and made 6, which they bid an made at the other table.

I asked Ros later what her bid meant. She said that she was showing a heart suit. So, I guess that she did not use control-showing cue bids at all.

At the end of 2023 Ros was still playing regularly at the HBC.

I have played against Jim Osofsky a large number of times, especially if you count the team events in which we were both sitting East-West at different tables. Jim and Mike usually teamed up with Ausra Geaski (introduced here) and Bunny Kliman, both regulars at the HBC.

For the 2023 Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, Jim’s usual partner, Mike Heider, was visiting the Fatherland with one of his sons. I also needed a partner for the four days that I intended to play. So, Jim and I paired up, intending to play in the Tuesday-Wednesday knockout and the Thursday-Friday knockout.

Abhi Dutta asked if he could team up with us for the event that started on Thursday. Later I learned that his partner would be Paul Johnson, the guy whose behavior upset me so much earlier in the year at Southbridge (documented here).

We used the partnership software to pick up partners from Florida for the first knockout. We had a very successful two days with them. The other two days were less so. The details have been posted here.

The last sectional of 2023 in Connecticut was in late October. Jim and Mike asked me to find a partner and play with them in the Sunday Swiss. I had a difficult time finding someone to play with. Eventually a fellow member of the CBA board, Linda Green, lined me up with Terry Lubman, a veteran player with more points than I had.

Terry and I had a little trouble agreeing on a convention card. She wanted to keep it simple, but I was nervous about not having enough weapons. We got off to a disastrous start, picked up a little in the middle, and lost the last match. We finished a little below average. Terry was very frustrated because it seemed that every decision that she made turned out wrong. Also, we had a rather fundamental and embarrassing miscommunication on one bidding sequence that severely impacted our morale. The details are provided here.

I learned that Terry went to Catholic schools (but never learned about indulgences!),never throws anything away (aaaargh!), and is a bigwig in the gardening club circuit in southwest Connecticut and Westchester County, NY.

For the 2024 edition of the Granite State Getaway I submitted forms for all five days that I planned to be in attendance. Denise Bahosh put me in touch with Steve Banwarth³, who actually lived in Nashua, the site of the tournament. So, he was commuting. We played together for three days, and we had quite good results that have been described in this entry. This was my best experience with a new partner in many years.

Steve’s real first name is Cletus. He asked me about Pope Cletus, and I had to tell him that Pope C. had been removed from recent lists of the popes.

Steve had told me that the bridge club in Nashua had closed because it lost its building. He also stated that it took him fifty minutes to drive to the closest bridge club in Derry. I made an issue of this at the meeting Board of Delegates. After having been challenged on the travel time, I asked Steve about it. He said that he took back roads because he did not like driving on highways. He also said that he did not like hotels, and he did not drive at night. So, it will be difficult to pair up with him again. The best chance might be in Warwick, RI. He might be able to stay with his son in Providence.

In the late summer of 2024 Abhi Dutta asked me to find a partner and join him and a new partner in the Sunday Swiss game in Johnston, RI, on September 22. I asked John Lloyd, with whom I had worked in the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Bridge Association. John lived in Avon. I had interacted with him many times at the HBC. He often played with one of my regular partners, Ken Leopold, at the Sunday High-Low game.

John had a lot less experience than I did. I asked him to send me a convention card. We negotiated one that we could both agree on via email. The details of the tournament itself have been posted here.

1. Jim and Mike were at least as odd a couple as Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. Jim was easily the most talkative person whom I have ever met. One of the bridge players called him Chatty Cathy. Mike, in contrast, had a good sense of humor, but hardly ever talked. While Jim was chatting up Donna Lyons, my partner at the NABC in Providence, Jim confided to me that “Jim seems to be coming out of his shell a little bit.”

2. According to his LinkedIn page Steve was retired from the Navy. When we played against Mike McDonald and Tom Floyd, he disclosed that he had been on nuclear submarines. Both Mike and Tom worked at Electric Boat, where the vessels are designed and fabricated.

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Tag Archives: Orange CT

2025 Bridge: Sectional Tournaments

2023 May 12-December 31

2022 Return of the Variants

2023 Bridge: Sectional Tournaments

2021-? Bridge: New Partners During and After Covid-19