Tag Archives: Gerchman, Tom

2008-2019 Bridge Partners at Tournaments Part 1: Steady

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Partners at regionals and sectionals. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inge Schuele.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all sat at a round table at Siena.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Labbadia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2004-2010 Members of the Simsbury Bridge Club Part 1

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Who was who at the SBC. Continue reading →

I started playing in the Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in May of 2004. My experiences playing there in the early years and my recollections about the people who were my partner are recounted here. This entry describes other recollection about the club, including lists of the people who participated and my memories of them, if any.

If my recollection is correct, the club charged $5 for a membership in 2004. The membership was for life; there were no annual dues. The table fee each week was also $5 for members. Non-members were charged $6. I bought a membership the first evening. At first the director had access to the kitchen that was adjacent to the Youth Room. So, free tea and instant coffee were available.

I took this and the next four photos shown here with a disposable camera at the Christmas party of 2004 or 2005. Shown here are (I think) Paula and Kathy Colket.

Paula Beauchamp was the owner/director of the club when I joined. I don’t know much about the history of the club before that. At one time there was a plaque honoring someone who had managed the club in the early nineties. I wish that I had taken a photo of it. The plaque was removed at some point before 2019.

Here are some of the people who played in 2004 and were never my partner in SBC games:

  • Louise Alvord mostly played with Carol Schaper (SHAH pur) and Clara Horn. She played once or twice a month for several years. I do not know what happened to her. The Internet (in 2021) seems to think that she might still be living in Tarriffville. She was a former nun, but she did not resemble any of the nus that I knew. She no longer had any use for anything related to the Catholic Church. Carol suggested once that Louise might be interested in my book on the popes, Stupid Pope Tricks (posted here). Louise wanted no part of it. I discovered in December of 2021 that she was still playing in the unsanctioned game at Eno Hall.
  • Carol and I played as partners a couple of times, but not at the SBC. She later played for several years with Maureen Denges. I liked Carol a lot, but she always claimed that she and Maureen were doing very badly whenever we were at the same table. Carol still lives in Simsbury, but she and Maureen stopped coming in 2019 or earlier.
  • In 2004 and for a year or two afterwards Maureen played with Pat Matthew. Pat was an extremely slow player, but they were both pretty good. I nearly lost it one time when Pat started harping on me to play faster on one hand. Pat died. I think that Maureen is still living in Granby.
  • Lila Englehart played a version of Schenken’s Big Club with Kay Hill. They also played at tournaments. I am pretty sure that Sue Rudd and I teamed up with them at least once. Lila was a large lady who drove a very large Buick SUV. She died at some point in the teens. Kay played more than Lila. For a while she partnered with Sue Rudd. She was still playing at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) when the pandemic caused it to close in March 2020. Kay was good at playing the cards, but her bidding was very old-school. She sometimes mentioned that she carried a gun. The story of my partnership with Sue is told here.
  • Mel Hirsch sometimes came up from Florida to play with his brother Jerry. More details of the games that I played with Jerry are provided here. Mel was a good player. He and Jerry often finished first.
  • I was surprised to see the names of Patty and Mark Howland. I did not remember them, but I played against Mark when he was assigned to play in an open game at the HBC in December 2021 with Jeanne Striefler. More about Jeanne can be read here.
  • Jerry Hudson (female) played regularly at the SBC with Jeanne Striefler. I think that she died a few years after I started playing. I remember only that she was astounded when I took off my game face and put on my silly tie at the Christmas party. She said, “You’re like a whole different person.”
  • Bob Nuckols‘ wife died the week before I started playing at the SBC. Everyone was talking about it. Bob returned to play with Bill Moody and a few other people including, for one game, me. He then played for a few years on a regular basis with Mary Lou Pech. I don’t remember too much about Bob except that his coffee mug had the black and gold colors of Purdue. He died in 2012. His obituary is here. Mary Lou was not a great player, but she was an awfully nice person. I remember that I made my first actual Endplay against her. She died in 2019. Here obituary is here.
  • I would have liked to get to know Joanna Overbaugh better. She only showed up a few times a year to play with Dorothy Clark. She spent the rest of her time on around-the-world cruises! I played with Dorothy once when Joanna was cruising. I wrote about it here. Dorothy was also one of the judges in the Hartford Courant’s story contest that I entered in 1989. That event is described here.
  • Helen Pawlowski was a very good player. I never played as her partner, but I got to know her pretty well when she took over as owner-director of the SBC. She was also the tournament manager for District 25 of the ACBL. In that role she found sites for our regional tournaments, negotiated the contracts, and dealt with the hotels in which we played. Soon after she took over the club in 2008 she began giving free classes before the games at Eno Hall. They were very popular. I always tried to show up early enough to listen to the lesson.
  • Laurie Robbins played a few times at the SBC, always with Paul Pearson. I don’t recall any occasion on which they finished below first. I never played as her partner, but I often played against her with almost uniformly bad results. In 2021 she is a teacher and director at the HBC. Much more about Paul can be read here.
  • David Rock is another exceptionally good player. He played in tournaments for several years with Sonja Smith. David was also very active in the administration of the district. He was vice-president of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC) and was instrumental in setting up the smooth operation of the North American Bridge Championships held in Providence in 2014. David teamed up with Sally Kirtley to run the SBC in the teens. That period is described here. David moved to West Brookfield, MA. After that he only attended one game at the SBC.
  • Sonja played with Jean Seale at the SBC for many years. After Jean moved to Colorado Sonja came to only a few games at the SBC, usually playing with her son Steve. Much more about Sonja is posted here.
  • Shirley Schienman often played with her son, John Schienman. I never got to know Shirley—who always reminded me of Shirley Jones in her Partridge Family days—very well, but I had some good conversations with John. After John stopped coming to the SBC Shirley played with a variety of partners. Shirley died in 2017. Her obituary is here.
  • The North-South seats at table #1 at the SBC were usually occupied by Ellen and Tony Tabell. When the subject of Moysian fits came up during one hand, they told me that they had known Sonny Moyse in New York. They moved to Exeter, NH, and, for a time ran a bridge club in the area. Tony died in 2020. His obituary is here.
  • Claire Tanzer played almost every week with a few regular partners. I recall the details of only one conversation with her in December of 2009. It is recounted here.
  • Don Verchick and Nancy Campbell played a strong club system that they called “Precision”. C.C Wei would not have recognized it. They never opened 1NT! Nancy played with various partners at the HBC through 2020.
  • I was surprised to see that Mary Witt played at the SBC at least once with Tom Gerchman. Much more about Tom can be read here. Mary was the tournament coordinator for the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA), which meant that she found sites, negotiated contracts, and brought the predealt boards to the sectional tournaments. Once she asked me to perform the last task for her. I was very flattered. Mary moved to Cary, NC. I have corresponded with her via email a few times.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2004.
    • Robert and Ruby Cheah played together several times.
    • Roger Evarts played once with Don Verchick.
    • Dick and Joan Harris played together several times.
    • I should remember Clara Horn, who played with a number of partners, but I don’t.
    • I cannot place Maryann Joyce.
    • Jean Marecki played with Lila Englehart.
    • Alice Rowland played with Claire Tanzer.
    • Ruth Schwartz played with Marylou Pech. Ruth played quite a bit, but I cannot picture her. I discovered in December of 2021 that she was still playing in the unsanctioned game at Eno Hall.
    • Marcia and Norman Samuels played together.
    • Martha Stout played with Claire Tanzer: I get Martha and Alice Rowland mixed up.
    • Carl and Dorothy Suhre played together several times.
Russ is at the far right. Paula is by the door. I think that Nancy Campbell is seated near the wall.

Below are listed people who began to play at the SBC in 2005. Paula was still the director.

  • Fred Bird played regularly with Jean Little. They were married. After Fred died in 2011 Jean played at the SBC and the HBC with Max Horton and others. Jean died in 2018. Her obituary is here.
  • Rita Bowlby played at the SBC only once. I don’t remember her. Her partner that evening was Dick Benedict, whom I remember very well. Those recollections are posted here.
  • I am sure that I conversed with Jim McGarr several times, but I don’t remember any details. I can picture him pretty clearly. He died in 2015. His obituary is here.
  • Jay and Luetta Gould owned a residence in Torrington, CT. They rarely came to the SBC, but I remember their visits were in different years. Jay also ran a game in the Berkshires in the summer. In 2021 they appear to live in Delray Beach, FL.
  • Roger Holmes played with Dick Benedict for several weeks. Then they had a falling out. Dick once told me what they argued about, but I don’t remember.
  • I was surprised to see Ausra Geaski’s name on the results sheets. I played as her partner in one pairs event at one tournament in 2014. I have played against her innumerable times. She was president of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC) when I became the district’s webmaster in 2013, and she chaired the B’s Needs committee that helped revitalize the tournaments.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2005.
    • Frank and Jean Catudal played together several times..
    • I have no recollection of Ray and Sym Gallucci.
    • Jack Gensheimer played with Jim McGarr once;
    • Dick Kronk played with Bill Moody.
    • Barbara Lynyak played with Dorothy Clark.
    • Phyllis Martin also played with Dorothy Clark.
    • Dennis McVickers played with Roger Evarts.
    • Marcia Scarles played with Lila Englehart.
    • Lou Urban played with Bill Moody.
    • Rita Wolak played with Ausra Geaski.
On the left are Dorothy Clark and Shirley Schienman. On the right are Mary Witt and Helen. The other woman at their table might be Margie Garilli.

Below are listed people who began to play at the SBC in 2006. Paula was still the director.

  • Betty Angel played once with Mary Witt. Betty is still an active member of the HBC. I don’t think that she ever played at the SBC again.
  • Sue Gerchman was Tom’s mother. She played off-and-on with her son, who picked her up and drove her to the games. She also played once with her sister, whose first name was, I think, Benvenuta (Beni) Lostocco. I am pretty sure that they played in the same 299er game at the regional in Cromwell in which Dick Benedict and I played. A few years later, when I was playing with Tom, Sue died. I drove out to Avon for the wake. Some of Tom’s golfing friends were there, but I did not see any other bridge players. Beni died in 2014. Her obituary is here.
  • I don’t remember the occasion, but on one evening in 2005 Stan Kerry played with Bob Tellar at the SBC. Their better halves, Sandy Sobel and Carol Tellar also played together. I think that Bob and Carol played together a few times at the SBC. They also played at the HBC, Carol more often than Bob. Stan is best known as the director and owner of the West Hartford Bridge Club, which directly competed with the HBC. I played there a couple of times, but I did not enjoy it much. In 2012 Stan and Sandy went on the same Larry Cohen Regional-at-Sea Cruise that my wife Sue and I took. My journal for that trips is posted here. Sandy died in 2017. Her obituary can be found here.
  • Sally Kirtley made her debut at the SBC (at least to my knowledge) in 2005. We played together a few time, but not at the SBC. Sally became the director of the club in _____. She also directed in 2021, as was documented in considerable detail here.
  • Judy Larkin played fairly regularly with Lisa Audolensky for a number of months. They were both new to the game and eager to learn how to play better. They invited Dick Benedict over to coach them. In exchange they agreed to cook supper for him. Dick readily agreedJudy has been playing again in the reborn SBC of 2021.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2006.
    • Norman Hargett played one night with Ruth Schwartz; I don’t remember him.
    • I have no memory of Matt Perry, who played with Roz Sternberg and Dick Benedict.
    • Robert Wise played with Russ Elmore. Much more about Roz, Dick, and Russ can be read here.
I am not sure of any of these people.

Below are listed people who began to play at the SBC in 2007. Paula may have started as the director, but early in the year Helen Pawlowski took control. Helen continued the policy of guaranteeing a partner for everyone. Eventually she quietly abandoned the $5 charge for membership and raised the table fee to $6. Attendance reached ten tables on several occasions.

  • Ida Coulter began playing with various partner, one of which was my wife Sue. Ida has been playing with Judy Larkin in the 2021 version of the club.
  • Trudi Brown usually played with her husband, Lou Brown. I played with Lou in the afternoon Open Pairs game at a CBA sectional in Hamden. His partner from the morning went home at lunch time, and my partner stood me up. We finished roughly in the middle, but we might have done better if Lou had not revoked even after I warned him that he was not following suit. Lou was serving his two-year term as president of the CBA at the time. He treated Trudi brutally whenever she made a mistake at the table. I asked Trudi whether I should say something to him about behavior that violated the ACBL’s zero-tolerance1 guidelines. She asked me not to and indicated that it was like water off of a duck’s back to her. Lou told me in 2010 that he could not attend my Life Master party because he had to call numbers in a bingo game in which his mother played. Trudi made Life Master in 2012 in a knockout at the regional tournament in Cromwell, CT. I played on the opposing team. My description of the match is posted here. Lou and Trudi moved to Delray Beach, FL, shortly thereafter.
  • Dan Finn played with Richard Finn, who was Dan’s brother (or maybe father) in one of the biggest games that we every had at the SBC. Dick and I played against the Finns at a card table that had been set up in the lobby. I also played with Dan at least twice, once at a tournament (described here) and once at the SBC.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2007.
  • Dot Horton played with her husband Max. They were not great players, but they were very nice people. I remember that they took a river cruise in the south of France. They said that they had a great time. Dot once confided that when they started playing at Simsbury she was afraid of me. She died in 2015, but not from fright. Max continued to play with several other people at the SBC and the HBC. I almost got him to go to a tournament to play in a Pro-Am game once. Max died in 2021. I could not find an obituary.
  • Karen Largay played with Sheila Gillin at the SBC pretty often until the Largays moved to the Cape. They also played with their husbands occasionally, but the ladies were more serious about the game. Dick Benedict and I teamed up with them for tournaments a few times. I also played as Karen’s partner once at the Senior Regional on Cape Cod. I warned her before the first hand that if the opponents had bid and raised a major suit that I might bid any weak hand with a five-card suit. She forgot and raised my bid. The opponents doubled and we got a bad score.
  • I don’t know Steve Noble and his wife Chris Noble very well, but I have seen them at the HBC once in a while. I don’t know why they stopped coming to the SBC. I think that my wife Sue played with them in team events.
  • Art and Marylin Noll played together at the SBC at least once. Marylin was a good player and a semi-regular at the HBC, but I have not seen her since the pandemic hit.
  • Susan Pearson played with her husband Paul a few times.
  • Jan Potts played with a few different partners. In the late teens she was a frequent partner for Jan Rosow.
  • I had no recollection of Joan Brault playing at the SBC, but she attended several sessions. Her partner the first time was Beth Rotko, whom I do not remember at all. I played with Joan fairly often at the HBC. Those games are described here.
  • Arline Small played frequently at the HBC. She occasionally played with her husband Stuart at the SBC.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2007.
    • Janice Boyko played with Ida.
    • Lillian Clark finished first out of ten pairs the evening that she played with Maryann Maikowski. They also finished at the top on at least one other occasion, but I don’t remember them.
    • Bill and Lenore Davis played together a few times.
    • Mary Fanette played with Helen once.
    • Art Marglies and Hannah Marglies played at least once, but don’t remember them.
    • Gladys McFetridge played with Dorothy Clark several times.
    • Margaret Milch played with Ida.
    • Rosa Shields played with Roz.
    • It seems like I should remember Donna Summer, but when I try to visualize her, all that I can see is the disco singer.
    • Barbara Steckler and June Rosenblatt don’t ring any bells either.
    • Elena Thompson played once with Carol Soucy.
    • Lisa Woods played once with Ida Coulter.
I think that the couple might be the Catudals. The woman on the right is Jeanne Striefler. Helen and Mary Witt are in the background.

Helen’s second year of directing was 2008. Listed below are some of the new players.

  • Michael Dworetsky played with Dan Finn and then with his wife Ellen. I played at many tournaments with Michael and as often as possible at the HBC. Our exploits together are assembled here.
  • Linda Kessleman played with Margie Garillli. Later Linda played pretty often with Mary Witt, Dick Benedict, and a few other people. I think that she was a real estate agent. Margie ran some games in the area and filled in as a director at the SBC. She played pretty often with Donna Lyons before the pandemic.
  • Sandy Macri played with someone else first, but eventually she teamed up with Karen Sterrett. I liked both of them a lot. I had to like Karen; she was a fellow Wolverine. They are both active members of the HBC.
  • Jeff Morris and Ron Saxon were both doctors. I went to Ron once when I had a build-up of wax in my ears. He was friends with Michael Dworetsky. Jeff sometimes played with his wife, who was very intense.
  • Jeff Oakes played with Sue Rudd. I don’t remember Jeff. Details about my long and continuing relationship with Sue are posted here.
  • Alden Stock played with Michael Dworetsky. He later played at the SBC with his wife Reba.
  • Louise Sunter played with Helen and Donna Lyons. I don’t remember Louise at all, but Donna is one of my favorite people in the world. I played with her a few times at the HBC and in a few tournaments. The details can be read here.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2008.
    • Mark Johnson played once with Helen.
    • Susan Lewis played with Shirley.
    • Howard Mark and Sheila Mark played together, but just once.
This and the following photos were taken at the 2008 Christmas party with my Canon point-and-shoot camera. Shown are (left to right) Helen, Sally, Sheila Gillin, Karen Largay, and Jerry Hirsch.

Helen continued as owner-director in 2009. Listed below are some of the players who first played at the SBC that year.

  • Judy Goff played with Louise Alvord. Judy later became one of my wife Sue’s regular teammates. I think that they were partners at one or two tournaments.
  • I can hardly believe that Len Helfgott played at the SBC one night with Roz. He is a very good player. I played against him on Tuesday nights at the HBC a few times. I also recognized his name from reading a question that he submitted to the column in the Bridge Bulletin written by great Eric Kokish. On one hand that I played against Len I used “restricted choice”2 to determine which way to finesse. It worked, and Len remarked that bridge players know the play, but no one else would believe it.
  • I definitely remember Anne and Paul Melvin, but I don’t have any stories about them.
  • Barbara Perez played with her sister, Donna Lyons, a few times. Barbara lives in Mexico, but she asked me to keep her apprised of developments in bridge in the area.
  • Jan Rosow played with Joan Rusconi in their debut at the SBC. Jan became a Life Master in 2014. In 2021 she came to the club about once per month. Jan is also very active in the CBA. I don’t remember Joan playing at all in subsequent years, but I often saw her at the HBC.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2009.
    • Beverly Lapioli and Sharon Smith played together one evening.
    • Peter Milliken played twice with Helen and once with a few others.
    • Doris Rothe played with Donna Lyons.
    • Mike Schwefel played with Jeff Morris.
    • Helene Wade and Lil Nolan played together.
This is Jerry Harrison.

Helen was still director in 2010. Listed below are some of the players who first played at the SBC that year.

  • Tim Largay played with his wife Karen. I think that he was more interested in golf than bridge.
  • Vivian Leshin played with Nancy Campbell. Vivian was a regular in the Tuesday night game at the HBC. She was the first person who warned me there that “Getting old is not for sissies.” I did not remember her playing in Simsbury. I was in attendance when she earned Silver Life Master at the Senior Regional in Hyannis. Her partner for that event was someone she had just met at the tournament’s partnership desk. I think that that was Vivian’s last tournament.
  • I don’t have any clear recollections of any of the following players whose names appeared on at least one results sheet in 2010.
    • Tina Cheffer played with Judy Goff.
    • Caroline Collins played with Ruth Schwartz.
    • Connie Fictner played with Louise Lapioli.
    • Kay Yaznac played with Tina Cheffer. I don’t remember them.
  • Bob Tellar & Linda Kesselman
  • Sue Rudd, Ken Leopold, Kay Hill, Jan Rosow, Elisabeth Barnicoat, & Carolyn Newell
  • Elisabeth Barnicoat & Kay Hill

I have lost the records for 2011 and 2012. The lists continue with 2013 here.

  • Tom Gerchman
  • Paul and Sue Pearson
  • Dick Benedict, Helen, & Jerry Hirsch
Photos at my Life Master party in 2010.

1. In 1998 the ACBL instituted a policy designed to make for a friendlier and more pleasant environment at all levels of duplicate play. It is posted here.

2. The principle of restricted choice is explained pretty well in the Wikipedia article that is posted here.

2004-2009 Partners at the Simsbury Bridge Club Part 1

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Partners at Eno Hall. Continue reading →

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

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

Roz Sternberg.

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

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

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

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

Actually she sent a check.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen Pawlowski.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inge Schuele.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Folded traveler in board and traveler with scores.

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

Mass Mutual in Springfield.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not the best bridge book ever.

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

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

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

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

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

The Crowne Plaza calls it “The Garden Pavilion”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerry Hirsch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. My partnership with Dave Landsberg is described here.

2008-2019 Partners at the Hartford Bridge Club Part 1

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Regular partners at the HBC. Continue reading →

Preparation: For several years I have maintained a spreadsheet that contained one line per bridge partner. I only kept track of ones with whom I had played at least one complete session at a sanctioned game. I also had bookmarked the ACBL’s web page that contained the records of club games. However, when I started working on this entry, I was disappointed to discover that the link no longer worked. So, I have needed to rely on my memory more than I hoped.

This document contains stories about partnered with whom I played several times. Part 2 (posted here) describes the ones that I met through the mentoring program or the High-Low game on Sundays and people that I only played with once or twice.

The HBC: The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) was founded in 1931. It is the oldest continuously operating bridge club in North America. Its headquarters since October 1995 has been at 19A Andover Drive in West Hartford. I played my first game at the club and became a member on January 1, 2008. My partner that afternoon was Dick Benedict (introduced here), with whom I had been playing on Wednesday evenings at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) for several years. At the time the club was charging $30 for a membership. The table fee was $5 for members and $6 for others. At the time I had only been playing in Simsbury. I joined the HBC because I had been asked to play in the games it ran on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. So, I figured that if I kept to that schedule all year1, it would be a good dealT

Tom Gerchman.

The person who asked me to play was Tom Gerchman. In preparation for playing with him I taught myself thirteen conventions that I had found in a book by William S. Root and Richard Pavlicek. I also bought Michael Lawrence’s CD about 2/1 (pronounced “two over one”), the set of bidding principles used by most players at the HBC and at tournaments. He had played 2/1 with his previous partner, Mary Witt2, and I eventually persuaded him to play it with me as well. At this point I knew enough conventions to be comfortable playing with nearly any new partner.

Tom drove a red BMW convertible. Between 2008 and 2023 he has purchased several new cars. Each one was a red BMW convertible. The license plate was GERCH. On trips he liked to drive, but the back seat was uninhabitable. If we were playing in a team game, the BMW was not big enough to hold four people. He borrowed his mother’s car.

I soon discovered that Tom wanted to play with me because Mary had resigned from their partnership. She wasn’t angry at him; she just did not like sitting across the table from him. I learned this when Tom and I played in a knockout with Mary and Ruth Tucker3 as teammates in the regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We made it to the semifinals of our bracket. After we had been eliminated Tom kept telling Ruth, “I got you gold!”

That evening the four of us went out for supper. I learned at that meal that Ruth had been a small child in Nazi Germany during the Kristallnacht in 1938. She was surprised that I knew quite a bit about the event. I had read about it when I had researched the backgrounds of two popes4, Pius XI and Pius XII, who had both been in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. Tom had never heard of it.

For quite some time I enjoyed playing with Tom for several reasons. The first was that he liked to go to tournaments, and so did I. In addition, he was still working5, which meant that he could only play in evening games, and on weekends and holidays. That schedule conformed to mine. However, he was an avid golfer. So, in nicer weather he played less bridge. I also like the fact that he was not averse to learning new conventions. Bidding has always been my favorite aspect of the game.

At the SBC Tom occasionally played with his mother, Sue. He was sometimes pretty hard on her when she made mistakes. Wen she died in 2012 (obituary here) I was still playing regularly with Tom, and I went to her wake. I was the only bridge player who attended, but a number of Tom’s golf buddies were there.

After the evening games Tom and a small group of the other players went to the Corner Pug in West Hartford to discuss the hands and drink. Tom might have eaten a very late supper. I don’t think that he cooked, and he was not married.

It took me a while to realize it, but Tom definitely was obsessive-compulsive in some ways. For example we played together on two separate days at the NABC held in Boston in 2008. I discovered that he had memorized in terms of minutes how long it took to get to the site of the tournament from several spots on the route. Furthermore, on the day that I drove I let him off to register us while I parked the car. He insisted that I must park in precisely the same spot that he had used on the previous day. Just to be peevish I parked in the same spot, but one floor lower.

On that occasion we played in an Open Swiss with a pair from the partnership desk. We won our first round against a team from Connecticut. After that it was one humiliating defeat after another. Our teammates were upset at us. We beat a hasty retreat after the last round.

I heard from Mary Witt that Tom read the Hartford Courant every morning and always started with the obituaries. She also said that he had a huge stack of old newspapers in his house. I never went to his house, and so I cannot verify this.

Tom was much more obsessed with the scores than I was. He was pretty hard on me at club games, but he very seldom talked during rounds at tournaments. He also stayed after club games and audited the scores. He once told me that he loved to check calculations. He confided once that he should have been an auditor.

I was still playing with Tom at the time of my Life Master parties at the HBC and the SBC in early 2010. I remember that he gave a little speech at the HBC in which he talked about my habit of sending him emails about what I thought we could have done to do better in the previous game. In my acceptance speech I thanked every single partner that I had had at that point. I thanked Tom for teaching me “that in a six-team Howell, you don’t play against the pair that you follow and the pair that follows you.”

I don’t have any great memories of playing with Tom. We did not do very well at most tournaments. Eventually, I stopped playing with him. I just could not stand the fact that he said and did the same things over and over and over and over. He also talked about the hands too much in club games while we were still playing. I found myself pounding the steering wheel while driving home after playing with him. Fifteen years later I still react negatively to the sound of his voice.

Actually, I quit twice. After the first time he persuaded me to try again. It took me very little time to realize that he was never going to change. I quit again.

I still teamed up occasionally with him for team games. We had much better results when I did not have to sit across from him.

Tom invited me and Sue to the party that he threw for himself on his sixtieth birthday. It was at a restaurant on the west side of town. He was celebrating the fact that he had survived that long. Apparently both his only brother and his father had died from heart attacks when they were in their fifties.

Michael Dworetsky.

After my partnership with Tom was dissolved, on most Tuesday evenings I played with Michael Dworetsky. He had been playing for quite a while before I returned to the world of bridge, but he had only occasionally played in tournaments. I never was quite sure why he had avoided tournaments before I began playing as his partner.

I have several vivid memories of playing with Michael. We drove to a sectional in Johnston, RI, and did well enough to finish first in the C Flight in the afternoon session of the Open Pairs. As the director read the results, I said to Michael, “Let’s see how he does with our last names.” He butchered both of them.

The most catastrophic mistake of my bridge career occurred in the penultimate round of the Flight C qualifying tournament for the Grand National Teams (GNT). We were definitely in contention when Michael made a Help Suit Game try by bidding 3♣. I needed to bid 4♠ if I thought that we could take ten of the thirteen tricks or 3♠ if not. I considered all that I knew about the hand and finally decided that we probably did not have enough. Unfortunately, I did not bid 3♠, I mistakenly passed, leaving Michael in a ludicrous club contract.

I played with Michael when he made Life Master in a sectional in Westchester County. He drove us into New York City to a deli to celebrate. I had a Reuben sandwich; he had pastrami. We had a great time, but it cost him a fortune to park the car.

He almost always drove us to tournaments. On one occasion I spilled some coffee on the rug in his car. He did not yell at me, but I knew he was upset. He had a very nice car. It was the first that I had ever been in that had a both a built-in GPS and a hand-free telephone.

One of the best calls that I ever made in bridge was when Michael and I played against two ladies, one of whom needed to win the match in order to make Life Master. I opened 1♠, the lady overcalled 2♥, Michael doubled, indicating that he had a pretty good hand with clubs and diamonds. I had six spades, five hearts that included two honors, a club, and a diamond. I passed. We took the first nine tricks. She was down four for 1100 points. She did not make Life Master that afternoon.

I gave a little speech at Michael’s Life Master party. It might have been the best speech that I ever gave. It was not as effective as Urban II’s call for a crusade in 1096, but mine got more laughs. I began by claiming that Michael was a founding member of the club in 1931. I also mentioned the hole in the sole of one of his shoes.

Michael and I played together at the NABC in the summer of 2013. I posted my recollections of this adventure here. We also flew down to the Gatlinburg Regional Tournament in Tennessee in 2013. I took notes and posted them here. We won a knockout and a lot of masterpoints there.

The house in Bloomfield in which Michael lived with his wife Ellen was struck by lightning. Eventually they moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL, but I have seen Michael at bridge tournaments in New England a few times. He usually was playing with a teaching pro named Bob Lavin.

Dan Koepf.

The nicest person whom I ever met was Dave Landsberg. When I started playing on Tuesday evenings, Dave was playing regularly with Dan Koepf. I invited them to team up with Jerry Hirsch and me in Flight C of the GNT event one year. They accepted, and we did quite well. I then wrote to both of them to ask if either one wanted to play in a tournament with me. Dave responded positively, and we were partners and good friends right up until his death (obituary here) in 2016. In fact, he was planning on playing with me in the Cape Cod Senior Regional the week that he died. I wrote up my experiences at that tournament, including my thoughts about Dave, and posted them here.

Dave was on the HBC’s Board of Trustees, and I was not. I once asked him what the BoT meetings were like. He told me that at that time there was a big controversy over toilet paper. He said that the women on the board were complaining that the toilet paper in the ladies’ room was too flimsy. Dave informed me that his position was that we should give them better paper, but it was only fair that they should agree to pay higher table fees. I laughed for several minutes.

Dave and I won a couple of events together. The most memorable one was in Cromwell, CT, when Dave played with Kay Hill, and I played with Ginny Iannini (introduced here). I posted a photo6 of us on the District 25 website, NEBridge.org, as I did the winners of all events at D25’s regionals. When Dave’s wife Jackie saw the photo of Dave and Ginny side-by-side, she told him that he could not play with her again. When Dave told me this, we both broke out laughing. However, it made me wonder why Sue never complained about me playing with Ginny.

Pat Fliakos.

I was playing with Dave and three other people when I set the world standard for captaining a five-person team in a sectional Swiss in Auburn, MA. We were playing with Pat Fliakos,7 one of Dave’s regular partners, and a pair that we picked up at the partnership desk, Charlie Curley (introduced here) and Mike Colburn. Since Mike and Charlie were regular partners, I assigned them to play all eight rounds. Pat and Dave would play six rounds, four together and two each with me. I would play the middle four rounds. This would allow me to leave early and mow the lawn, which needed it badly. When I departed, our team’s score was slightly above average, but in my absence my four teammates won both of the last two rounds, defeating the best team in attendance in the last round. We finished third overall and first in B and C.

The accident occurred between Worcester and Springfield.

The grass did not get mowed. On the trip home my 2007 Honda was rear-ended on the Mass Pike by someone driving a rental car. I did not yet have a cellphone, but he did. He did not speak English very well, but I did. So I called 911 on his phone. After about twenty minutes a state trooper appeared. After a few minutes he told me that he had given the other man a ticket for following too closely. I already had his insurance information; he had Progressive. So, I just drove home.

A few days later a Progressive adjuster examined my car and assessed the cost to fix a small dent on one bumper at $1500. I later was contacted by someone from Avis, who had rented the car to the other driver. They said that they would accept Progressive’s assessment and asked me to settle for $2,000. I spelled my name for them, and gave them my address. The check arrived a few weeks later. Four or five years later I traded in the car. I never considered getting it fixed.

Dave’s Life Master party at the HBC was shared with Sue Rudd (introduced here). I told the above story (minus the car crash and insurance). I balanced it with the tale of the first sectional in Hamden, CT, in which Dave and I competed as partners. We finished dead last in both the morning and afternoon session. I have never heard of anyone who could match that performance.

The best time that I spent with Dave was when the two of us dined at an Italian restaurant in Hyannis, MA. I recall that I ordered the Bolognese and a glass of wine. The food was good, and the conversation was better. For some reason it was very easy to talk to and to listen to Dave. By the time that we left, we had solved the most serious of the world’s problems.

I went to Dave’s wake and the ceremony for him at Wesleyan, where he had worked. When I met Jackie, I told her that Dave really loved her. I was certain of this because he never rolled his eyes when he talked about her. I really miss him.

A photo of Dave is in the Felix Springer section of this entry.

Peter Katz and I started playing together on Saturdays and Tuesday evenings after I stopped playing with Tom Gerchman. In 2023 I still played with him whenever the HBC had a game on Saturday. We had one great showing in August of 2023, which I have documented here.

Earlier in our partnership Peter and I played together in a few sectionals that were held in the Hartford area. At one of them we happened to have the last sitout in the afternoon session, which meant that we could go home early. Before we left we picked up hand records for that session. It did not take us long to realize that some of the hands that we played did not correspond to the ones on the printout. We reported this to the director, Tim Hill. He did not tear his hair out, but I am pretty sure that I saw his bow tie spinning around.

How could this have happened? Some directors like to play “web movements” when an awkward number of pairs are playing. If, for example, thirty-eight pairs are playing, the standard way to play it would be to have two sections, one with ten tables and one with nine. Both sections would be playing nine three-board matches. Each pair would only play against nine of the other thirty-seven pairs. A web movement would allow for one very large section playing fourteen two-board rounds. This requires two identical sets of boards, and they must be handled precisely correctly, but the directors who do this are very reliable about setting them up correctly.

In this case, however, the directors were not at fault. The two sets of boards were NOT identical. I don’t know how they were able to score this, but they eventually did. The directors definitely earned their salary that day.

When I first began playing with Peter he was something of a local celebrity. He and his wife (whom I never met) attended all of the home games of the Hartford University men’s and women’s basketball teams. Peter wore outrageous wigs to the games. I never met his wife, and I only saw photos of him in his super-fan getup.

At some point in the teens the couple got divorced, and Peter stopped attending the games. The marriage must have been stressful on him. He mellowed out quite a bit after the divorce.

At first Peter and I played a version of 2/1 that was not much different from what I had played with Tom Gerchman. At some point Peter began playing on Tuesdays with one of the best players at the club, Tom Joyce. They played a version of the Kaplan-Sheinwold weak 1NT system. I agreed to learn this and play it on Saturdays with Peter. That was what we employed in our big game.

Peter served as webmaster for the HBC. In 2023 I began working with him on posting the club’s monthly calendars.

Before the Pandemic I played regularly with Felix Springer. In fact we played together (and won!) in the very last game on March 15, 2020, before the HBC closed its doors for over a year. We also played together at a few tournaments, including a week at the Fall NABC in San Francisco in 2019. We also played together on a large number of very successful teams, but I usually paired with someone else.

Felix shared his Life Master party with Ken Leopold (introduced here). They asked Dave Landsberg and me to be their teammates. Before the play started, Dave turned to me and said, “Did you read their background stories? Why are they playing with us?”

I don’t know, but it was a good idea. We won our first four rounds. In the fifth round, we faced the other unbeaten team. They had at least five times as many points as we did. It was a very close match that turned on one hand. Laurie Robbins, an excellent bridge player, and I were both West holding the same cards. We each had to make a decision similar to the catastrophic one that I had made in the GNT with Michael Dworetsky. Laurie chose to try for game and went down. I settled for the partial.

Donna Feir.

Donna Feir, the longtime club manager, said that it was the only time that she could remember that the honorees won such a game, and also the only time that they were undefeated.

Felix, as president of the HBC, guided the club through the perilous times of the Pandemic. The club had almost no income, and it still had considerable expenses. He kept everyone involved with periodic newsletter, analysis of playing bridge with robots, and walks in the park. Donna confided to me that without Felix the club probably would not have survived.

In 2022 Felix did something that I never would have expected him to do, and it hurt me deeply. The story is related here.

Ann Hudson.

Ann Hudson lived across the river form Enfield in Suffield, CT, with her husband, Randy Johnson. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with both of them. The card that they played was very sophisticated. I must admit that I had a difficult time to remember the modified Manfield responses to an opponents takeout double.

For a few years Ann and I were rather regular partners for the half of the year that Ann and Randy spent in New England. The other half of the year they lived in South Carolina. In 2022 they moved from Suffield to Hadley, MA.

The only times that I got to play at the HBC with Randy were when Ann had to cancel at the last minute. It only happened a few times. He was an exceptionally good player. We played together in the open pairs in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA, one year and won the afternoon session.

Randy Johnson.

I met Ann while I was working at the partnership desk at the NABC in Providence in 2014. After that we played together pretty regularly at sectional, regional, and NABC tournaments and occasionally at the HBC if she could get away from her chores on their mini-farm.

I usually stopped at the McDonald’s on the south side of Hazard Ave. on the way to either their house in Suffield or at the Hampton Inn that was about halfway between us. On one occasion I was sitting in my blue 2007 Honda in the parking lot while I ate my sausage biscuit with egg. I had turned off the Honda’s engine while I ate. I could not get the car to start, and I did not have a cellphone yet. I had to go in to McDonald’s to use someone’s phone to call Sue, and I had to cancel my game with Ann. If was embarrassing. The best thing about Hondas is their reliability. Mine was telling me that it was time for a trade-in, and I listened.

Ann had actually been born in China. Both of her parents were university professors. They brought her to the U.S. when Ann was very young.

In 2015 my wife Sue and I decided to fly to Denver to play in the Fall NABC. Randy and Ann also planned to attend. Ann and I decided to play in two NABC events: the 0-10,000 Swiss and the 5K Blue Ribbon Pairs.

Kathy Rolfe.

Before those events started I picked up a partner for the evening side game, Kathy Rolfe. I had met her at a previous NABC when we were both playing in the lowest level of the Life Masters Event. When we came to her table she asked me if I was related to Vic Wavada in Kansas City, and—get this—she pronounced my name correctly. It turned out that Kathy knew Vic’s wife Theresa very well, and she had mentioned that I played bridge.

Kathy and I finished near the middle in the side game. We probably should have done a little better.

I had arranged to play in the 10,000 Swiss with a woman from Arkansas named Ti Davis.8 I told her that I was 6-feet tall, grey-haired, and skinny, and I would have on my red and blue Barça hat. She was playing with an Asian woman whom she met at the partnership desk. Unfortunately, we were overmatched in the event and only won one or two rounds.

Leonardo Cima.

On the next day Ann and I teamed up with Randy and one of his regular partners to play in an Open Swiss event. In the second round we played against Leonardo Cima and Valerio Giubilo, famous players from Rome. We had a little time to talk with them before the match. They told me that they were both from Roma. I told them that it was “la mia città preferita in Italia.”

Valerio Giubilo.

In the match Giubilo made an incorrect bid on an important hand causing them to miss a slam. Cima gave him a severe dressing-down. During the rest of the match they both spoke impeccable English, but during this post mortem Cima filled the air with Italian curse words.

We won the match, but we did not do well in the event. Giubilo and Cima won over 100 points in the tournament.

In the Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs Ann and I played as well as we have ever played. I was very excited when we made it to the second day. We played pretty well then as well, but not quite well enough.

I was too intense for Ann in the Super Senior Pairs and Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs at the NABC in Honolulu, as described here. She was not angry at me; I think that she felt sorry for me more than anything. After the tournament she drove to the airport and drove Sue and me to Enfield. Ann and I have played together in less stressful situations a few times since then.

I played with Michael Varhalamas a few times at the Saturday game at the HBC. I also played with him at least once in a Swiss in a sectional somewhere in Westchester County. I remember that he drove us there in his truck. Our teammates were two women from, I think, New Jersey. I don’t remember their names. Michael made the arrangements.

Twice during the game he bid dicey grand slams that I had to play. I made the first one without too much difficulty. The second one, however, was in the last round and required a squeeze—not my specialty. However, I pulled it off, and we ended up with a very good score.

Michael and his wife eventually moved to Saint Petersburg. Sue and I went to a bridge game there, and my partner, Chris Person, and I played against him in the first round of a pairs game at the local club. On one hand Chris opened 1[Suit x=”C”]. I passed with three or four points and only one or two clubs. Chris had only three clubs; it was a bloodbath. Michael recommended bidding in that situation, but only over 1[Suit x=”C”], not over any other opening bid.

Connie Dube

Before the Pandemic I played fairly regularly at the HBC with Connie Dube ( pronounced DOO bee). I met her when she and Myrna Butler agreed to be teammates with Ken Leopold and me at a regional tournament. They were late for the first round. Helen Pawlowski and Sally Kirtley sat in for them for one or two hands. In case you are wondering, this was definitely not legal. Since Helen told me that Myrna was always late, I did not hold it against Connie.

Connie and I played at a few sectional tournaments. Her availability was quite limited because her husband was suffering from severe chronic illnesses. As of 2023 she has not resumed playing after the Pandemic.

Joan Brault.

At the HBC I have played with Joan Brault quite a few times when one of her regular partners, Mike (really Michele) Raviele or Aldona Siuta, could not play. We have never set the world on fire, but we have played together a few times in 2023.

Paul Pearson and I teamed up with Mike and Joan at a sectional Swiss in the Hartford area. I think that we did pretty well.

She was a very talented artist. She also had a grandson who was a pitcher/outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Over the years I have played with Mary Eisenberg both at the HBC and at a few tournaments. She asked her to help her to get her Life Master designation at an upcoming regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We played together in club games at least twice so that we could accustom ourselves to each other’s styles. One of those was a STaC (Sectional Tournament at Clubs) game that we somehow won. We earned a lot of silver points for that, but Mary still needed a small fraction of a gold point.

Mary asked me to drive us to the tournament. She had apparently been in an automotive accident a few months earlier, and she was still shaky about driving, especially at night. I picked her up at a parking lot at a supermarket near her home. I never did understand why this arrangement was necessary, but I did not question it.

We played in the Golden Opportunity Pairs at the tournament. It was a two-session event limited to players with less than 750 masterpoints. At the time I was within a few points of the limit. So, I was not afraid of any of our competitors. It was safe to say that I had more tournament experience than any of them. Gold points were awarded to players who had a good combined score (known as “overalls”) for the two sessions, but a smaller amount of gold was also awarded to the pairs that finished first (both North-South and East-West) out of the ten in each section of ten tables for each session.

We did very badly in the morning. I remember interfering against a team playing Precision. The player with the strong hand doubled my bid, and it resulted in a four-digit score in the minus column. Mary did not play very well either. Our score was bad enough that we had very little chance of getting one of the overall awards. Mary was very disappointed. She asked me if I wanted to go home. Go home? I hadn’t driven all this way when there was still a chance of achieving the objective. I said that we just had to win our section in the afternoon session, and that was (at least from my perspective) a reasonable goal. If we played as well as well as we had in the STaC game, we would prevail easily.

We did much better in the afternoon. I have always had a pretty good feel for anticipating results. I reckoned that there was a pretty good chance that we might have won. You never knew for certain; someone may have received a lot of “gifts” from their opponents.

During the last round they posted the standings after the penultimate round. We checked it when we finished playing the last round. We were in first in our section, but only by one point. I thought back on the last round. On the first hand one of our opponents had made a grievous error that should have given us a good score. On the second hand we bid to the best contract, but Mary made some mistakes in the play. The third hand was mediocre, but we did avoid possible errors.

It took the directors nearly half an hour to post the final scores. Mary was beside herself with worry. They finally posted the scores. We tied for first place, and so we had to split the gold award with the other pair. Fortunately, that was just enough for Mary to become a Life Master.

On a good day the drive the hotel to Hartford took an hour.

The trip back to Hartford was in a downpour. However, my Honda had good tires, and so I was not much concerned with the water, and I still had pretty good vision for night driving. So, I was going the speed limit. I nonchalantly passed trucks that were going slower. Mary had to hide her face for most of the ride. She was terrified of another accident.

When we got to Hartford Mary could not remember how to get to the parking lot when coming from the west. We drove around for five or ten minutes before she got her bearings. Since I still had a half-hour drive to Enfield, I was annoyed by this.

Some months later the club sponsored a Life Master party for Mary. I gave a short speech that highlighted two aspects of her activities. At the time she often brought baked goods or other goodies to the club. She also cooked professionally. She even cooked for the Archbishop of Hartford for a while!

The other aspect was her fear of driving. I claimed that she had taken up racing on the Formula 1 circuit, and I held up a large picture of her alleged Ferrari. This reference went right over (or maybe under) Mary’s head, but a few people in the audience understood what I was talking about.

I may have played with Eric Vogel at the HBC more often than any other player. He started playing a few years after I did, and he amassed a terrific record. After I played with him a while I realized that he shared my interest in conventions. Together we put together a good card.

We also have played together in tournaments. We won one session of the open pairs at a sectional in Connecticut. That story has been told here. At the Presidential Regional in Southbridge, MA, in 2023 we played in Bracket 2 of the knockout. We won the qualifying Swiss very easily but only finished a very disappointing fourth. That tale of woe can be read here.

Eric is another talented artist. He also became the club’s treasurer in 2022. He has not had an easy time with accrual accounting.

Eric unobtrusively became a vegetarian at some point during our partnership. He certainly was one in 2023, but I remember that he complimented me on my chili at one of the pot-luck lunches at the HBC.

Eric’s daughter died in 2022. I went to the service at his church. His wife gave a very nice tribute.

Partab.

Prior to the Pandemic I was playing at the HBC nearly every Tuesday with Partab Makhijani. I expected to resume playing with him when the club reopened, but he did not return to play. I think that he, like many others, might have health issues.

His LinkedIn page (here) said that he was on the adjunct faculty at the University of Hartford.

Buz.

I met Buz Kohn (LinkedIn page here) when he was playing with his mother Joan occasionally on Tuesday evenings. We have played together several times at the HBC both before and after the club closed for the Pandemic.

Although Buz was as good at playing the cards as anyone he was not very tolerant of conventions. I had trouble getting him to even use a convention card.

Buz was still playing at the HBC in 2023, but I think that he also had a house in Florida.

Sonja Smith was Steve’s mother, and she also had triplet girls. When I began playing at the SBC in 2004, Sonja played there regularly with a partner who subsequently moved away.

We played together at the HBC several time before the Pandemic and once or twice afterwards—including one of the sectionals in 2022—before she and her family moved to the South.

Sonja attended the 2018 NABC in Honolulu. Afterwards she and her husband Chris spent a few days in Maui, as did my wife Sue and I. Sonja, who was staying at a resort hotel a few miles north of our base of Lahaina, invited us to join them on Monday, December 3, for an expensive sunset cruise of Maui’s west coast. I described it in detail here. It turned out to be a booze cruise with very loud music. I did not enjoy it at all.

Jeanne Striefler and her husband Fred invited Sue and me to their house in West Simsbury several times before the Pandemic. Jeanne and I also played together at the HBC several times and played at teams events at nearby sectionals and regionals. She was part of our ill-fated team at the Presidential Regional described in Eric Vogel’s section. She served as the club’s secretary for many years.

Jeanne also played regularly at the SBC both before and after the closure for the Pandemic.

Jeanne was from Omaha, Nebraska. She grew up closer to my old stomping grounds than anyone else in the HBC.

Ron Talbot.

Ron Talbot, who attended Notre Dame, was the president of the HBC for two years. Before the Pandemic I played with him fairly often at the HBC as well as at a few sectionals in Rhode Island. If his partner was male. he wore a baseball cap while he was playing. If female, he was bareheaded.

Ron told me that he walked three miles every morning. I much preferred to do my walking in the evening. He also walked fifty miles in three days on the Appalachian Trail with his children and/or grandchildren. I don’t know if I could have done that.

Ron moved to Naples, FL, before the Pandemic. He has returned to the HBC once or twice.

Trevor Reeves.

Trevor Reeves served as president and then treasurer of the HBC. He implemented the budgeting system that was instrumental in helping to get the HBC through the Pandemic.

I played with him a few times at the club and at tournaments, including an open pairs game at the Summer NABC in Toronto in 2017 in which we were first in our section in the evening session.

Trevor was involved in the GNT difficulty that I described at the end of Felix Springer’s section.

The player with whom I have played for the longest time is my wife Sue. W have played together at the SBC, the HBC, at tournaments, on cruises, and clubs while we were traveling.

Sue’s HBC photo.

Sue had never played bridge when we met in 1972, but she had played a lot of setback, a much simpler trick-taking game, with friends and family members. She had no trouble learning the rules of bridge, but she had a difficult time understanding even the basics of the strategic principles concerning bidding and play.

I vividly remember one of the first times that we played as partners. It was at the house in Wethersfield of friends of ours, Jim and Ann Cochran, who were introduced here. I may have had a gin and tonic or two. It was a friendly game of rubber bridge. Nothing was at stake.

Sue and I got the bid in a suit contract, and Sue had to play it. The hand was not very challenging; all she had to do was to lead a few rounds of trump and then take her winners. Unfortunately, she neglected to take out the trumps before taking her high cards. So, the Cochrans were able to ruff several of her winners, and the contract went down.

Ann helpfully provided Sue with a way of remembering the importance of drawing trumps before attacking side suits. She taught her the old adage, “Get the children off the street!”

A few hands later Sue played another suit contract. She once again forgot about her opponents’ children, and they once again made enough mischief to set the contract.

On the third hand that I witnessed from across the table in my role of dummy, Sue’s failure to draw trumps led to another failed contract, I lost my temper, slammed my fist down, and broke the card table. I would have offered to buy them a new one, but at the time we were, as the British say, skint.

Nearly forty years passed before Sue and I played together at a sanctioned game. She joined the ACBL in 2011, seven years after I did. By the time that she started to play, I was already a Life Master. She blamed me for not warning her that the ACBL had changed the requirements for that rank on January 1 of 2011. The organization increased the number of required points, but they also made available new opportunities for obtaining them.

Over the years Sue and I played together at a few NABC tournaments, two bridge cruises, and at a few clubs in New England and Florida. At first I tried to get her to go over the hands with me after a session of bridge, but she really hated to do so. Our games together did not improve much over the years.

Sue has a lot of trouble with time, and in competitive bridge only seven minutes are ordinarily allotted for each hand. Contributing to this difficult are the facts that she plays—and does every other thing—rather slowly, keeps a very detailed score, and insists on playing North, the position that maintains the official results.

Mary Petit

I remember one Sunday in which we played in the High-Low game at the HBC. By chance I declared more than my usual share of contracts. We finished first! I cannot remember any other occasion on which we enjoyed even a modicum of success.

Sue would like to do better, but she does not have the drive that I have always had to improve one’s game. In short, she never reads books or bridge articles. She sometimes goes over a result sheet, but never with a critical eye.

She participated in the mentoring program once. Her mentor, an experienced player named Mary Petit, offered her some tips. Later Mary asked me why Sue did not use any of them. I knew the answer, but I could not explain it in a way that anyone else could understand. So, I just said, “That’s the way that Sue is.”

Document here are more of my partnerships at North America’s oldest bridge club before it closed for the Pandemic . Partnerships after the reopening are described here.

1. I naturally thought that I had twelve months of play. In fact, however, the year started on October 1 at the HBC. So, I needed to play 25 times in nine months, which I did.

2. I never got a chance to play with Mary Witt before she moved to Cary, NC. I have occasionally communicated with her by email.

3. Several years later Ruth asked me to play with her at the HBC. I remember that I made a mistake of some kind on one hand that prevented us from getting any points. She mentioned that she knew that I was going to do that. Ruth was a good player, but she never made Life Master because she did not like tournaments. She died in 2020 at the age of 86. Here obituary can be found here. Her parents brought her to the United States in 1940.

4. An abbreviated recounting of my long obsession with papal history has been posted here. The chapter of my book about papal history that makes reference to Nazi Germany is posted here.

5. Tom was an actuary, but he never made FSA. In 2023 he was still working part-time at a pension consulting firm called PCI.

6. This photo was unfortunately lost when the server on which NEBridge.org ran had a catastrophic system failure in 2015. I also had a copy of the photo, but I cannot find it.

7. Pat still plays bridge, but she moved to Charlottesville, VA.

8. As it happened, we played against Ti’s team in the semifinals of the Summer NABC in Washington in 2016. Her team won the match and the event. I did not play against her. She and her partner played the same direction as Felix and me.