2008-2019 Partners at the Hartford Bridge Club Part 2

Posted on October 23, 2023 by Mike

Mentoring and short-term partnerships. Continue reading →

This entry describes my partners who participated in the mentoring program of the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) and the ones with whom I have only played once or twice. The regular partners can be found here. Those I encountered outside of the HBC mentoring program after the pandemic have been posted here.

Mentoring: The HBC’s Board of Trustees established a mentoring program several years after I became a Life Master. I cannot think of a way to set the date. The purpose was to allow newer players to pick up a few tips from more established players by playing together as often as possible over a three-month period. The incentive for the mentors was that one game per month was free. I always participated. I am not certain of the order of my partners, but I have put them in chronological order as closely as possible.

My technique varied little from year to year. I asked my partner what they wanted to focus on. I then asked them to send me a copy of the convention card that they were currently using. I wrote up a series of questions about the card/ After they answered we scheduled our play at mutually convenient times.

I communicated very little during the play. I generally try not to watch my partner’s play very closely because I do not want to make them nervous. If we had time after the round I might fo over anything that I noticed. Afterward I went of

My first partner in the mentoring program was Susan Glasspiegel¹, who was already a pretty good player. At the time she played mostly with her husband Bob on holidays, in night games, and occasionally at the SBC. I also encountered them sometimes at nearby tournaments, where they often teamed up with Ru Cole and Silvia Szantos. I remember losing my temper when my team lost to them. I did not mind losing, but Ru was late turning in the score—for no good reason. That meant that both teams received the dreaded red dot. Two red dots would result in a loss of a victory point. My team never got the second dot, but theirs did.

I don’t think that playing with me had much effect on Sue’s bridge game. At the time she was pretty set in her ways. Bidding has always been my favorite aspect of bridge, and she made it clear that she needed to continue bidding the way that she did because Bob was unlikely to change.

I remember that Sue played Standard American rather than 2/1, her sparse set of conventions included the Brozel defense against 1NT openings. She also insisted that if she was responder after a one-level opening in a suit, and her right-hand opponent overcalled, that a 1NT response did not necessarily imply a stopper in the overcaller’s suit.

In later years Sue played at the HBC quite a lot with Lee Wilcox and a few other people. By then I think that her bidding was more sophisticated.

Sue suffered a very bad accident in 2022. However, when she heard that we had two and a half tables in Simsbury, she told Bob that she wanted to play so that we could have a reasonable game. That was very nice of her.

JoSue Coppa: JoSue usually played with her husband, Gene, described below, both in tournaments and at club games. I was a little surprised to learn that she had signed up for the mentoring program.

I cannot remember any memorable occurrences during our partnership. I don’t think that she advanced a lot.

Gene and JoSue moved to Fairfax, VA, during the Pandemic or shortly thereafter.

I also don’t have a lot of memories of playing with Linda Erickson. The main one is that I was scheduling games for her at the time that I had scheduled a game with Linda Starr. It was the first and (so far) last time that I double-booked. The other Linda was very gracious about the situation, although she admitted that she had placed a curse on us. Linda E. and I had a horrendous result.

I remember that Linda said that in her house she was the CEO of the kitchen. She evidently did not appreciate her husband messing around with culinary paraphernalia.

Linda served as vice-president of the HBC for a while. I guess that she was in line to become president, but for some reason she decided not to. My wife Sue, who was on the nominating committee speculated that her reluctance was because of the fact that she and her husband were moving to Charlotte, NC. However, she was still playing locally in 2020, so she must not have moved before the Pandemic.

Fran Weiner² was a member of the HBC long before I returned to the world of bridge, but she did not have a lot of masterpoints. We only played together a couple of times. In fact, I ended up owing her

At the time, Fran’s daughter Jennifer, a novelist was involved in some kind of promotional event in California for one of her novels or screenplays or something. So, Fran went out to the West Coast to help her or to babysit or something. I expected Fran to get in touch with me when she returned, but she never did.

Bridge was not a very important part of Fran’s life. She was in the ACBL for twenty-nine years, and she only amassed 282.19 masterpoints. I doubt that she got much out of our association. Nevertheless, I was quite disappointed that she seemed to disappear from the HBC after that. I wanted to learn more about how her daughter managed to break into the world of publishing.

I often say that everyone in bridge has an interesting backstory. Hers certainly qualified.

John Calderbank came to the mentoring program with a specific objective, to learn the 2/1 bidding system. I wrote up a description of the differences between the Standard American that John had always played and 2/1. The differences were not insignificant, but there were not a lot of new things to learn.

John probably got more out of our partnership than any of the other people with whom I worked. When I wrote this entry in 2023 I was still playing with him in the morning game at the HBC nearly every Tuesday. I subsequently have taught John a few new conventions, but he mostly has wanted to take it slowly.

John and Mary Sullivan (below) took over management of the mentoring program in 2022. Their oversight was far superior to the previous coordinator’s.

In 2023 John was still doing a lot for the club behind the scenes. In addition he and his wife Nancy (below) were running an unsanctioned game in their home town of Glastonbury. He also took and passed the ACBL’s directorship test. His first assignment for the club was to direct the Sunday afternoon High-Low game. My wife Sue and I played in it regularly.

Of all of my mentoring partners³, Mary Sullivan was the most conscientious. She always responded to my emails, which she shared with her regular partner, Xenia Coulter, and she usually had additional questions.

Xenia was already a Life Master when I started playing with Mary It did not surprise me at all when Mary achieved the same rank in 2022.

In 2023 Mary was still running the the club’s mentoring program with John Calderbank (above). She also was assisting several of the other programs aimed at helping newer players.

Mary has hearing difficulties and macular pucker, scar tissue in the macula that can distort vision. Through my first seventy-five years I avoided the first of those, but I was still struggling with the latter in my left eye.

In 2022 Nancy Calderbank asked me to be her mentor. Like her husband, John, she had been playing bridge for a long time, but she wanted to learn how to play the 2/1 bidding system. We only got to play together a few times, but I am pretty sure that she had mastered 2/1 by the time that the mentoring period was finished.

I also worked with Nancy for three years on the HBC Board of Trustees. She and John, whom she called a “busy-body”, also ran an unsanctioned bridge game in Glastonbury, CT.

In the summer of 2023 I got to meet and play with Fran Gurtman, who had much less experience than any of the other players whom I had mentored. She was still a practicing physician when we started playing together.

Fran had taken online lessons. The first convention card that we played was very unsophisticated. It had no defense against 1NT openings, and it also lacked Jacoby 2NT, New Minor Forcing, Drury, and other conventions used by most of the mid-level players at the HBC. We only played together, but she felt comfortable adding most of them.

On November 8, 2023, Fran was driving from her home in Avon to play with my wife Sue in the weekly Wednesday evening game at the Simsbury Bridge Club. A deer jumped in front of her car. The collision killed the deer and damaged the auto. She called Sue to ask if she was still needed. Sue told her that we would not be able to have a game if she dropped out.

So, after filing a police report Fran drove the car, which was difficult to steer, to her house and drove a different car to the game. She arrived only a couple of minutes late.

A new mentoring session started in January of 2024 and ran through March of the same year. I was assigned by the mentor program to work with Mike Kaplan, who had even less experience than Fran did. Our convention card contained a lot of blankness. I taught him New Minor Forcing, Fourth Suit Forcing, and the two-suited bids.

Unfortunately, we had to play in the open pairs games at the HBC. Our results were therefore not very good, but I think that Mike learned quite a bit. I wrote up all of the hands on which we did poorly as I always did. I could have played for free in three of the games, but I donated the money to the HBC, which got reimbursed $30 by the CBA.

Playing with Mike on March 7 I was dealt the following hand: ♠A5432 ♥A653 ♦A5 ♣62. This hand had no face cards and only forty-four pips, an incredibly low number. The lowest possible number is twenty-eight. Mike had a very good hand, which got a lot better when blended with my three aces. He took all the tricks, but we only bid 4♥. We got a bad score.

At the same time I served with Mike on the HBC Planning Committee.

One-time partners: For quite some time I have maintained a spreadsheet with one line for each person with whom I have played at least one entire session in a sanctioned game at a club or tournament. Below is a list of the ones with whom I played only one or two games at the HBC. They are listed in alphabetical order, mostly just to make things easier for me to make sure that I did not skip anyone.

A guy whose last name was Balasubrama played on Saturdays a few times one summer at the HBC. He asked everyone to call him Bala, but the spreadsheet also has KC in the First Name column. On at least one of those occasions I played with him. He was pretty good, and he liked to play with me.

I could find no trace of Bala either online or in my database of players. Perhaps he dropped out of the ACBL before I began downloading the rosters in 2013. It is also possible that I have his name wrong. Unfortunately, in 2023 there is no longer a way to look up HBC results on the Internet.

Myrna Butler lived in Southwick, MA. She came down to the HBC to play occasionally. I played with her at least once at the HBC. I am pretty sure that she answered one of my mass emails soliciting partners.

I remember that some time after we played together I found a card filled out by Myrna at the partnership desk at the regional tournament in Cromwell. My team had been eliminated in an early round of a knockout. We planned to play in the next day’s “Loser Swiss”, but one of our team members was not feeling well. Since we had already played together, I assured the remaining members of the team that I would play with Myrna. However, I was unable to get in touch with her. I later learned that she had gone home and had neglected to remove her card from the partnership desk. I don’t recall how the team dealt with the situation.

I played in a Swiss team event at a tournament in (I think) Hyannis, MA, with Myrna and her partner, Connie Dube (introduced here). They were late for the first match. Helen Pawlowski, the tournament manager, and Sally Kirtley, who at the time was learning Helen’s job, sat in for the first match. After she learned whom she was replacing Helen said, “Oh, Myrna’s always late.”

Myrna has played a few times at the HBC since it reopened after Covid-19.

Gary Cohen played bridge for only a little more than a year, but what a year it was! He played mostly at Stan Kerry’s West Hartford Bridge Club (WHBC) game at the temple in West Hartford³. During his first year of play Gary amassed more masterpoints at club games than any other rookie in all of North America. That earned him the national Ace of Clubs award, as well as the district and unit versions. Since I was still playing with Dick Benedict, that must have been in 2008.

I am pretty sure that I played at the temple with Gary once. He made a joke about getting out the big (circumcision) knife. Although we did pretty well, I did not enjoy the experience much. Stan’s laissez faire style of directing was not appreciated by serious players like myself.

I am certain that I played with Gary at the HBC. It was on December 31 of, I think, 2009. Gary asked me to play in hopes of augmenting his chances of winning the award. We did win a fraction of a black point, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need it.

I remember playing on a team with Gary at the Cromwell tournament the next year. We had to play against Y.L. Shiue’s team. Gary did not think that it was fair for us rookies to be matched against “the best card-player” at the club.

Gary, who was a professional photographer, often went on vacations with both his wife and his ex-wife—at the same time! He insisted that he could get away with this because he was “a catch”. His LinkedIn page is here.

Gene Coppa and his wife JoSue (introduced above) joined the HBC a few years after I did. I played with Gene at least once at the club. We played together at a limited game on Wednesday afternoon that was designated as an NAP qualifier. There were at least ten pairs. Gene and I were the only people in the B strat. All of the other players were in the C strat and had considerably less experience than we did. So, we should have easily been able to qualify; in fact, we should have won.

Instead I got the worst result that I had ever received at the HBC. We finished dead last, and we did not earn our Q.

I was playing East that day; prior to that time I had always sat in North, South, or West. For quite a few years thereafter I refused to sit East in that building. When I began playing with Joan Brault (introduced here), she insisted on playing West when we were assigned to sit East-West, I reluctantly discarded the superstition.

Gene served a term as HBC president. He also served as hospitality manager for Unit 126 before the Pandemic. He and Jo Sue moved to Fairfax, VA, in 2022.

Phyllis Crowley was a fairly new player when I was paired with her for some reason. She was, in my recollection, somewhat overwhelmed by the event.

I think that she still plays in limited games in 2023. I have not seen her in any open games, but she was still on the email list.

I remember playing with Lucie Fradet once at the HBC, but I do not remember the circumstances. I remember, too, that Felix Springer and I helped her to win some gold points at a regional while playing in a Swiss event of some sort.

In 2023 she was still a member of the HBC , but she mostly played at the WHBC.

In real life Lucie had been a French teacher, and she still loved to speak in that language.

I am certain that I played with Marsha Futterman only once at the HBC. She was a very good player at one time. She even won the Governor’s Cup at a sectional, but she refused to take the very large trophy home.

Marsha often played with Peter Katz. She told me that she thought that she was a better bidder than Peter, but Peter played his cards better. That may have been true then, but Peter’s bidding improved, and Marsha’s play did not.

Marsh directed the Saturday games at the HBC. Her husband, Carl, often came with her, helped set up and clean up, and filled in at the bridge table when necessary. When Marsh played with him (to avoid a sitout), she was constantly frustrated by the way that he played. I suggested that she could play with my partner, Peter, and I would play with Carl, but she did not want to do that.

Marsha gave up bridge after the Pandemic. I don’t know why.

Carl Futterman died on November 12, 2023, while I was composing this entry. His obituary can be read here.

Margie Garilli has for year run one or two games in the northeastern suburbs of Hartford. She has played at the SBC quite a few times, mostly with Donna Lyons. She seldom came after the Pandemic because she could not drive at night.

Margie, who is a pretty good player, asked if I would play a game with her at the HBC. I quickly agreed. I don’t know if she got a great deal out of it, but she seemed to have a good time.

Marilyn Goldberg was an exceptionally good player with much more experience than I had. She asked me to play with her very late in her career. I made a mistake—I don’t remember the details—and she remarked that she knew that I would do that. That hurt.

Marilyn died in 2022 at the age of 93. Her obituary can be read here.

I played with Judy Hyde quite a few times before she moved from the Hartford area to Northampton, and I played with her a couple of times at the Northampton Bridge Club before she paired up with Bob Sagor.

On one occasion at a regional tournament in Nashua, NH, my wife Sue and I went out for supper with Judy (my partner at the tournament) and Judy Cavagnaro (Sue’s partner). The unusual aspect was that Judy C. was married to Jud H.’s ex-husband, Tom Hyde. There was not a bit of animosity between the two Judys.

On her eightieth birthday Judy bought herself one lesson and game with a local pro, Doug Doub.

Judy served as the representative of Unit 186 (Western Massachusetts) on the committee that I formed to determine the first winner of the Weiss-Bertoni award. That process was described here.

C.J. Joseph‘s first name was Carolyn, but absolutely nobody called her anything other than C.J. I only played with her once.

C.J. met her husband, who was (to the best of my recollection) a hospital administrator while they were both attending the University of Michigan. So, most of our conversations were about the Wolverine football team.

She left the Hartford area for a seaside home they built in Englewood, FL She scoffed when joked about her house being washed away. I don’t know; the Ross Ice Shelf is several hundred meters thick and the size of France. Nothing but friction is holding it back.

In 2023 C.J. was still a member of the ACBL, but she did not appear to be playing any more. A lot of that happened during the Pandemic

Joel Krug was still a regular at the HBC as I wrote this in late 2023. I only played with him once, but I recognized him on an old photo of an annual meeting, and none of the other members looked familiar.

The only thing that I remember about our game was that he was surprised that I knew how to play the McCabe Adjunct as well as the Brozel 1NT defense.

Joel was one of the best players at the club. He may have lost a step over the years, but he was still formidable.

I played at least one round with Pam Lombardo, when she was just a novice. Maybe it was during one of the first sessions of the Sunday high-low game before Covid-19.

Pam has had significant health issues that seemed to affect her ability to play, but in 2023 she was still an active member of the club.

A friend of hers named Butch Norman was one of two recipients who objected to me using the name Tonto in one of my emails. I discussed this incident in detail in the blog entry that I posted here.

At one time Donna Feir planned to hire Pam as a director, but that plan never came to fruition.

Jim Macomber (MAY cum ber) was a regular player in the Tuesday evening games when I first started playing at the club in 2008. I may have played against him more times than against anyone else.

One of Jim’s regular partners at the HBC morning games was Jeanne Striefler. I asked Jeanne and Jim to team up with Eric Vogel and me for the knockout in the Presidential Regional in Southbridge in February of 2023. We did very well on the first day, but terrible on the second. The saga has been recorded here.

Later in 2023 I finally got to play a round as Jim’s partner. I had long respected him a great deal. Our result was uninspiring, but it left me hoping for a second chance.

When Jim had his cataracts removed in the late summer of 2023 he was left with double vision, something to which I could relate. He was unable to drive until he got a pair of glasses to address the situation.

Partab Makhijani was my regular partner on Tuesday mornings at the HBC before Covid-19 caused the club to close. We played a fairly sophisticated card. I remember that he criticized one of my bids once, but I don’t recall the details.

Partab did not return to the club after it reopened in 2021, and I have not heard any explanation for his absence. His LinkedIn page, which is posted here, in 2023 listed him as part of the adjunct faculty of the University of Hartford.

Lesley Meyers was (and still is in 2023) one of the best players at the club. We only played together once. There must have been something about my style that she did not like. She never responded to any of my emails after that.

Lesley (LEZ lee) notices things about people. She was the only person who noticed the golf-ball-sized lump on my left elbow that was presumably caused by the effort required to extract gallons and gallons of water from the basement of our house in Enfield after Hurricane Ida in September of 2021. That episode is recounted here. I am glad that she noticed the problem. I saw a doctor about it, and he gave me a wrap that eventually reduced it to nothing.

Lesley was also the only person who asked me about the fingernails on my left hand. They apparently got severely bent and bruised when I fell in Budapest in May of 2022. That misadventure has been described in detail here.

When I first started to play at the club, no one intimidated me as much as Lesley. She was not tolerant about novices who took excessive times concocting their bids.

I remember distinctly that Nancy Narwold told me that one day that she would surprise me and respond positively to one of my emails soliciting one-time partners. Her name is on my spreadsheet, and I have a convention card for her. Therefore, it must have happened, but I don’t remember it. It seems strange that I remember the off-hand comment more than the 3.5 hour game that it resulted in.

I do recall that before she became a Life Master Nancy played almost exclusively with another woman whose name has escaped my memory—Karen Somebody, I think. The HBC held a party when the two of them achieved Life Master status. I attended. The other lady told tales about their efforts to attain the rank, including something about answering a knock on the door of their hotel room in a nightgown. I always considered Nancy a much better player than her partner.

After that event I don’t think that they ever played together again. From then until the closing for the Pandemic Nancy played mostly with Joel Krug. She also ran an unsanctioned bridge game at one of the country clubs on the west side of town.

I have deduced that in 2023 Nancy teaches business at Manchester Community College. If so, her LinkedIn page is here. She is still winning masterpoints; she probably plays online.

Val Orefice was not as serious about bridge as most of the people on this list. Although she joined the ACBL in 1994 (ten years before I did), she only made Bronze Life Master in 2012, a year after I did. She dropped out in 2018.

I remember only two things about Val. The first was that she did not seem to be familiar with several of the conventions that nearly all the accomplished players used. The other was that she pronounced her last name the same as the common word “orifice”. The Italian word orefice means goldsmith and is pronounced oh RAY fee chay.

I played with Pam Palmer a few times when her main partner, Aldona Siuta, could not play. Pam. They played a much simpler system than I was accustomed to. They very seldom made mistakes, and both of them were very good at playing the cards.

In 2023 Pam was still playing, but at a much reduced rate. She seemed to be very frightened of Covid-19, perhaps on account of her partner.

Both Pam and her partner were quite active in the same church attended by the Calderbanks.

Susan Pflederer, who was (and still is in 2023) one of the best players at the HBC, once told me that she wanted to play with me because she had a hard time playing against me. This astonished me because I did not remember having particularly good results when I played against her.

I know very little about Susan. She had been playing bridge for a long time when I started. I seem to remember that our results were mediocre. I probably made some mistakes that she noticed and I didn’t. We never played again.

After the Pandemic Susan has played less than she did before.

Trevor Reeves has the unique distinction of playing with me without making it onto my spreadsheet. When we were scheduled to play together a second time, he was able to show me the results from our first partnership. I cannot imagine how it could have happened, and I took no notice of it.

Trevor learned to play bridge in England, which explains why his BBO handle is ACOLyte. Trevor is a very good player. Although in late 2023 I still have more masterpoints than he does, the people in the club obviously consider him a better player than I am.

Trevor formerly played as a teammate of mine at many tournaments, and we did quite well. He also played with me in a pairs event at the Summer NABC in Toronto in 2017 (no notes?). We won our section in the evening session.

I would like to play more with Trevor, but he obviously prefers other partners. He asked me to play with him in the sectional in Orange in August of 2023, but I had to turn him down because of a previous commitment to play in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA.

Trevor’s primary partner at tournaments has been Felix Springer. They have a great record together and even made it to the semifinals of Flight B of the Grand National Teams in 2022.

Trevor served as both the president and then treasurer of the HBC. He was responsible for implementing the accounting changes that allowed the club to do accurate budgeting during and after Covid-19.

I cannot say that I enjoyed the one time that I played with Joan Salve. Her world view was just too different from mine. I don’t remember any details, but I was happy when the session was over.

I met Carol Schaper at the SBC. She was a regular there when I first started playing. I liked her a lot.

She played with a former nun named Louise Alvord. Carol was interested in my book on the popes (posted here). She especially liked the title, Stupid Pope Tricks: What St. Mary Immaculata Never Revealed About the Papacy. Louise, however, did not want to hear anything about Roman Catholic clergy, good, bad, or just unusual. Carol tried to defend me, but Louise did not want to hear it.

I played with Carol only once at the HBC and never at tournaments or, for that matter, the SBC. I thought that she had the potential to be a pretty good player, but she did not want to put in the effort.

Carol was one of the thousands of people who let their membership in the ACBL lapse during the Pandemic or shortly thereafter. She had enough points for Life Master, but she must have been short some gold and/or silver.

Susan Seckinger has long been a key person at the HBC. She was hired as a director and Donna Feir’s right-hand person. Before that she was a critically important official for Unit 126. She had the formidable responsibilities of being both the treasurer and the tournament manager at the same time. She did a good job in both roles.

Susan’s husband Gary was considered one of the best players in Connecticut. He often played with Deb Noack at sectionals. He died in 2014, just as I was becoming active at the district and unit levels.

I only played with Susan once. I think that we both enjoyed it, but we never played again. She has long had a small group of women with whom she played regularly.

Mike Smith almost always played with his wife Susan. They became a formidable pair during their stay in the Hartford area. They even won a pair of national championships. Mike was a Life Master when they moved to God’s country. I spoke at Susan’s Life Master party and complained that she had never once agreed to play with me and that they had stolen my favorite teammates, Bob and Shirley Derrah.

I never got to play with Susan Smith, but on one occasion Mike asked me to play with him on a Tuesday evening when Susan was busy elsewhere. I jumped at the chance. I really enjoyed it, but he was an intimidating figure (both physically and at the table). I made a mistake that kept us from having a good round. It was embarrassing.

Mike was still working full-time while the couple lived in the area. So, his presence at the HBC was pretty much limited to evenings, weekends, and holidays. Susan, however, became a rather active member. I an pretty sure that she participated in the mentoring program.

In the post-Pandemic period the Smiths moved to Alexandria, VA. I have not encountered them since they did.

I first met Linda Starr during the Tuesday evening games. She usually played with Mike Carmiggelt in those days. They—and many other players in those games—were good enough that they intimidated me. Once Mike accused my partner and I of something unethical. When I responded with a one-word interrogative: “Ethical?” Linda immediately responded by saying that Mike was just crabby because he was hungry. I am not sure why, but Linda has not played with Mike for a few years.

I have paired with Linda a few times at the club and at least once at a sectional in Orange. That experience has been recorded here.

Shortly before Covid-19 struck Linda passed the director’s exam and was hired by the HBC. At my suggestion the club bought a subscription to MailChimp to send emails about news of the club. Linda took over the project of maintaining the database and composing emails. Her emails throughout the closure helped maintain a sense of community among club members.

Linda came up with the idea of the High-Low game on Sunday as a way for experienced players could help the less experienced. She has unofficially mentored Doug Eitelman and greatly improved his game.

Linda and I worked together on the fantastically successful Limited Sectionals that were sponsored by the HBC in 2023. Documentation of those events begins here. At the time she was a member of the board of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). She became very upset at the handling of the notorious “Tonto Scandal” that has been documented here. After a short sting on the CBA board she resigned. At the HBC’s annual meeting in October of 2023 she became the first director ever elect to the Board of Trustees.

Gary Cohen put together a team for a Swiss event at the HBC. I don’t remember the date. I was assigned to play with Merrill Stein, whom I barely knew. I don’t remember any more details. I think that Merrill died in 2018. An obituary for someone with that name has been posted here.

Jeanne Striefler has been an active member of both the HBC and the SBC for longer than I have. We have played on teams together at tournaments quite a few times and we have paired up at least once or twice.

On a few occasions Jeanie (as everyone called her) invited my wife Sue and me to the house in West Simsbury that she shared with her husband Fred⁴. One of those occasions was when she celebrated making Silver Life Master, and Susan Seckinger celebrated making Gold Life Master. She probably would have invited us more often if we had reciprocated. Fat chance.

Jeanie served as the HBC’s secretary for many years.

Jeanie and Fred went on a Viking cruise in France at the same time that I took the European cruise (described here). She contracted Covid-19 near the end of the cruise and was unable to leave Paris for several days. She reported that she had had a terrible experience. She was surprised that I enjoyed my journey and thought that Viking did well under the circumstances.

I learned when I played with Rowna Sutin at the HBC that she had been a professional opera singer in Pittsburgh. She appeared as Musetta in Puccini’s La Bohème. I immediately remarked that she must have sung the show-stopping aria, Quando me’n vo’⁵. I then asked her if she wore a red dress. She said that her dress was not red, but it did have a very long slit in the skirt.

I also discussed with Rowna about the version of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin that was performed on television and is available on YouTube here. Rowna did not like the cuts that were made. I felt that the cuts made it a much better television show and highlighted the talents of the wonderful choir and dancers.

I told Rowna about my favorite Tchaikovsky opera, Cherevichki. She replied “How come I have never heard of it?” I wasn’t sure how to explain why it has not gotten much attention in the U.S. I speculated that it might be because it was difficult to stage. I refused to believe that it had anything to do with the music.

That was the last time that I saw Rowna. For some reason she stopped coming to the HBC. She was still a member of the ACBL in 2023, and she had won a few masterpoints during the year.

Bill Watson became the president of the HBC shortly after I joined. As president he arranged for Michael Lawrence, a world champion and highly respected author, to visit the club and give a free presentation on takeout doubles. He even let him stay overnight in his house.

I attended the event. During a break I encountered Mr. Lawrence in the men’s room. He stumped me with a question about whether the faucet’s water ever became hot.

Bill was also a director at the HBC and with Laurie Robbins ran the club’s education program for new members. For six years he ran the Limited Sectional that the club hosted every October.

I played with Bill a few times before Covid-19 shut down the club in 2020. I remember that he was shocked when I said that a bid at the two-level in the fourth seat should show a minimum opening hand. The club’s experts agreed with me, but later when I played with Barbara Gallagher that the best players in Denver played that the same bid at the one-level was weaker.

Before the Pandemic Bill often was the public address announcer at football games for one of the local high schools in Hartford.

Bill and I have not played together since the club reopened. He mostly has played with Mike Carmiggelt and Larry Bowman.

Bill drove a red Jaguar that gave him a lot of grief in 2023.

John Willoughby started playing at the Tuesday evening games a little after I did. I think that I only played with him once, and I don’t remember any details about the occasion. My wife Sue played with him pretty often online during the Pandemic.

Although he and his wife had moved to North Haven in 2022 John continued as president of the HBC until his sudden and very unexpected death in the summer of 2023. Previously he had lived in Suffield. In his business life he worked as an underwriter for one of the insurance companies. His obituary can be found here.

When John was vice-president of the HBC, he was also the chairman of the Planning Committee, of which I was a member. The committee came up with many good ideas during this period.

The club held a special event as a tribute to John. Many of his family and friends attended. Over $6,000 was raised for the club.

1. In September of 2023 Bob and Sue Glasspiegel moved to Charleston, SC.

2. I was surprised to discover that Fran was still living in West Hartford when she died in 2021. Her obituary is posted here.

3. Stan had just opened his club when Gary began the year of his feat. Stan took advantage of a loophole in the ACBL rules to give extra points by designating every game as a “charity game”. In addition, although all of the games were technically open games, almost no Life Masters ever attended. So, because the games were fully rated—and then some—it was much easier to earn points at the WHBC than at the HBC, where the open games were dominated by experienced players. .

4. Fred was introduced here. His real first name was Manfred, not Frederick.

5. The long version would be “quando me ne vado”, which just means “when I go out”. I don’t know what happened to the “e” in “ne”.

2013-2018 Bridge: The Larry Weiss Award

Posted on July 29, 2023 by Mike

D25’s old award. Continue reading →

In 2013 I was still working full-time at TSI. My bridge was mostly limited to evenings and weekends. My involvement with District 25 (New England) was mostly limited to maintaining the NEBridge.org website, but I did accept an appointment to be one of the people who represented Unit 126 (Connecticut) at the twice-yearly meetings of the Board of Delegates. The big attraction was the free breakfast.

The Larry Weiss award was about eighteen inches in diameter.

The Larry Weiss Award was actually instituted in 1982. Its history is recorded here. The first presentation that I witnessed was at a Board of Delegates (BoD) meeting in 2013. The winner that year was Frank Hacker¹, an expert player from Vermont whom I had contacted about contributing materials to the district’s website. The presenter was the previous winner, Jim Rasmussen. Frank seemed shocked and a little embarrassed to receive it.

I read about the award on NEBridge.org. It was named after an expert player who had a national reputation for being very congenial at the table. The evident purpose was to recognize a good bridge player from New England who had similar comportment. In those days² an accomplished player who was also friendly was rare.

I was fascinated by the award, which was the only physical trophy given out by the district. I examined the list of previous winners. Most of the names were not familiar to me.

Not long after receiving the award Frank moved to Florida. No award was presented in 2014 or 2015. In 2016 someone retrieved the tray from Frank, and Jim Rasmussen was pressed into service to find a suitable recipient. I posted a notice on the website for him asking people to submit nominations to Jim’s email address. I submitted two names, mainly because I was afraid that no one else had bothered to respond.

A few months later I was taken aback when Jim called me aside at a tournament and asked me if I would be amenable to him just selecting the person to receive the award. I said that I certainly had no objection. The award that year was given to Luke Gillespie, whom I had played against a couple of times. I was a little surprised that he won. I had only seen him at a few tournaments. I had also encountered him at no meetings or in any of my undertakings as webmaster. Luke was very surprised when his name was announced. That was the only time that I ever saw him at a BoD meeting.

Both of Jim’s presentation speeches were brief. He described the award, but he never went into any details about the process used to determine the winner.

In 2017 I was again asked by someone on the Executive Committee to post an item on the website soliciting nominations for the award. This time I did not nominate anyone. The award was presented at the BoD meeting in Nashua NH in June. Earlier in the week Jack Mahoney had greeted me in an elevator with “Congrats on the Weiss!” I don’t remember what I responded. However, this revelation game me a day or two to think about what I would do if they actually gave me the award.

At the end of the meeting Luke Gillespie presented me with the Larry Weiss award. When he introduced me, he admitted that he did not actually know me. In fact, I had only played against him once or twice. The memorable occasion was in Johnston, RI, at a sectional. I distinctly remember one hand. He was playing with Sheila Gabay. My partner, Steve Smith (introduced here), had opened 3♦. Sheila had bid 4♣. I raised to 4♦. Luke ventured 5♣, and Steve said 5♦, which was doubled.

As I lay down the dummy, I remember my exact words: “I don’t know; I don’t think that they are making 5♣. Afterwards, Luke and Sheila gently chided Steve for usurping my captaincy.

I was well aware of the criteria for this prestigious award, at least one of which I did not in any way meet. I gave a little speech in which I argued that if they were going to lower the standards to consider a Bracket 4 player, they should have chosen my friend and frequent teammate, Bob Derrah, who had established successful youth bridge programs at two middle schools in Springfield. His devotion of time, energy, and his own money for this and other projects was truly “superior behavior.” His wife (and bridge partner) Shirley had also been a great help, but Bob had been the driving force.

At the very end I emphasized that I felt honored, but Bob would have been a better choice. I spelled Bob’s last name so that the fill-in secretary, Beth Bertoni, would be certain to get it right in the minutes. Sandy DeMartino said that I made a good point in that players should be encouraged to nominate people that they thought were deserving of the award.

Early in 2018 I followed the instructions that were posted on the NEBridge.org website. I organized a committee of nine players that had representatives each of the eight units in Di25. My first choice was Luke Gillespie. The text describing the award indicated that preference should be given to former winners. Luke agreed. The other members were Susan Smith, Shirley Wagner, Jack Mahoney, Wayne Burt, Linda Ahrens, Karen Hewitt Randall, and Bob Sagor.

I once again posted a notice for the submission of nominations. This time I asked people to reply to my email address.³ Only nine people responded; seven nominated one person, and Carolyn Weiser nominated Wayne Burt, Dick Budd, and David Rock. The other nominees were Paul Harris, Sabrina Miles, Joe Brouillard, Bob Derrah, Don Caplin, Pat McDevitt, Felix Springer, and Frank Merblum. I nominated Bob Bertoni and Ausra Geaski. No one was nominated by more than one person.

I created a pdf file of all of the nominations, included the arguments provided by the nominators and sent it with the following email to the members of the committee.

I received thirteen nominations for the Larry Weiss Award. I have enclosed them in a pdf file and a Word doc file. To some of them I have appended comments when I had personal knowledge of the recipient.
I think that the next step is to gather comments from committee members. No one can know everyone, and so in some cases we must rely on the judgments of others. Please read the documents and send me whatever comments you might have this week. During the week of April 9 I will assemble a new package that includes them. Then we can start the balloting.
One note: The last ten winners have been men. No woman has won the award since Jane Smith in 2003. This seems peculiar to me, since there seems to be nothing in the criteria that would predict such a bent.
Thanks for your participation.

There were only a few comments, but one person was very upset that one of the nominees was even under consideration and asked that I include that comment without attribution. Since I had said that I would allow anonymous comments, I did. The subject of that comment, who was also a voting member of the nominating committee, offered the opinion that only positive comments should be accepted. I did not remove the comment.

In the first round of voting I allowed all members to name up to three nominees who best, in their opinion, met the criteria. Only three people were named by more than one person: Joe Brouillard, Ausra Geaski, and Bob Bertoni. Bob and Ausra were named more often than Joe.

So, the final ballot was between Bob and Ausra. Ausra got four votes; Bob get five. I would have been happy with either result. In retrospect it seems remarkable to me that if I had not been on the committee, they would not have even been considered.

I announced on the website that the award for 2018 would be given out at the meeting of the Board of Delegates at the Granite State Getaway ( a regional tournament held in Nashua, NH) on Sunday, June 24, 2018. I did not disclose the winner’s name to anyone—not even my wife Sue.

I brought the award with me to the Senior Regional in North Falmouth, MA. When I gave the trophy to Carolyn Weiser to be engraved, I had to tell her who had won. A big smile appeared on her face.

My presentation of the award to Bob has already been chronicled here (search for “Weiss”), but that account did not include my actual description of the winner: “My friend, my boss, my guru, my hero, Bob Bertoni.”

This was the last presentation of the Larry Weiss award. Bob died in 2021. No one seemed to know where the silver-plated tray ended up.

My relationship to the award that replaced it has been described here.

1. I also played against Frank in a sectional in New Hampshire. He told me that he was an actuary. He also asked me if I knew Joel Wolfe. I did know him from the Tuesday evening games at the Hartford Bridge Club, but I was terrified of him. I never told Joel about the encounter in New Hampshire.

2. Behavior was apparently much less friendly in the eighties. In 1988 the ACBL instituted a set of laws governing behavior at the bridge table called the Zero Tolerance policy. Over the next three decades bridge gradually became a much more friendly game as it became “bad form” to be rude or abusive to the others at the table.

3. I am not sure why I did not send a district-wide email asking for nominations. The district certainly had its MailChimp account by that time, and I had been maintaining the database for many years. The description of the award says that the website should be used to ask for nominations, but when that admonition was written the district had no way to send a large set of emails. Perhaps I was worried about the cost, which would have been about $7.50.

2021 Part 2: The Pandemic Strikes Back

Posted on May 26, 2022 by Mike

Living with Covid-19 in 2021. Continue reading →

I kept pretty good records of what my activities during 2021. I decided to arrange this entry in chronological order with separate entries for a few startling or momentous events.

January: 2020 was widely considered the worst year ever or at least in my lifetime, but it appeared that 2021 might wrest that crown away. It had the usual 365 days, but it felt like the longest year of all time. I had rather enjoyed the tranquility of the isolation in 2020, but by January of 2021 I really wanted to play bridge and see all of my friends again on a regular basis.

During the first few days of the new year no one talked about anything besides the election. I had become convinced early in the election campaign that Trump would try to start a coup if he lost. I was right. That story has been told here.

On the Pandemic front the big news in late 2020 was that three different vaccines would soon be available, but the schedule had not been published. The priority would be given to health care workers and then to those over 65.

We sufferers from trypanophobia were relentlessly subjected to photos of people with their sleeves rolled up as someone near them administered the shot (or “jab” as they called it in England).

On January 1 I played bridge online with Ken Leopold. We scored over 65 percent, one of my best scores ever. I still did not enjoy it.

On January 4, my sister’s 65th birthday, both of the Democrats were declared winners in Georgia. The Democrats seemed to be in control of both houses of Congress, but two of them, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, were not reliable votes. The former was in bed with Big Coal and conservative for even a Blue Dog, and the latter was just a narcissist.

On January 6 I played bridge with Ken again. This time we did horribly. When I get nervous playing online (sometimes because I am not yet used to the BBO interface), my left hand begins to shake.

Almost none of the rioters that stormed the Capitol wore masks. Deaths from Covid-19 were still averaging 4,000 per year. So, on top of everything else the insurrection was also probably a super-spreader event.

Ken and I had another awful game on January 8. This time I had an excuse. While we were playing, Sue was in the other end of the house and had a heart attack. She called 911, and an ambulance took her to the emergency room of St. Francis hospital. The doctors put in a stent. In January of 2021 hospitals were a very dangerous place. I was quite worried. I had long known that a day like this might come. Sue was quite overweight, and she knew that she had a mild case of diabetes for a long time. She never exercised, and her eating and sleeping habits were deplorable.

Almost all my horror stories involved Unite.

Expedia sent me an email that said that I had a credit with United Airlines. I had absolutely no idea what caused this. I looked at the header for the email; it seemed legitimate. At that point it seemed pretty unlikely that I would ever fly on United again. Unfortunately, the email got lost when I cleaned out my Outlook folders before moving to the Asus computer (details here) in 2023. So, I probably will never know any more about this.

I drove Sue home from the hospital on January 11. For the rest of her life she was required to administer insulin shots to herself and to take several types of heart medicine and a few other drugs for other chronic issues. She was on a fairly strict diet aimed at getting her weight down and her blood-sugar level under control. She could walk without assistance, but she had no stamina. She seemed worse a couple of days later.

She made an appointment with her primary care physician. The appointment with the doctor seemed to go OK. There might have been an adjustment to her drugs. I was required to wake her up every morning at 9 a.m. and to remind her when it was 6 p.m. After a while she figured out how to give herself reminders on her phone, but I still needed to awaken her every morning.

On January 20 Joe Biden was sworn in peacefully. At this point some right-wingers were claiming (with no evidence whatever) that the rioters (or at least the instigators) were actually from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or even the FBI. The FBI had begun searching for participants. There was an unbelievable abundance of video. Evidently for a lot of these bozos this was the culmination of a great deal of training and effort, and they wanted to make sure that they had mementos. Many of them would come to regret that decision.

On the 23rd I wrote in my notes that Sue seemed a little better, but she was still quite weak. She said that she could cook some, but she requested that I do the dishes. I agreed, of course, and there were several delicious but easy meals that I was comfortable preparing and cooking. I shopped for them, and she learned how to order groceries online.

February: On February 5 I played on BBO with Eric Vogel. We scored better than 54 percent.

Sue has rehabilitation therapy scheduled for the 8th, but she canceled it. She did that a lot when she had her knee replacement surgery a few years earlier. For a little while she tried to walk around on Hamilton Court. I joined her for a few of these jaunts. The cold air bothered her breathing for some reason. When it got warmer she went on little walks by herself, but she eventually stopped doing them. That was just the way she was. It would have done no good to nag her to exercise.

On the next day I played with Eric again. This time we scored better than 57 percent. I was starting to feel more relaxed playing online, but I still hated it. It was also the day that Trump’s trial in the Senate began. The first vote was on whether the process was constitutional. That passed 56-44 with six Republicans voting in favor. However, 67 votes will be required for conviction, and so it appears that he will walk again.

On the 10th Sue went back to her heart doctor. He put her back on Lasix to reduce the buildup of fluids. This seemed to help her a lot, but it made her go to the bathroom. It took her a bit of time to learn how to control this situation.

On the same day I went downstairs to walk a few miles on the treadmill¹. It made a horrible sound, and I had to unplug it. After I thought about it, I became pretty sure that this was caused by the cats, Giacomo and Bob. They both took naps on the treadmill after visiting the litter box, which was also in the basement. A bit of litter might have stuck to their paws, then fell into the treadmill’s mechanism, and somehow made it jam up. In any case fixing or replacing it was not a job to be undertaken when all of society was under lockdown.

I always watched an opera or a streamed TV show or movie on my laptop situated on the ping pong table.

On the very next day I spent 100 minutes on the rowing machine that Sue had bought for me many years earlier. It gave me a sore tailbone. I brought down a small pillow and strapped it on top of the seat. I also brought down a pair of grey sneakers and permanently tied them into the footrest. It had bothered me that my feet slipped while I was rowing. This solved the problem.

Sue at some point in February had an anxiety attack. This was really the worst symptom yet. She had difficulty breathing for several minutes. This development meant that I had to keep bottled up my feelings about everything (including but not limited to my disdain for the pigsty in which we lived) or risk killing my wife. She got a prescription for this from one of her doctors. It seemed to work.

Over the next few days I spent some time doing our income taxes. I filed them electronically using “Free File Fillable Forms” and almost immediately received a refund from Connecticut. The federal refund did not arrive for several months. I can’t complain too much; the IRS did send a “stimulus” check of $2800.

At some point I dropped my Pixel 2 cellphone and cracked the screen. It still seemed to function correctly. This device, which I came to hate, continued to function until May of 2022. Its demise occurred somewhere in Germany and was described in detail here.

March: The 2nd was Sue’s 70th birthday. She was planning on throwing a big party, but she was definitely not up to it, and not many people would have been able to come anyway.

On March 15 Sue and I drove to a huge parking lot on Runway Rd. in East Hartford. There we received our initial Pfizer mRNA-based vaccine. It was a very quick and well-organized process overseen by members of the National Guard. The vaccine was reportedly more than 90 percent effective, which was incredibly high for a vaccine of any time. The number of new cases was already dropping in response to its availability.

A meeting of the District 25 Executive Committee (EC) was held via Zoom. Not much was decided. The big issue was whether the district would follow the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), the locality, or nobody with regards to requirements for vaccination and/or masks.

On March 16 the weather was nice enough to walk five miles outside. However this was the last time in March that I was able to achieve that distance. Subsequent walks were cut short by pain in my right foot that seemed somehow to be related to the chronic tendinitis that I had in the IT band that ran from my knee to my hip (described here). This was quite upsetting to me.

On March 21 I posted the pre-registration form and deposit for our team for the Grand National Teams (GNT) qualifying tournament: Felix Springer, Trevor Reeves, Ken, and me. The qualifying games would definitely be held online on BBO. The national finals were scheduled for the summer NABC. Because that tournament had been canceled, the GNT finals would be held online.

On March 22 the Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) met on Zoom. The plan was to hold the Ocean State Regional in Warwick on the week before Labor Day, if possible. The ACBL was planning to make a decision about sanctioning tournaments on May 22.

On the last day of March I made a long overdue appointment with my dentist, Dr. Coombs in Suffield. I later canceled the appointment because of fear of Covid-19.

April: No April fool jokes on April 1: The last blossom on the Christmas cactus appeared. The most remarkable story of the year concerned the mysterious injury to Sue’s cat, Bob. The details have been posted here.

April 5: I sent out an email composed by Sue Miguel to promote the online GNT qualifying tournaments that will be held at various times.

April 7: Bob seems nearly fully recovered.

April 13: Frances Schneider, the outgoing president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) asks me to take over her job at the end of her term. I declined because I was still doing a great deal of work for the district, and no one seemed to be taking seriously that I planned to resign those duties at the end of the year, and a great deal of effort would be required to replace me.

April 15: Sue and I drove back to East Hartford to be given the second Pfizer shot. I was once again amazed at how easy it was. I have always absolutely hated even the idea of shots, but this was not a bad experience. A fairly sizeable percentage of the population, however, has bought into the idea that the vaccines are some kind of plot generated by the Big State.

April 17-18: The GNT qualifier was held over a weekend online on BBO. In the first round on Saturday our foursome played in a four-way, which was necessary because there was no way to do a three-way on BBO. Because it was so easy to cheat on BBO, we were supposed to provide our own way of communicating visually (via Zoom or some other device). There were no instructions as to how this should or could be done. It was left up to the players, each of whom was paired up with an opponent in the way that is done in matches that used screens. .

The Meyerson team. Bernie is on the right.

In the first half of the first round we met Steve Meyerson’s team for a twelve-board match. I was supposed to set up some kind of communication with Bernie Bendiksen. I had played against Bernie a few times at tournaments, but I did not know him well. He didn’t know how to do it, and neither did I. So, we just played. I think that the other six people figured out a way to do it.

We won easily. The margin was 30 victory points. That meant that we did not need to play in the second half of the first round. We did not need to come back until after lunch.

Meyerson’s team won the second half of the morning. So, they got to play in the second round after the lunch break

In the afternoon we had another four-way. In the first twelve-board match our opponents were the team captained by Dana Rossi, who was also the person with whom I was supposed to establish verbal communication. Dana was from southwest Connecticut; I had played against him quite a few times at sectionals, but I had never been friendly with him. He provided me with a link to a Zoom feed that he was controlling. I signed in on Yoga, my convertible laptop. I played the match online on my desktop computer. I was uncomfortable listening to Dana Russo talking to a little girl, presumably his daughter. He told her that they take dead animals to the incinerator to burn them.

We won again, this time by 35 victory points. So, we qualified to play in the quarterfinals on Sunday. We were matched up against Brad Mampe’s team. I was paired with his long-time partner Steve Willner. I had played against them once or twice, but I had not conversed with either of them. They seemed to play very little except in this event. Steve ran the Zoom feed. They had previously played a version of the Polish Club (as, in fact, so had Dan and his partner, Adam Lally). In this match they played a fairly standard version of 2/1.

This was a twenty-four board match. We lost the first half by 11 victory points. Steve was not around when the second half began, but he showed up a few minutes later. Ken and I had some chances in the second hand, but we each misplayed one hand. We lost the second half by 24.

The Mampe team defeated the team captained by Dan Jablonski in the semifinals. Their opponents in the final match would be the Xiao team, whose captain was Victor. They would play a 48-board match for first place at some later date, but they were both guaranteed to qualify for the GNT.

On April 19 I sent out another email on MailChimp for Sue Miguel. When I attempted to remove everyone from the audience that I was using so that I could replace them with C players, Donna Cone’s record did not move. In an online “chat” someone from MailChimp told me it was because her record had been “cleaned”, which meant that the email address was no longer valid. I had obtained this address from the Rhode Island Bridge Association (RIBA) several years earlier.

After I sent out the email I undertook to print a coupon for $3 off of a box of cat litter. Thus began the great encounter with the Geek Squad that has been recounted in detail here.

On April 24 I walked 2.5 miles, but I had to quit at that point because of the pain in my right foot. The pain persisted throughout the evening.

The next day I sent out another email for Sue Miguel.

On April 26 I listened to a very disturbing podcast on This American Life about how right-wingers are sabotaging the effort to get the nation to a state of “herd immunity”, in which enough people have immunity that new infections cannot find new hosts. It has been posted here.

May: On May 2 I sent the following email to my friend, Bob Sagor (introduced here), the captain of the team that finished third: “The Xiaos won C. They can’t play in both flights. You may get to play in the NABC!”

On Thursday, May 6, I mowed the lawn for the first time in 2024. As usual, the Honda lawnmower started on the first or second pull. I needed to stop after completing the parts of the yard that face Hamilton Court or North Street. I sat, stretched the IT band on my right leg, and rested a bit. I then mowed the rest of the lawn.

The flowers on the daffodils and tulips in the neighborhood were withering. New Englanders said that the plants were “going by.” I had never heard this expression before coming to Connecticut, and I have never seen it in print.

On May 8 Brad Mampe’s team beat Victor Xiao’s team in the final match of the Flight B qualifying tournament by 50 Victory Points! The third-place match was won by the team thrown together at the last minute by my friend and occasional partner, Bob Sagor. In fact, Bob’s team did attend the tournament, which was held online. They added Felix to their roster.

On May 11 Sue somehow hurt her left foot. I gave her the ankle brace that I had used a couple of times when I had sprained my ankle. Also, her ears were stopped up. Neither of these conditions lasted very long, but they made her even more miserable.

On May 13 I walked five miles with only two stretch breaks in 70 degree weather. I considered that a big improvement! Giacomo was having trouble getting up the steps from the basement to the house. I hated to do it, but I was going to need to bring the litter box upstairs.

The was the day that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) eliminated the mask guidelines “for most”. This was strictly a political move. Hundreds were still dying every day, but an incredibly large number of people resented being told to wear them. Good masks were an effective means of reducing the spread of the virus. The CDC had fumbled the ball when they said that any sort of face covering would do. Only later did their spokesmen indicate that the N95 masks were many times more effective than ordinary cotton ones.

On Wednesday, May 26, I had placed my convertible computer, Yoga, on the floor next to the nightstand in the bedroom just before I took a nap. I then set my Big Bubba mug on the nightstand. It fell on the computer. Even though Yoga was closed, the impact cracked the screen. It was no longer functional.

Two days later I ordered a Microsoft Surface Go laptop from Best Buy. Before the Pandemic there was a Best Buy store in Enfield, but it had been closed. I had to drive to Manchester, CT, to pick it up. I did not give it a name.

On May 31 the Hartford Bridge Club reopened. Eight pairs played in a Howell. Masks were required (thank goodness!) because of the policy of West Hartford.

June: On the first day of the new month my new laptop would not operate. The screen was all black or dark grey. I could see the cursor, but i could not get it to operate. I made an appointment and drove to Best Buy in Manchester. The guy at the Geek squad desk was sanguine. He told me that “It uploads changes every Tuesday; something must have happened so that it could not reboot.” I asked him if I should make an appointment now for the following Wednesday. He advised me to hold the power key, which was the second one from the right on the top row, down for ten seconds.

On June 3 the TSC had a Zoom meeting. The district will try to hold a tournament in the week before Labor Day in Warwick, RI. This was exciting news. I sent out three big emails about Warwick.

That evening I found Bob in the basement. I deduced that he was able to climb up and down the stairs. I moved the litter box back to the basement.

Sohail Hasan, a partner from a tournament in 2019, sent me an email that asked me to play with him in Warwick.

On June 5 Chen’s team beat Mampe’s in a close match in the Flight A final of the GNT qualifier. That would really have been something if Mampe’s team had won both A and B.

The internal modem on my desktop computer stopped working, but I got the Belkin external modem to function. 52 people unsubscribed to my emails. That was a very high number. It was 94 degrees outside that day. I found that I could no longer tolerate long walks in temperatures above 90. When I was in my fifties I had no problems running in 100+ temperatures. It was still very hot the next day.

Sue told me that she has seen a white circle in the middle of her field of vision twice. This could be very bad. I certainly hoped that it didn’t happen again.

On June 8 I committed to play on July 1 with Felix Springer at the Hartford Bridge Club. I needed to avoid getting too many masterpoints because my total was very close to 2500, which was the cutoff for the GNT in 2022. I needed to be under that total for the roster that was published on August 6, 2021.

While researching for the blog entry about the Mark Twain writing contest (posted here), I discovered that Dorothy Clark was one of the judges. I played against her many times in Simsbury, and I was also her partner one evening, as described here.

June 12th was my third straight day of pain-free five mile hikes. I committed to play on 6/21 with Eric Vogel in club qualifying game for the North American Pairs (NAP).

The next day I committed to play at the HBC with Trevor Reeves on June 29. That game got canceled later.

On June 14 I discovered that Sue’s cat, Bob, was able to use the ramp that led from the basement to the cat door and thence to the back yard. So, he evidently no longer needed the litter box.

I played with Eric online on June 21. We were horrible.

I learned on June 27 that I did not need to report for jury duty. In 2023 I would be 75, which would allow me to avoid jury duty forever. I never served on a jury. I came close once. I was selected as an alternate for a civil case about an automobile accident. It was scheduled for two days, but one of those was canceled because of a bomb threat. I was unable to attend on the rescheduling date, and so I was excused.

6/29 Bob Bertoni (introduced here) died at 5:45 AM. This was very hard to take. Bridge in New England will have a very difficult time recovering without him. Over the subsequent years I have thought of him very often. His obituary was posted here.

Sue played bridge at the HBC with John Willoughby. After the temperature topped out at 97 degrees, a front came through with a thunderstorm.

6/30 I played with Felix at club. There were nine tables. We won with 62+%, and I earned my Q for the NAP qualifier.

July: A lot happened in July. On the first Sue and I drove to Bradford, MA, for Bob Bertoni’s wake. I had to let Sue off and park several blocks away. I saw Peter, Lois DeBlois, Carolyn Weiser, and Paula Najarian, who, to my great surprise, had white hair. A lot of the bridge players from the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA) were also there. I introduced myself to Beth Bertoni and told her that I did not know what we were going to do without Bob. I really meant it, and in the ensuing months and years I learned that my concern was justified.

Sad news: O’Connor’s closed for good at the end of 2022.

On the way back to Enfield we stopped for supper at O’Connor’s Irish restaurant in Worcester. I had to let Sue off again before I found a parking sport a good way from the door. This was our first night out in over fifteen months. We wore masks until the food came. Most of the other diners acted as if the Pandemic had never happened.

Mrs. Brown’s giant chicken and vegetable pot pie.

I had the chicken pot pie and a Guiness. It was good, but not a lot better than what could be purchased at the grocery store and reheated. It was nice, however, to be in public and see people who were having a good time.

It was raining lightly when I walked out to retrieve the car. By the time that we reached the Mass Pike there were torrents of rain. I drove almost all thee way home with the windshield wipers on at the highest speed. Most of the time I had great difficulty seeing the lane indicators. This was the worst occasion for summertime driving that I ever experienced.

It continued to rain very hard on the next day. Enfield seemed to get more rain than nearby locations. The back yard was flooded, and a few puddles were evident in the basement. Never in the more than thirty years that we had lived in Enfield had water seeped into the basement. I struggled to understand where it came from. Evidently concrete is slightly porous, and when the soil is very wet the water finds its own level.

Sue borrowed (or otherwise procured) a Sears Wet/Dry Vacuum and showed me how to use it. The puddles were eliminated rather quickly.

On July 9 Saul Agranoff asked me if I could help with the EMBA website. It had been designed and supported by Bob Bertoni. I supplied him with the email address of the contact person at Bob’s company, Megahertz Computer. I also explained that I had never worked on the EMBA website, had no credentials for it, and was pretty certain that it was significantly different from NEBridge.org.

On July 10 I received emails from District 25 officials who were concerned about new ACBL rules for tournaments. They evidently required masks on all players and a distance of nine feet between tables.

My notes said that on the next day the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) announced a sectional in Stamford. I could find no details about when this was scheduled to occur. This struck me as very peculiar because I was a member of the board in 2021 (and the previous eight years). To my knowledge we had no meetings whatever during the Pandemic.

My notes also indicated that on the next day that I sent email to my steady partners. Because a large number of emails were deleted when I converted to the Asus box in the fall of 2023 (described here), I cannot locate a copy of this email, but my recollection is that I wanted to set up a regular schedule for online play at the HBC on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

On July 13 I played bridge at the H

I kept a couple of these masks to use while mowing my lawn in allergy season.

BC with Felix. Quite a few players had difficulties with the masks. The most common complaint was that they caused glasses to fog up. I had bought ten masks for $10 at Shoprite. They were sold by Hanes and made of cotton and were washable. They probably stopped not even one infected particulate, but they did not bother me even a little.

Ben and Ginny Bishop provided decorated masks for members of the HBC. Sue ordered one. I don’t know what happened to it.

On July 15 I renamed the blog entries that chronicled the story of my life as The 1948 Project. It was a takeoff on the somewhat controversial 1619 Project that was sponsored by the New York Times in 2019 concerning the role of slavery in the development of the United states.

On the same day a $63.75 charge from Slice appeared on my American Express card. This was for three pizzas that the cellphone that was in my pocket apparently ordered while I was on one of my five-mile walks. The pizzas were delivered, but I had refused them because I did not place or confirm the order.

In an open pairs game at the HBC on July 20 Donna Lyons (introduced here) and I scored 62%. It was Maria Van der Ree’s 90^th birthday.

On July 22 I played at the HBC with Joan Brault (introduced here). There were a lot of wild hands. Joan and I did not deal with them very well.

On July 24 Sue and I attended Maria’s birthday party. We found the event somewhat scary. No one was wearing masks. People had had enough of Covid-19, but the threat was a very long way from over.

Ken Leopold’s teenage son Sam had died at some point in July. I never learned the details. Sue and I attended the burial service in Avon. It was the first Jewish burial service that I had attended. A few people from the HBC were there: Ronit Shoham, Geof Brod, Y.L. Shiue, Marie Abate, and Felix Springer and his wife Helene. Ken gave a very touching speech about his son’s baseball heroics.

The virus had been raising its ugly head. On July 30 the ACBL responded by canceling all tournaments scheduled for August, which included the tournament that D25 hoped to old in Warwick. I immediately sent out an email with the same selection criteria as the on that I had previously sent to announce the cancellation of the tournament.

August: On August 2 I received an email from Viking (the cruise line) moving the departure date for our Grand European Tour to October 23. That would preclude attendance at the scheduled tournament in Mansfield, MA. I began investigating the alternatives.

My notes for August 5 say “Stood up by Joan. Had to drive back to pick up Sue Rudd.” I do not remember either of those events or what caused them. American Express reinstated the charges for the pizzas. I called, and they reopened the dispute. In the end I had to pay for one pizza. It was not worth it to fight this any more, but I deleted the Slice app from the Pixel 2. I have told this story many times, and I have yet to meet anyone else whose phone ordered anything for them.

After a Zoom call in the evening with Mark Aquino, who, after Bob Bertoni’s death, had decided to run for Regional Director, I felt very depressed about the future of bridge in New England and elsewhere.

On August 6 I rebooked the Viking tour to depart on October 11.

On the next day on behalf of Brenda Montague, the chair of the Nominating Committee, I sent out a set of emails to bridge players in New England soliciting volunteers for the job of vice-president. Trevor Reeves later talked with me about the possibility of applying. I don’t think that he went through with it.

On August 11 I attended the Zoom call with the three Regional Director candidates, David Moss, Mark Aquino, and Allan Graves. David was the District 24 Director from New York City. Allan Graves lived in St. Johnsbury, VT, but for years had only participated in NABC’s and international events. No one mentioned the word tournament. Allan argued that we should concentrate our efforts on trying to get people to play rubber bridge. I found the whole event very depressing.

After the bridge game on my 73^rd birthday a bunch of people who had played in the game joined Sue and me for lunch at Effie’s Place. In attendance were Lea Selig, Susan Seckinger, Lois McOmber, Jeanne Striefler, Maria Van der Ree, and Fred Gagnon. We ate outside. I think that I had a Reuben sandwich. It was nice to have any kind of a social occasion.

The next day a “war room” Zoom meeting of D25 officials was held. Carole Weinstein, Carolyn Weiser, Jack Mahoney, Peter Marcus, Sue Miguel, Joe Brouillard, and Sally Kirtley atttended. Peter wanted D25 to cancel all tournaments for 2021 and 2022! Nobody took that suggestion seriously. The qualification tournaments for the NAP would be held online. Carole called the decision a “no-brainer”. I thought that it was a bad idea to decide that anything would be played online if an alternative was possible.

On August 19 I reluctantly voted for Mark Aquino for Regional Director. He won.

I learned on August 20 that airline reservations had been made by Viking for the trip in October. I started doing some serious research about the ports of call on the cruise, which would start in Amsterdam and end in Budapest.

SBC games were played at Eno Hall, the Simsbury Senior Center.

On August 21 I sent an email to players in the vicinity of Simsbury to determine whether they would be interested in resuming the games of the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). It is posted here. I received a lot of positive responses.

The next day Hurricane Henri passed through Connecticut. Enfield received only a little bit of rain, but floods were reported in Vernon and Manchester.

On August 24 I learned that the SBC will have been turned over to Sally Kirtley as of September 15. Ken did not want to direct the games. I asked her to verify the schedule with Eno Hall before I announced it.

On August 25 I sent an email to SBC subscribers that we would not be allowed to validate vaccinations on site. I definitely did not want to play bridge with anyone who had not been vaccinated.

On August 30 Med Colket came up with a work-around. We could change SBC games to invitational instead of open so that I could validate vaccinations that were sent to me through emails. I could also automatically register players whom I had seen play at the HBC.

Aaaaargh! The U.S. has been removed from the white list by the European Union because of the recent uptick in the number of Covid-19 cases here. I began to wonder whether the cruise would be called off and, if not, whether we would be quarantined before boarding the ship.

September: On the first day of the month tropical depression Ida arrived in CT late at night. The rest of this heroic story has been told here.

On September 3 three European countries (Norway, Sweden, and Italy) began requiring tourists from the U.S. to quarantine. The problem was the new Delta variant was nearly twice as transmissible as the original strain, which had spread at an incredible rate before the vaccinations began. .

On September 5 the leaders of D25 were considering—via an exchange of emails—whether to cancel the tournament in Mansfield in November. Most people seem to be leaning in that direction.

On the following day Tom Corcoran, Sue and I decided to postpone the cruise until the spring because of the threat of quarantining in Europe. This would also allow Tom to spend his 70th birthday with his family in Vermont.

On August 8 the cruise was changed to begin on May 5 and end on May 22. Sue made the arrangements while I was playing bridge at the HBC. This period was chosen because no bridge tournaments were scheduled then. The new cruise started in Budapest and ended in Amsterdam. The other ports were the same or nearly so. This was not the last change in our plans, but I actually did go on the cruise on those dates. The bizarre details have been posted here.

On September 10 the HBC restarted the Saturday afternoon game. Peter Katz, my long-time Saturday partner, agreed to play with me.

On September 10 Sue and I went to the picnic for the Locke cousins. I sat by myself because I heard that some of the attendees had refused to get vaccinated, and no one in attendance wore a mask.

On September 14 for the first time ever my Honda lawnmower would not start. I later learn that there was gas or oil in the air filter. On the next day it started, and Sue hired a local guy to pick it up, change the oil, and check it out.

The inaugural Friday afternoon open game at HBC on September 17 drew only six pairs. I played with Trevor.

On the next day the first Saturday afternoon game at the reopened HBC was held. Both Mike and Susan Smith and Ken and Lori Leopold attended. There were five tables.

On September 20 I learned that changing the date of the trip had cost Tom $3K. I did not understand why, but there was not much I could do about it.

Giacomo surprised me by climbing back up on the couch. In his younger days he nonchalantly walked up onto the couch. He also executed a very tentative “mighty leap”².

On September 21 the mechanic delivered the lawnmower and only charged $125. It ran very well. It was (and still is in 2024) the best lawnmower by far that I ever bought.

I realized on September 23 that I officially had exceeded my life expectancy at birth (73.1 years). I told people this at the HBC. No one seemed interested at all.

The cats had been acting weird for the last week or two. They no longer associated with each other. Bob stayed outside all day and night. He only came in only for meals or storms. Giacomo has returned to his throne on the back of the couch. He has taken to biting at his back legs and spine area. Who knows why?

On the same day the EC voted 9-3-1 to cancel Mansfield. I was the 1.

On September 24 the forecast on WTIC radio at 4:30 AM predicted a low of 75 and a high of 69.

The next day I discovered a sensitive spot on Giacomo’s back. For the first time ever he bit me.

On September 26 I was on the winning team of the first Swiss event at the reopened HBC. I played with Ann Hudson. Our teammates were Trevor, and Felix. We won by four victory points with a blitz in the last round against weak competition. I made made three bidding errors, but none of them cost us, and one helped us. 1♣-1♠-1NT-2♣–♥-2NT made 3; 2♣ by Ann was a relay to 2D (XYZ)³.Ann wanted to sign off in diamonds.

On September 27 I walked five miles without stopping for first time in months in perfect weather.

On September 30 I changed dentists because Dr. Peter Coombs did not take ConnectiCare. My new dentist was Dr. Bill Cummiskey.

October: On October 11 I canceled Chewy.com order of Advantage II, but it was delivered four days later. The charge was refunded on October 18.

On October 13 I saw Boris Godunov (an opera by Modest Mussorgsky recorded live in HD at the Met) at Cinemark⁴ at Enfield Square. Only one other person attended. Since that person was at least thirty feet away from me I took off my mask. I also saw two employees and one other person who was there to see a movie.

On October 15 I sent out the invitations for the first Simsbury game to 72 vaccinated people.

The next day Linda Starr helped me make boards at the HBC for the first game at Simsbury. Peter Katz and I finished first. There were only five other pairs, but it was a strong field. So far 4.5 tables are committed for the first game at the SBC.

On October 19 I got the points that I needed to finally make Gold Life Master even though I played poorly with John Calderbank.

Sally Kirtley set me an email that Eno “cannot accommodate SBC” on October 20. I had to postpone the first game, for which we had five tables.This was hard to take.

On October 20 I checked to make sure that everyone saw my email about the cancellation. Felix and Trevor agreed to play with Ken and me in the GNT qualifier next spring. HBC announced that it will drop mask requirement as of Friday. I had absolutely no intention of abandoning my mask.

On October 22 I discovered that Bob had a bump on his right shoulder that he did not like being touched. Sue was convinced that it was a bite. It did not feel like that to me.

I played with Sally Kirtley and learned that Eno Hall canceled our game because it did not have a janitor scheduled for October 20. Eight pairs had so far agreed to play on October 27.

On October 24 the HBC held its annual meeting on Zoom. Trevor had asked me to serve as a trustee, and I had agreed to a three-year commitment.

On October 27 Donna Feir let us use the boards that were made for the Tuesday night that was canceled because not enough people registered. It was Tom Corcoran’s birthday. Sue and I talked with him and his kids on Zoom. I copied the wrong .pbn⁵ file onto my thumb drive to give to Sally. I was ten minutes late at Simsbury because of Sue Rudd. Ken and I tied for first (out of eleven pairs) with Felix and Trevor.

On October 29 I discovered that Bob had one or two ticks.

November: We assigned November 1 as the birth date for two of our cats, Giacomo, and Woodrow. So, we celebrated Giacomo’s eighteenth birthday on 11/01/21. This was a big one. Both Woodrow and Rocky had made it to 18, but each died shortly thereafter. So, from now on Giacomo was playing with the house’s money.

In other cat news: Bob would not come into the house. Sue put food and water in bowls outside for him and made up a bed for him among all of her junk piled up outside of the blue door to the kitchen. Maybe he was afraid of Giacomo. Maybe he was afraid of me. Maybe he was just crazy.

On Tuesday, November 2. I drove into the HBC before the morning game and used the HBC’s dealing machine to make boards for the SBC game the next evening. John Calderbank and I then had a 59 percent game, a real coup for us.

I somehow managed to pull a huge tick off of Bob’s right shoulder. Sue claimed that he still had a smaller one on the left side of hs neck, but I had not seen it.

On Wednesday evening we had 3 1/2 tables at the evening game at the SBC. I had used the correct pbn file this time.

On November 6 the grey cat that sometimes roamed our neighborhood appeared. Bob stayed inside.

On November 7 an astounding sixteen teams played in the Swiss at the HBC! Food was provided, and the players were definitely ready to party.

I picked a second tick off of Bob’s right shoulder. I could not find anything on his left shoulder. This might have been the best day of the year at the Wavada household.

On November 12 Bob returned to the family. He got up on Sue’s chair without help while she was sitting on it. Sue was absolutely delighted.

On November 23 the first meeting of the new HBC Planning Committee was held on Zoom. John Willoughby, the new vice-president, ran the meeting. I learned that there would be a “rainbow” event for clubs in January. Gold, silver, red, and black points would be awarded ⁶

Sue has taken to sleeping on my chair in the living room because Bob would not leave her chair. Why, you may ask, does she sleep prefer to sleep on a chair rather than a bed?

On November 24 I sent a long email to the people on the EC to explain what I had been doing in my role as webmaster, database manager, and other things before the Pandemic. The rest of my frustrating but ultimately successful attempt to resign from these responsibilities has been described here in excruciating detail.

November 27 was another great day. U-M defeated Ohio State 42-27. Michigan had no takeaways and only punted twice. They had seven drives that ended in touchdowns. Needless to say, I did not watch the game, but I wished that I had. I feasted on lots of replays of the many highlights. Michigan finished the regular season 11-1 and would meet Iowa on December 4 for the conference championship.

11/29 For some stupid reason the TSC announced that it would meet on Zoom on December 15, a Wednesday evening. My protests that this was the ONLY time all week that Sally and I could not attend fell on deaf ears. I don’t know if Sally emphasized this, but I certainly did. was really upset about this.

December: Sue and I got our booster shots for the Pfizer vaccine at the local CVS.

12/3 I had a minor pain in my shoulder and neck; the only reason to mention it was because I had no known injuries there. The passport that I planned to use on the October trip would expire before I needed it for the rescheduled one in May. I had researched what was required. I took a photo of myself in the size and format required. I mailed it with all the other materials, including my old passport. The State Department did not accept the photo and sent the package back to me.

On the next day Michigan beat Iowa 42-3. The Wolverines were champions of the Big 10 for the first time since they started the championship game.

On December 6 the new stove that Sue purchased arrived and was installed. The burners are, in my opinion, much too hot, but I didn’t know what we could do about it. My neck felt much better.

12/7 I went to Walgreen’s and bought a new passport photo. They guaranteed that it would be accepted. Evidently there was a website that examined the image and validated it. I could not find my old passport.

The next day I found the old passport under my chair in living room. It had apparently dropped through the cushions. I mailed the forms back in.

Ken and I scored more than 72 percent at the SBC bridge game. That might have been the best score that I had ever recorded up to that point.

The space to the right of the Gold LM certificate will probably always be empty.

On December 10 I received Gold LM certificate from the ACBL and attached it to the east wall in my office below the other ones. I don’t expect to win any more

On the next Tuesday Donna Feir needed me to make boards for the morning open pairs game while she got the room set up. I did so. I only had time to make 5 boards for the Wednesday night game at the SBC. I made the rest of boards by hand. Unfortunately, when I did so I made boards #21 and 22 the same. Ken directed and Margie Garilli kept score on the BridgeMate.

On December 16 the EC voted on Zoom to move the Royal STaC to April of 2022, to cancel the Presidential Regional ordinarily held in February, and to hold two four-day regionals in May. One would be a free tournament structured along the lines of the Gold Mine held in 2019⁷. The other would be open.

On December 17 President Biden postponed closing U.S airports to people from countries that were infected by the Omicron virus.

On December 22 I could not get dealing machine to work. At the SBC game we played using an old deck that had been given to me years earlier. The players did not like this much.

In the little shelf on the north wall of my office I found a package of McCormick’s Meat Marinade. On Christmas day I used it to marinate a spoon roast that Sue and I feasted on. I put Bob up on my lap both in the office and the living room. He really liked the former when I petted him with both hands, but I was not able to get much work done when I did so.

By December 26 Omicron accounted for 71 percent of the cases of Covid-19 in the US. The number of new cases eclipsed 200,000 per day. The holiday season turned into a super-spreader event.

I realized that I must be allergic to Bob—sneezing and blowing nose all day. I bought ten N95 masks at Home Depot for $23. The CDC finally admitted that simple face coverings were better than nothing, but the N95 masks were tremendously more effect

I encountered no problems whatever in making thee boards for the SBC game. I played with Felix in the open pairs game at the HBC. We almost won; one different decision against Tom Joyce would have done it.

On December 29 I had a 64 percent game in the open pairs at the HBC with Eric. In the last game of the year at the SBC 3 tables, Ken and I scored 65%.

On December 30 at an emergency meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) on Zoom. Carole Amaio was a riot: “Can you hear me? I broke my wine glass. Shit!” We decided to require masks starting on Monday.

On December 31 over 500,000 new cases were reported, the most of entire Pandemic. The only good sign was the fact that hospitalizations and deaths were not as prevalent as with the original virus. However, both vaccinated people and those who had already had Covid-19 were susceptible to Omicron.

U-M lost to Georgia 38-11. The football team had a great year, but they were not (yet) in Georgia’s class. Four bowl games were canceled in 2021.

1. This treadmill was given to me by Tom Corcoran. My first treadmill was purchased second-hand from someone who had never used it. I found them on Craig’s List. The belt on that one broke after I had used it regularly in the winter and foul weather for several years. Tom brought the second one from his house in Wethersfield. His wife Patti had used it for a while. He somehow arranged for removal of the old one and installation of this much better one. Incidentally, I claim to be the only person who has ever broken two treadmills. Prove me wrong.

2. Giacomo was the only cat that we ever had who attempted to make the “mighty leap” from the couch on which he tended to spend his days to my easy chair where he liked to sit on my lap while I was watching television. When in September 2021 he executed the “tentative” version of the leap, I realized that his legs and body were so long that he could actually reach the armrest that he landed on by just stretching out to his full length.

3. XYZ is a kind of new-minor forcing. After any three bids 2♣ is a relay to 2♦, usually to show invitational values. A ♦ rebid is an artificial game-force.

4. In December of 2023 the twelve-theater Cinemark complex in Enfield Square closed for good. At that point it became a twenty-minute drive to see a movie or, in my case,an HD opera.

5. Files with the extension “.pbn” (portable bridge notation) can be read by the Dealer4 software that runs the dealing machine at the HBC. At first I had Linda make some of these files for me using software on the HBC’s computer. In 2023 I discovered free software available for download that allowed me to make them on my computer. In both cases the files generated were completely random.

6. I am pretty sure that the “rainbow” event was later called a Royal STaC.

7. The free Gold Mine never happened. I do not remember why.

2008-2019 Bridge Partners at Tournaments Part 1: Steady

Posted on December 25, 2021 by Mike

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

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 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.

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.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Sagor, Bob

2008-2019 Partners at the Hartford Bridge Club Part 2

2013-2018 Bridge: The Larry Weiss Award

2021 Part 2: The Pandemic Strikes Back

2008-2019 Bridge Partners at Tournaments Part 1: Steady