Still under construction. The first event of 2025 was a five-day mishmash scheduled for Mansfield, MA, from Tuesday February 18 through Saturday February 22. It featured a limited regional for non-Life Masters and a contemporaneous open sectional. I was not … Continue reading
Still under construction.
The first event of 2025 was a five-day mishmash scheduled for Mansfield, MA, from Tuesday February 18 through Saturday February 22. It featured a limited regional for non-Life Masters and a contemporaneous open sectional. I was not eligible for the former and was not interested in the latter because of the length of the drive, the cost and location of the hotel, had the lack of interesting events.
It also included qualifying tournaments for each of the four divisions of the Grand National Teams event. I definitely would have been interested in putting together a team for the GNT if I could play in Flight B, which had always been limited to players with less than 2,500 masterpoints. At the last Executive Committee meeting in the fall Mark Aquino, the Regional Director, had announced that the limit would be raised to 3,000, but he emphasized that it had not officially been changed yet, and there was some opposition. So, I used Google to find the official Conditions of Contest. That led me to this website1, which clearly stated on page 4 that the limit was still 2,500. A few weeks before the event I learned that the CofC was erroneous. Evidently whoever was responsible for posting it never bothered to fix it. When I mentioned this to Sally Kirtley, the tournament manager, she was concerned. She told me that whoever was managing the partnerships could probably find a partner for me. I said that it was too late to put a reasonably good team together. I had no intention of driving all the way to Manchester to play in a one-day Swiss2 in which I had no chance of doing well. The worst imaginable situation for me would have been to be part of a team that, even if it did well, the other members might have no interest in representing the district at the North American Bridge Championships in the summer.
So, since I was no longer on either the Executive Committee or the Board of Delegates, I had no reason to attend the event in Mansfield.
The district’s first real regional tournament was scheduled for the Wellsworth Hotel in Southbridge, MA, from Tuesday, April 22, through Sunday, April 27. The 35-mile drive was by far the easiest of all the tournaments for me, and the schedule included plenty of team games (except for on Saturday. I was therefore very interested in playing there.
I learned more than a month before the event that Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider wanted to team up with me on every day except Thursday. That sounded like an excellent plan. The endurance of the 76-year-old me was much less than it had been earlier. A day for napping in the middle would be greatly appreciated.
I quickly enlisted Eric Vogel as a partner. He committed to play on Tuesday and Wednesday, but he was not available on the weekend. He later needed to rescind his commitment. I was, fortunately, able to get Abhi Dutta to fill in. Mike Heider told me that Helen Benson3, with whom he sometimes played at the Newtown Bridge Club, might be available. I contacted her, and she agreed. She played a much simpler convention card than most that I was accustomed to, but after a fairly lengthy exchange of ideas by email, we agreed upon a very limited set of conventions.
On Monday evening I had purchased a Caesar salad and a chicken wrap at Big Y in Enfield. My recollection was that the hotel’s luncheon buffet was not that good, and I was not enthusiastic about standing in line. On Tuesday morning I left the house at about 8:10. I did not anticipate a lot of traffic, but I was ready to go, and so I left. I listened to Hector Berlioz’s epic opera, Les Troyens. As usual, I stopped at McDonald’s in West Stafford for a sausage biscuit with egg. It cost almost a dollar more than I paid in Hartford, but it was quick and tasty. I arrived at the Wellsworth a little after 9 o’clock. Jim, Mike, and Eric all arrived a few minutes later.
We were scheduled to play in the Open Swiss on both days. On Tuesday we had a very unfortunate draw in the morning. We began by playing against the wunderkinds, Eric and Jeff Xiao and their formidable partners, professional David Caprera4, and another fine player, Max Siline. We lost by 18 victory points, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Our schedule in the rest of the matches was relatively easy. We did not face any of the other top teams, and in the last two rounds we even faced teams from Flight C. In the end we as a B team finished in second place behind only the Xiao team. We were award 6.3 gold points. I was in a good mood for the drive home, but I had started well at regional tournaments before and too often had seen poor results later.
The drive to Southbridge on Wednesday was nearly identical to the drive on Tuesday. The only difference was that I listened to the part of the opera set in Carthage, and it featured Dido rather than Cassandra.
Abhi arrived only a few minutes before nine, but we had played together enough that we only had to review a few items.
Because there were two Swiss events on Wednesday (Open and under 2500), I expected the number of teams in the Open event to be smaller than on Tuesday. I was wrong. There were seventeen, three more than on the previous day. The format was seven rounds of seven-board matches. We were in the lowest strat, which was labeled Y. We won our first match against an A team, but we then lost to Sheila Gabay’s team, but only by four imps. In the third round we tied a team that we had defeated on Tuesday. We had a win, a loss, and a tie, but our total victory points was above average.
We won the next three rounds. In the last round we played against two old friends of mine, Chris Apitz and Ellen Dilbert. We lost the match by 18, but it would have been a lot closer if I had not made a defensive error.on the second-to-last hand. Ellen was playing a doubled 5♦ contract. She had one trump and ♣9 on the board as well as some hearts and spades. Clubs had never been led. She led low to the 9. I had the ace and a small one. Thinking that my partner could beat the 9, I ducked, and it held the trick. We set them 500, but if it had been 800, we would have only lost the match by 4.
As it was we finished with the very respectable score of 74 victory points, which placed us third in X and second in Y. If I had played that ace, we would have won both X and Y. Still, we earned another 5.94 gold points.
On the way home I stopped at the Big Y near the McDonald’s in West Stafford to pick up a salad and a wrap for lunches on Friday and Saturday. I was shocked to discover that all of the other stores in that strip mall were unoccupied.
I stayed home on Thursday and took multiple naps.
Newton
Warwick
Norwich
1. The erroneous CofC was still available through Google as of April of 2025.
2. Prior to 2020 the GNT Flight B qualifier always was spread over two days. The second day was a four-team knockout. There was no GNT in 2020. In 2021 through 2024 it had been held online using a format that I tolerated in 2021. I planned to play in 2022, but the pair that had agreed to play with Ken Leopold and me reneged on the agreement. I was not eligible for Flight B in 2023 and 2024.
3. She went by Helen, but her real name was Elena DiBissi Benson. She was born in the Abruzzo region of Italy. I told her that I had been there. It was true, but on the South Italy bus tour that Sue and I took in 2011 we only drove through the southern part of the region on our way from Tivoli to Vieste.
4. I happened to overhear David, while he was talking with Eric and Jeff about the card that they would be playing, mention that he was born and raised in Southbridge, and his father was the town attorney.