Johnston Sectional in March: In January of 2024 Abhi Dutta asked me to play with him at the Rhode Island sectional tournament scheduled for March 2-3. I could not play on Saturday because it was my wife Sue’s birthday, but I agreed to play in the Swiss on Sunday. Abhi was out of town for most of the month of February, but he contacted me late in the month to report that he had acquired teammates. In Johnston I learned that our teammates were the DiOrios, Lou and Megan. I had worked with Megan on the committee for the NABC event in Providence in 2022 (introduced here), and I had played on a team with Lou some time before that.
I was not sanguine about our chances. The partnership of Abhi and me had really recorded only one good result (described here), and that was nineteen months earlier. Our more recent games were not memorable. I also did not remember great successes recorded for either Lou or Megan. The fact that we drew #13 did not raise my hopes, although I always remind people that for Wilt Chamberlain that number was reportedly lucky 20,000 times.2
In the first round Abhi and I played against Al Votolato and someone whom I did not know. The very first hand was weird. Al’s partner opened 1♦ in the second seat; Abhi passed; Al responded 1♠; I passed, and so did Al’s partner! Abhi made the mistake of doubling, which gave Al a chance to bid 2♦, which was the final contract. I asked Al if they had an agreement that allowed his partner to pass his response. He said that he was as surprised as I was. His partner at first defended his pass, but when he understood the situation he said that he did not realize that he had passed.
In the end, even though they were an A team, and we were a B team, we defeated them 29-0, which was a “blitz” that converted to the maximum victory point score of 20. We scored at least one imp on six of the seven hands, and the seventh hand was a push.
In the second round we played another A team, Dan Jablonski and Cilla Borras. They were both very good players whom I had played against several times. I made a horrible mistake in playing a 5♣ contract that Abhi put me in. For some reason I thought that we had nine trumps, not eight. I was therefore quite confident of making the bid when I dropped Dan’s queen on the second round of trumps. A little later, however, I mistakenly led a low diamond from the board. Cilla, who was on my right, ruffed it, and I underruffed even though I had a diamond! I took the requisite eleven tricks, but I was penalized one trick for revoking. Abhi insisted that he warned me when I did it.1
This faux pas cost us 11 imps. We would have lost the match anyway, but our running total of victory points was four fewer—21 as opposed to 25. This was not all bad because we got to play a much weaker B team in the third round, and we beat them 31-0—another blitz.
In the last round before lunch we played a much better B team, Mike McDonald and Tom Floyd. We beat them by 12 imps. At the break we had amassed 56 out of a possible 80 victory points. That was good enough for second place.
I had ordered a salad for lunch. I ate about half of it as well as a bag of chips and a Diet Coke. I sat by myself. I don’t know where my teammates went.
In the fifth round we played the team that was in first place. It included Sheila Gabay and Alan Watson, who had won both sessions of the pairs game on Saturday. The foursome had blitzed both of their last two opponents. Abhi and I played against another very fine pair, Max Siline and Carrie Liu. On the first hand I made 3NT, and our Sheila and Alan had a misunderstanding in their bidding. That was enough for a ten-imp swing, but we would have won the match anyway. The final score was 30-13. Abhi and I had no negative scores at all. I was wondering if it were possible to lose with no negative scores (Yes!), and I was worried that I would find out. I had played against Sheila’s teams at least six or seven times, and I had never won before.
I thought that I played pretty well in the sixth round, but we lost by 16 points to a very good B team. It seemed to me that most of the problems were at the other table. I was most proud of the fact that two of our twelve imps came from when I passed in the fourth seat.
In the last round we played against people whom I did not know. I again passed in the fourth seat, and this time it was worth five imps. Since our margin of victory in this match was only nine imps, I was very surprised to learn that we had won the event by two victory points over both the Siline team and the team from the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC)—Tom Gerchman, Linda Starr, and Bob and Ann Hughes. I was still in a foul mood because at the very end of the last hand Abhi had trumped a trick that I would have won anyway. That mistake cost us six imps, which would have given us two additional victory points. Even so, we brought home 7.15 silver masterpoints.
I did not receive much satisfaction from this result. I had made one huge and embarrassing mistake, and Abhi had made several smaller ones. However, out teammates were very excited about winning. They even asked Tom Gerchman (of all people) to take a photo of the four of us with a cellphone. He had a great deal of difficulty with the assignment.
Was our victory a fluke? I thought so at the time, but after examine the results, I am more inclined to think that we were the best team that day with that set of cards in a fairly weak field. We played all but one of the top teams. We never played against a C team. We beat the top-seeded team decisively in our match with them. We could easily have had quite a few more victory points than we did.
I still had a ninety-minute drive ahead of me. The traffic was slow, and for the first half hour the sun was really brutal even though I had on sunglasses and pulled down the visor as low as I could get it. The high temperature that day was 67 degrees.
On the way home I stopped at Big Y in Stafford and bought a cake for Sue. I should have done it so she could have enjoyed a piece on her birthday, but this was much better than nothing.
St. Patrick’s Day Sectional in Orange, CT: Bill Segraves did a tremendous job of setting up and running this tournament, which occurred the weekend of March 15-17. I am glad that he took the job of president. I would not have had the energy to pull something like this off. The date was the best that could be arranged, but it conflicted with the first weekend of the NABC spring tournament in Louisville. So, undoubtedly some of the best players could be expected to be at that event. That date also meant that it might be difficult to find a director. Robert Neuhart from Troy, NY, was hired. I had no previous familiarity with him.
The design and promotion of this tournament was much better than what was done for the previous ones. I thought that the St. Patrick’s Day theme, which I in fact suggested, was a little overdone, but people seemed to be having fun with it. I planned on wearing on Sunday my bright green sweater that my dad bought in Ireland. Before play started Bill paraded around in a hooded green jumpsuit and a green mask. To goose the Sunday attendance the games on Sunday were designated to support the Grass Roots fund.
A decision was made to increase the masterpoint limit for the Friday and Saturday limited pairs games to 750 masterpoints, but only non-Life Masters were allowed to play. This turned out to be a good decision. The limited games, which had been a problem, were pretty well attended throughout.
I decided to play all three days. Eric Vogel agreed to play with me in the pairs games on Friday and Saturday. I had difficulty finding a suitable partner and teammates for the Sunday Swiss. I sent out a solicitation to my usual list of potential partners, but the only responses that I received were from Buz Kohn, Joan Brault, and Terry Lubman. Terry said that she was still in Florida. Buz was the first to respond positively, but he backed out shortly thereafter. So, I agreed to play with Joan. No one expressed any interest in teaming up with us. So, I sent a request to the email address for partnerships that was on the flyer. Bill replied with an email that indicated that he would find someone. He eventually assigned us to play with Ivan Smirnov from Staten Island and Joe Lanzel from Foxborough, MA. I told Ivan that I would be wearing a bright green sweater with “Ireland” on the chest.
I commuted all three days by myself. Each trip to Orange took a little over an hour, but that included my usual stop at the McDonald’s in Cromwell to purchase a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich. The price at the McD at the end of the ramp for Exit 21 charged a dime less than the one in Hartford. However, the man taking the order on Sunday entered it as “sausage biscuit, add folded egg.” The cost was almost $1 less.
I left each day at about 8:25 and arrived at 9:30. The traffic was heavier on Friday, but it did not really slow me down. A strange thing happened with my car in the mornings. I was accustomed to turning on the front window defogger on cold days. This heated up the car on Saturday, but on Sunday it blew nothing but cold air.4
The return trips were as uneventful as the morning drives, except for the Sunday evening drive. The line of cars backed up on the parkway at the exit that led to I-91 north was more than a mile long. It took me more than ninety minutes to complete that trip.
I decided to wear a mask throughout the tournament. Almost no one except Bill and Frank Blachowski wore one.
Since I arrived on Friday morning before Eric did, I got in line to buy our entry fee. For some reason the director did not allow purchasing of both sessions. I charged the first session. Eric later bought the afternoon session. There was no problem with the transactions on Friday and Saturday. However, the computer connection with the card reading device did not work on Sunday. and so everyone had to pay in cash. I was the customer for whom the malfunction first was discovered. I don’t know if the problem was ever fixed.
The first thing that I noticed about the pairs games on Friday was that Peter Marcus was in attendance and was actually playing with Bill Segraves to fill out the movement. I had seen him at many tournaments, but I had only seen him play bridge once, and that was at the HBC.
The second peculiarity was that there were no clocks to keep track of the time remaining in each round. I cannot remember ever playing in a tournament in which there were no clocks. I never heard why this was the case in Orange. Perhaps the unit has depended on the directors to bring them.
Once play began it was pretty evident that, although the attendance was good (seventeen tables), the field was not as strong as it usually was. That was definitely reflected in the results. Eric and I were in first place after six rounds, but in the last round we were passed by a C team from the HBC, John Lloyd and Donna Simpson. We still won 5.84 points. I did not think that we played particularly well.
Eric and I had two egregious bidding mistakes in the morning session, but only one of them hurt us. Eric had apparently not reviewed our card thoroughly enough.
On one hand we were on defense after I had opened 1♠. I led the ace and then the queen. Eric ruffed it. After the hand I explained that when I led ace and then queen of a suit that I had bid, it meant that I also had the king. He asked why I didn’t just lead the king after the ace. I said that if I did, he would not know that I also had the queen.
Our level of play did not diminish in the afternoon, but our results dropped off a lot. I did not circle a single hand on the scorecard. We finished above 50 percent, but we did not make the overalls, and so we did not get any points.
We actually played better on Saturday. We earned over 9.37 masterpoints over the course of two days. That was not close to Rich DeMartino’s total. He won all three pairs games in which he participated.
We might have gone over the ten-point mark if Eric had not made an uncharacteristic blunder near the end. Acting as declarer, he intended to set up a cross-ruff for the last three tricks, but he discarded the wrong card from his hand. That left him with a heart and two trumps in both hands.
A strange situation occurred on Saturday. The opponent on my right was about to declare a hand. His partner was in the act of setting down the dummy when he accidentally dropped most of his cards on the floor. I did not look, but he said that some were face-up. He said that he was not able to get down on his knees to pick them up, and therefore he called the director, who was also not very spry. I volunteered to put my lead on the table and gather together the cards, but the director insisted on doing it himself.
Eric and I bid a slam in spades after he had opened 2♣. He had hearts and spades. We decided to change our response to the 2♠ follow-up so that the relay to 2NT could be broken if responder had spade support. This eliminated the ambiguity of the sequence 2♣-22♦-2♠-2NT-32♥-4♠. Previously it could have meant signing off in spades or Kickback for hearts.
Ordering lunch was embarrassing. I only wrote the six letters of my last name, but on both occasions the result was almost unreadable.
By the way, both lunches were good. The only problem with Friday’s salad with lots of meat and cheese on Friday was that the only beverage available was a small bottle of water. The sandwich on Saturday was even meatier. This caterer also brought cans of soft drinks. There were only two Diet Cokes, but I managed to claim one. The pizza on Sunday was OK, but the pairs game was still in process when the ninety-six people playing in the Swiss went to lunch. Usually there is enough pizza for seconds, but by the time that the pairs players ate, the teams were back in combat.
Our first round was against Debbie Prince’s team. We won by seven. In the second round we were blasted by 26 imps by a very good team. Joan and I thought that we had more or less held our own, but no hands showed positive results. Our teammates failed to set a 4♠ contract that I could see no way to make. They also bid an impossible slam that got doubled. We won the third round by 13 imps over a C team.
After lunch we played Mike Heider’s team. The results on two 3NT contracts startled me. On one I went down, and they made it at the other table. On the other they made it at our table with two overtricks, but our teammates did not even make the bid. In the fifth round we faced the team from the HBC that had done well in Johnston. Joan and I played against Ann and Bob Hughes. We thought that we had done pretty well, but we were worried about one hand on which we bid 3♠ but made 4. In reality, that hand was our only positive result in an extremely painful 17-imp loss.
Halfway through the sixth round against a team that obviously was over its head I lost interest and started playing badly. Nevertheless, we won the last two matches by 21 and 5 points to finish with four wins and 70 victory points—exactly average.
Our worst hand all day was the last one. We were playing Cappelletti, the only notrump defense that Joan will play. Cindy Lyall, sitting West, opened 1NT, and Joan doubled for penalty. I had a flat hand with only one honor, a queen. Cindy ended up making 3NT for 380 points. It would have been better for them to bid and make 3NT, but at the other table Joe went down in 1NT. Since I did nothing except follow suit and discard the four spot cards in hearts that I was dealt, I have no way to know whether Joan’s defense or Joe’s declarer play was more to blame for this fiasco.
Shekhar and Shashank won the afternoon session of the 0-750 pairs! They won almost three silver points in their first day at a tournament.
The attendance at the tournament was good through the entire weekend. That proved to me that good planning, good marketing, and a good schedule are still the keys to successful attendance in the world of tournament bridge.
1. If Abhi said that he warned me, and I am sure that he did. However, if I were the dummy, and my partner did what I did, I would have said, “Wait a minute. Are you sure that you did not have any diamonds? You underruffed!” I take great pride the fact that none of my partners has revoked in more than fifteen years.
2. In his 1991 book, A View From Above Wilt claimed to have slept with 20,000 different women during his life.
3. In the period after the pandemic I have had trouble getting teammates from the HBC. Perhaps the problem is the timing. Some arrangements are made many months in advance; many are made at the very last minute. My efforts seem to fall in the middle.
4. I brought the car into Lia, my dealership, on Friday, March 22. They gave me a lift home in their shuttle. I had only been there a minute when they called to tell me that the heater was working perfectly. I had tried it on Tuesday and Wednesday without success. There must be more to this story.
One of the very first tournaments that I ever attended was in the Fiesta Regional in Waterbury, CT, in the summer of 2007. I was planning to play with Dick Benedict (introduced here) in the Bracketed Swiss on Labor Day. On one of the weekend days I drove to the Holiday Inn that hosted the tournament by myself in hope of picking up a partner for both sessions of pairs. The person at the Partnership Desk was Carol Schaper (introduced here), whom I knew from the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC).
Carol matched me up with John Morrin to play in the 299er game in the morning. Dick dropped by the 299er room and said that he was glad that John and I had met. We played pretty well, but we failed to win any points because of a defensive lapse. One of us held the ace in a side suit and the other held the king. We both avoided the suit, and the opponents made a contract that they should not have.
I have played against John many times at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC), at which he still was playing regularly in 2023, but that long-ago game in Waterbury was the only time that we have played as partners.
In the afternoon session in Waterbury I played with Mort Friedman in an event that I had no business playing, the Open Pairs. He was 26 years older than I was and as gregarious as I was introverted. He had come to the tournament from the Albany area. He knew all of our opponents, and he introduced me to them as a “new player”.
Mort thought at the end of the round that we might have placed, but he was overly optimistic. I probably made some simple errors that he did not pick up on.
At the time Mort published a bridge column called “Bridging the Gap”. He emailed it to me for several years, and I occasionally asked him questions about it. He always responded.
Mort died in 2011. His obituary can be found here.
I evidently received my first (fractional) gold points at the Waterbury tournament. Dick, Virginia Labbadia, Donald Fosberg (of whom I have no memory whatever) and I finished third in the bottom bracket of the Round Robin on Labor Day.
The Ukrainian National Home.
I was scheduled to play with Dick Benedict at an afternoon session of the sectional tournament at the Ukrainian National Home on Wethersfield Ave. in Hartford. Our signals got crossed, and, with just a few minutes before game time I discovered that he was not going to come. Lou Brown, who was president of the HBC at the time, also needed a partner. So, although he had much more experience than I did, we formed a one-time partnership.
I remember two things about the session. At one point we played against Mary Witt and Linda Starr. At the time they were both redheads. I question whether that was allowed by the ACBL. A few hands later Lou, as declarer, failed to follow suit even though I had warned him with the question “No hearts?.” He was very embarrassed by his mistake, which prevented us from placing in the event.
I have two other vivid memories of Dr. Brown. He occasionally played at the SBC with his wife Trudi. Quite often he was verbally abusive to her. I took Trudi aside and offered to talk to him about his behavior, which was clearly against the ACBL’s Zero Tolerance policy. She told me not to because, “For me it is like water off of a duck.”
I was present when Trudi got the gold points that she needed to become a Life Master. Lou and Trudi were paired with Merrill Stein and Gary Cohen. I don’t remember who our teammates were, but my partner was Michael Dworetsky. Merrill had bid 7NT on a hand. Michael was on lead on the first trick. For some reason he chose to lead “fourth best” from a spade suit headed by the king. It was a terrible choice that allowed Gary to take all thirteen tricks and win the match. If he had selected any other suit, he would have eventually won that king, and we would have won the event.
Lou and Trudi moved to Delray Beach, FL. They are both still active in the ACBL.
I am pretty sure that in the first event that I ever won I was playing with Dan Finn. Dan was an actuary who lived in the Baltimore area but spent a lot of time working in Connecticut. He played with Tom Gerchman at the HBC on Thursday evenings. He also played with John Morrin at the limited game (that I called 0-Finn) at the HBC on Wednesday evenings.
Dan and I played as partners with Tom Gerchman and his (only?) friend, Terry Fair, an actuary from the Philadelphia area, as teammates. The tournament was a sectional in District 3, probably in northern New Jersey.
We were playing in a B-C Swiss. Everything seemed to go our way. In the final round we played the only other team that was in contention. Our opponents made enough mistakes that I was certain that we had won. When Tom asked us whether we thought that we had done well enough, I asked him, “How many times did you revoke?”
He acted as if he did not understand the question. Dan intervened: “He wants to know how many times you revoked.” Gerchman muttered, “Uh, none.”
I said, “Then I think that we are OK.” I was right. We won the event.
On the way home I wanted to stop and get some real food. We were a long way from Enfield, and it was late. Gerch insisted on stopping at Dunkin Donuts.
Occasionally filling out a card at the Partnership Desk at a tournament brought a very pleasant surprise. Such was the case at the Masters Regional in Mansfield, MA, in 2013 when Ausra Geaski showed up without a partner. I was acquainted with her in three ways: 1) she was president of the district; 2) she arranged for me to become the district’s webmaster; 3) she was Bunny Kliman’s partner at the HBC and regionals and had a lot more points than I did. I don’t think that she was thrilled with the prospect, but she agreed to play with me in the open pairs.
I remember one hand from the round. We missed a slam in a notrump contract because one of us had a six-card diamond suit. It occurred to me that we should have used 2NT as a transfer to diamonds rather than signing off in 3NT. When partner accepted the diamond suit we could have found the slam.
The other thing that I remember was that Carole Weinstein was one of our opponents. She talked with Ausra about helping with the hospitality at the 2014 Fall NABC that was going to be held in Providence.
Ausra still played regularly at the HBC in 2023. She also played at a few sectionals, but she was hobbled by bad knees that she got replaced in October.
This is Paula. I could not find a photo of Marcia.
I came to know Marcia West, who lived in Charlestown, RI, from her association with Paul Pearson. She had taken a bridge class that Paul taught somewhere in Rhode Island. I don’t remember when I played with Marcia, but it must have been at a sectional in Johnston, RI. She did not often venture far from home for tournaments.
I don’t think that we did very well on that occasion, but Steve Smith and I teamed up with Marcia and Paula Najarian in an epic Round Robin at the first regional tournament ever held at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick, RI. I have recounted my heroic dummy play here.
I have been friends with Marcia and Paula for many years. Marcia was a nurse in real life; Paula taught math in high school. They both are still playing pretty regularly in 2023. Marcia played with my wife Sue at a sectional in Johnston, RI.
I am sure that I played with Vince D’Souza at a Unit 126 (Connecticut) sectional, but I cannot remember when or where. We were undoubtedly matched up by whoever was manning the partnership desk. I am even more certain that we did not do very well, but don’t ask me why.
Perhaps Vince remembers. In 2023 he contacted me about the lessons for beginners being offered by the HBC to beginning players. He wanted to purchase them for one of his sons or grandsons. He seemed to remember me better than I remembered him.
The LinkedIn page that is posted here is probably Vince’s. I was somewhat surprised to see that Vince was still a member of the ACBL in 2023. He played in the fall sectional in Orange, CT, but he did not earn any masterpoints.
I was assigned to play with Joe DaCosta at a regional tournament. I am not sure which one or when it occurred. I remember that he was expecting his partner to show up, but for some reason he suspected that he/she might not show up, and so he lined me up as a substitute. I had no choice; no one else was available..
We agreed to play his convention card, which included the Flannery convention, in which the 2♦ bid is used for hands with 11-15 high-card points, four spades and five or more hearts. Such hands are difficult to describe in most systems.
I played this convention every week with Peter Katz, and I had played it a few times with others. Joe asked me if I was familiar with it and knew the responses. I assured him that I did.
At the very first table Joe opened 2♦. I quickly responded 2♥, which indicated a hand with three hearts that had no chance of taking ten tricks even if opener had a maximum. I had an honor card or two, but I could have had absolutely nothing. To my surprise Joe bid 3♥. I quickly passed, and he went down by one trick.
Joe’s explanation was that he was afraid that I might have had more strength than I showed. I resolved then and there never to play with him again. I did not need a partner who did not trust me when I said that I knew something.
There are no DaCostas in my database and only one Da Costa, Laura from Clovis, CA. So, our game must have been before I started maintaining my database of ACBL members in 2014.
Sue and Judy.
As was our custom, my wife Sue and I drove up to the hotel in the morning of one of the days of the regional tournament in Nashua, NH. She had made arrangements to play with Judy Cavagnaro, one of her partners from Connecticut, but, as usual, she was late. We arrived just a minute or two before play started, and the car was nearly out of gas. My original plan was to see if anyone at the Partnership Desk was looking for a partner, but I abandoned that idea, dropped Sue off at the door to the hotel, filled up the car’s tank with regular, and went to McDonald’s to buy my traditional sausage biscuit with egg.
I later discovered that one other person was looking for a partner for the Open Pairs. His name was Doug Clark, and he was from the Albany area. We met and went over his convention card together. I was astounded to discover that in the “Opening Preempts” section no boxes were checked, and he had written in “Not used”. I honestly felt like I was going into battle with a broken sword.
Somehow we won some points in that session, but I resolved never to play with him again. He was still an ACBL member in 2023, but he has not won any points all year. At some point he moved to Ponte Vedra Beach, FL.
At the same tournament I had arranged to play in the Round Robin with Tony Norris on Sunday. Our teammates were my old friends, Bob and Shirley Derrah from Springield MA.
Shirley, Bob, Tony, and me.
Tony’s convention card had one peculiar item on it. I remember that I messed it up at one point in one match, but we were on the same page in the rest of our matches.
Our foursome were one of the lowest seeded teams in bracket #1, but in the end we came out tied for first place with a team from Maine. We were all very happy with the result. Someone took our photo. It wasn’t Sue. She had driven home earlier. The Derrahs brought me back to Enfield.
I played with Tony again in Nashua in an Open Pairs game. We won only a half of a masterpoint. The last tournament that he played in was a sectional in Williston, VT, in September of 2018. He was still a member of the ACBL in 2023, but he had not won any masterpoints all year. This was surprising to me because Tony liked to play online.
I met Andre Wiejacki (vee eh YAH skee but compressed into three syllables) at the qualifying tournament for Flight C of the North American Pairs in Sturbridge, MA. I was playing with Steve Smith; Andre was playing with Ron Briggs. They finished second, and we finished third. The winning pair was disqualified, and so all four of us got to to to the finals at the Spring NABC in Reno.
I have often said that everyone in bridge has an interesting backstory. Andre’s is one of the most impressive. He was born in Poland when it was still a satellite of the Soviet Union. He somehow escaped to France where he changed his first name to Andre and learned about computers. At some point after that he immigrated to the U.S.
I played a few times at tournaments with Andre. He was good at playing the cards, but his bidding could be erratic. I liked playing with him, and he definitely liked playing with me. The last time that I heard from him he had moved to the NYC area because the job prospects were better.
In 2023 Andre was still an ACBL member, and he has moved back to Chelsea, MA. He had not played at any tournaments since Covid-19 struck, and he has earned only a handful of masterpoints in 2023.
Andre is still “open to work”. If you are looking for a “scrum master”, his LinkedIn page is here.
I remember that an opponent in one of the matches that Andre exhibited was Sarah Widhu of Nashua NH. After one of Andre’s strange bids, I explained to him how we could have reached the right contract.
We lost the match, and the margin was totally attributable to this one hand. I was impressed that Sarah noticed that everything rode on that one hand.
I only played with Sarah once, and we did not do too well. I suspect that if we had played together more, we would have started to click.
Sarah was one of the most active members of the bridge community in New Hampshire during the period that I became involved with the district. I am pretty sure that she was on the B’s Needs committee, and she was definitely the tournament manager for the Nashua tournament at least once. I designed a successful email campaign for her.
Sarah still played regularly in 2023. She might have still been running the club in Nashua as well, but she did not participate in the administration of the district or its functions.
Ron Agel.
Bridge was definitely only the second-favorite card game of Ron Agel. He was first and foremost a poker player. I played with him for two sessions of an Open Pairs game at a regional tournament in Massachusetts I think that it was at some point in 2014.
At the time Ron only had about half as many masterpoints as I did, but he acquitted himself pretty well. We did not win anything, but I remember one hand that we played against an expert pair, Bill Braucher and Rick Binder, who were playing a strong club system. I had made a lead-directing bid of one of their artificial bids. Ron was not familiar with the concept, and took it as takeout. We ended up in a horrible contract that the opponents quickly doubled. Oh, well, a zero is a zero.
My recollection is that Ron had a home on the cape and another one in Florida. He was still a member of the ACBL in 2023. He had about thirteen points for the year, but he had not attended a regional tournament in New England since 2018.
I have played against Alan Godes many times, including two occasions since the reopening. He and his wife, Charlotte Bailey, have long resided in Needham, MA, but for years they have traveled around the country to play in bridge tournaments.
I don’t really remember the event in which Alan and I played together. He was pleasant enough, but I did not enjoy the occasion. I have often had opportunities to play with him again, but I have been reluctant to take advantage of them. I proudly accept the title of geezer, but Alan was in Junior High when I was born, and his game has not changed much in the decade or so that I have known him.
Both Alan and Charlotte were in attendance at the last D25 tournament of 2023, the regional in Marlborough, MA. Alan played with Adi Chehna, and Charlotte played with a pro, Adam Grossack. They finished third in bracket 1 of the Thursday-Friday KO.
I only played with Bill Gay once, but I have fairly clear memories of the occasion. It occurred at the regional tournament in Nashua, NH, where I was often in need of a partner. Bill and I were matched up by the Partnership Desk and we had agreed upon a convention card. We went over to the table at which the directors were selling entries for the Open Pairs game. In front of us were Marcia West and Paula Najarian. The four of us decided to play in a bracketed team game instead.
Our foursome did not win the event, but we had one surprising victory. Bill and I were playing against Christina Parker, and her sister who was visiting from (I seem to remember) St. Louis. Their teammates were Stewart Rubenstein (Christina’s husband and regular partner) and someone whom I don’t remember. We were big underdogs in the match, but somehow we pulled off a victory. Bill asked me, “Do you know how good that team is?” I told him that I did. I had played against Stewart and Christina often with little success.
Bill has not been to a district tournament since 2018, but he was still a member of the ACBL in 2023, and he earned more than eighty masterpoints through the end of October.
Michelle Blanchard, who is from the Worcester area, is still quite active in tournament bridge in 2023. Eric Vogel and I teamed up with her and Carol Seager in the Gala Regional in the autumn of 2023. That experience, which was not altogether pleasant, has been described here.
I am pretty sure that Michelle and I played as teammates in a sectional tournament in Watertown, MA. We seemed to play pretty well together. I never have done well in any events in Watertown, and so I am sure that we did not come close to winning. If the opportunity presented itself, I would be happy to play opposite her again.
I played with Linda Ahrens in a pairs event held in Hyannis, MA. I remember very little about our actual game together, but I have a fairly vivid recollection of some of the ancillary details.
In the first place I remember that Linda played the Mexican 2♦ convention to handle the hand with balanced distribution and 18-19 high-card points. Most people open balanced hand with 15-17 points with 1NT and those with 20-21 points with 2NT. So, this is used for the ones in between. I have never played it elsewhere before or since.
At the time Linda and her husband Joe Brouillard had a home in Rhode Island and another on the Cape near Hyannis. Before the tournament I drove to Warwick, RI, to play at a club there with Linda. We did not win, but we also did not encounter any major disagreements.
I had the distinction of saying that my partner was the only person who walked from her house to the game in Hyannis. I also was the only person who was brought a home-made sandwich by his partner’s husband during the lunch break. In other ways, unfortunately, my game with Linda was not too memorable.
I took this photo of Linda and Dan. after their victory.
In February of 2017 I was working at the Partnership Desk at the regional tournament in Cromwell, CT. Linda Ahrens had filled out a card indicating that she was looking for a partner for the Mid-Flight Pairs. event.
On the morning of the event Dan Jablonski, a very good player, came to the desk and said that he needed a partner. I matched Dan up with Linda, and they ended up winning the event!
Linda was on the committee that I chaired that awarded the Larry Weiss award to Bob Bertoni in 2018. The details are in Bob’s section of this entry (here).
Paul Lord was from Montreal, but for several years he came down to New England because of his job, which I think involved insurancee. I played as his partner more than once and communicated with him now and then. I have not seen him in quite a few years. However, he was still a member of the ACBL in 2023, had amassed over 3,000 masterpoints, and appeared to be playing regularly.
The last time that I saw Paul he was grumbling about a partner whom he had picked up at a tournament’s Partnership Desk: “He doesn’t know how to defend a hand.”
Diane Storey was a teammate of mine in a knockout. Our team was eliminated in the first round of the Knockout Regional in Cromwell. I have a vague recollection that my partner had been Gary Cohen (introduced here). Diane was probably playing with a guy named Marvin who worked in NYC.
Players who lost in the KO usually played in the Single-session Swiss1, an event that offered only red points. Our partners from the KO wanted to skip the Swiss and go home early. Diane and I were greedy about the chance of winning some points and paired up. The Partnership Desk assigned us to play with a very nice experienced player and a guy with much less experience. I don’t remember either name. My recollection is that we won only one match. The experienced player apologized for his partner’s shenanigans.
I never played as Diane’s partner after that, but I played against her and Marvin often at sectionals. I remember a very bizarre hand from one of those events. I was playing with Peter Katz at a tournament in Hamden, CT. We were playing the Flannery convention, in which 2♦ is used to show a hand with 11-15 high-card points, four spades, and five or more hearts. I have posted a write-up of this hand here. It is the hand that starts after the horizontal line. Diane was LHO. Marvin was RHO.
In 2023 Diane was still a member of the ACBL, but she had not earned any masterpoints all year. Her address on the roster was Vero Beach, FL.
I am pretty sure that we played against the Palmer team in the semifinals. I know all of the people on Don Caplin’s team, and I don’t remember playing them.
Playing with Estelle Margolin from Rego Park, NY, was a real treat for me. She had a lot more points than I did when the Partnership Desk informed my teammates from the HBC, Sally Kirtley and Jeanne Striefler, that she was the only person who was available to play with us in a compact knockout event in Cromwell in 2015.
I was delighted to discover that I had long ago written up and posted details of this event here. It is a pretty long article; just search for “Estelle”.
Estelle was still playing in 2023. She had amassed over 5,600 masterpoints and was a Diamond Life Master.
I must have played as the partner of Esther Watstein at a sectional tournament, but I do not remember the occasion. I do remember playing against her a few times.
I have had many contacts with Esther on the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA). She served two terms as president. I was just a representative or an at-large member. Esther is still active as a member of the CBA’s Communications Committee. She also still plays regularly at sectional events, but since the Pandemic I don’t think that she has played outside of the state.
Greg Winkler was from Australia. He lived in Centerville, MA, which is very close to Hyannis, the site of the Senior Regional. The partnership person for the event was one of my regular partners, Ginny Iannini. Greg needed just a few points to make Life Master. I remember him as a very good card player who needed to learn more about bidding. He agreed with this assessment.
I think that I must have played with him more than once. I remember playing in a team event in which our teammates were Charlie Curley and Gene Flynn. I don’t remember how we did.
My other recollection is that after playing in afternoon session in Mansfield, MA, Greg wanted to play in the evening side game. Evidently he just needed a fraction of a point to attain Life Master status. I had to pass; Because I was very tired, I would have made a poor partner anyway. He played with Marcia West and got the points that he needed.
The next year at the tournament in Hyannis I was scheduled to play with Greg a third time. He had been on a vacation, but he promised me that he would be able to play that day. When he had not arrived, I tried to call him, but I got no answer. Ginny was able to find a partner for me, as is explained in the next section.
After this I had no further contact with Greg.
Greg was extremely sociable. He called all the women “love” and al the guys “mate”. I remember that at one tournament someone fell or suffered some other kind of accident. Greg rushed to his/her aid. I did not; I figured that I would likely be in the way of people who knew what they were doing..
I was surprised to discover that in 2023 Greg had almost as many masterpoints as I did, and he earned a lot more throughout the year. Since he has not been at tournaments, he must have been playing online. Although he has almost the same number of points as I had at the time, he was only a Silver Life Master in late 2023. He probably failed to meet the number of gold points required for subsequent ranks.
On the morning that Greg Winkler stood me up in Hyannis (described above) Lynda Flanger of Mayfield, NY, was looking for a partner in the A/X Swiss. She must have already had teammates. I was the only person available.
We had a pretty enjoyable round playing together, but at that point I would have been a lot more comfortable playing in the Open Swiss that was being held at the same time in the Cape Cod Sectional that was going on at the same time in the same hotel.
Lynda died in September of 2022. Her obituary has been posted here. She was still an active member of the ACBL at the time of her death. Despite what the obituary said, she was actually a Sapphire Life Master with over 4,600 masterpoints.
I don’t remember exactly where I met Charlie Curley. I played against him several times when his regular partner was Mike Colburn an actuary who lived in Simsbury, CT.2 They were the top qualifying team for the North American Pairs (NAP) in both 2010 and 2011. They also were the other pair in the epic five-person team that I successfully captained in the sectional in Auburn, MA, that was described here.
I invited Charlie to play on our team in the Mini-Spingold event in Washington, DC, that I described here. At that tournament I somehow lost my red and blue Barça hat. When Charlie and his wife took a vacation to Barcelona, he bought a replacement for me and gave it to me at a subsequent tournament. I was suitably touched.
Charlie won a few D25 tournaments. When I wrote him to request a photo of him with or without his partner, he advised me to just use a photo of Cary Grant. By the way, he also insisted on being called Handsome Charlie Curley.
I only played with Charlie once. It was at a sectional in Auburn, MA. Charlie told me that he had read many of Marty Bergen’s books and pamphlets and suggested that we should just go by his approach. That was OK with me, although it was the only time that I have ever played “Serious 3NT”.
Our round was scuttled by one unfortunate hand. I opened 1♣. Charlie responded 2♥. I interpreted this as a jump-shift, which we were playing as weak (except for Bergen raises). Charlie thought that he was making a standard 2/1 response. Evidently the Bergen books that he had read did not cover this situation.
Charlie owned his own business. During much of our association he was going through the agony of trying to sell it. I commiserated with him. At that point I had already given up on selling TSI (described here). I am pretty sure that in the end, however, Charlie was able to close his deal.
Charlie was still active in the ACBL in 2023. He was closing in on Gold Life Master. However, he has not attended any D25 tournaments since 2018.
I met Tucker Merritt at the HBC, where he was a regular in the Tuesday evening game when I started playing there in 2008. I never played with him at the HBC, but for some reason Tom Gerchman set me up to play with Tucker in a team game in a sectional somewhere in District 3 while he played with Dan Finn or Terry Fair—I don’t remember which.
As usual, we had to meet very early in the morning at the office in Avon where Tom worked. I had to park my car in the open-air garage that was beneath the building. While we were driving to the tournament on the parkway named after one of Tucker’s ancestors I had to memorize Tucker’s convention card, which included a few things that I had never played. I seem to recollect that we played transfer overcalls for 1NT openers.
I think that we held our own in the event, which was a Swiss, perhaps limited to a certain number of points. I am not sure whether we did well enough to place in the overalls. I don’t remember any specifics of this adventure.
I never had a chance to play with Tucker again. He died in 2019. His obituary can be found here.
The partnership coordinator for one of the sectionals in Watertown set me up to play with LuciaEnica (loo CHEE ah) in the Open Pairs game on a Saturday. I corresponded with her by email to establish a convention card with which we both felt comfortable. She convinced me to play a practice game on Bridge Base Online. I was not at all familiar with the interface, and I found the entire experience unnerving. To me it was not bridge. I resolved never to do it again.3
We did not do too well in the event either. My only recollection of it was when I led the ace of a side suit and then the queen. Lucia did not understand that this sequence guaranteed that I also had the king, and she trumped it. She claimed that I was wrong about this, but I could not understand how she could think that I was so silly as to lead the ace from an AQ holding.
Lucia and I never played together as a pair, but we did team up at an equally unsatisfactory attempt to qualify for the Grand National Teams (GNT). My partner was Paul Burnham (introduced here). Hers was Lou DiOrio.
Lucia, who was a psychiatric nurse, was still very active in bridge in 2023, but she had moved to Washington, DC.
I played one session at a regional tournament with a novice player from Rhode Island named Bea Martini. It was probably at the pro-am game that was held in Warwick one year. I remember only that she was rather new to the game.
Bea was still a member of the ACBL in 2023. She amassed a few masterpoints in 2023, but she had not attended any D25 events since 2019. She also did not attend the NABC in Providence in the summer of 2022 even though she lived in East Providence.
I have known Mike Winterfield longer than any of my other partners. He was my first boss at my first job at the Hartford Life in 1972, as described here.
I have seen Mike at the HBC many times and played against him more than a few times. I am pretty sure that my wife Sue played as his partner a few times as well.
When he first started attending games at the club he often played with his wife Jane. She had health problems, an they had relationship problems. They eventually divorced, and she moved away. She died in 2016. I could not find an obituary.
My game with Mike was on a Saturday evening in a pro-am event in the regional tournament in Cromwell, CT, in February of 2016.
We did quite well in the event, finishing in sixth place (out of forty-eight pairs) with a 56.88 percent game, which was good enough for 1.99 masterpoints. I had a good time playing with him and thought that he had quite a bit of potential.
In 2023 Mike mostly played with Barbara Edelstein, who has been his partner for more than five years.
James (really Sun-Ming) Lee has played fairly regularly at the HBC for many years and was still playing pretty often in 2023 when I wrote this. In all of that time he has never really had a regular partner. Since the reopening he has played mostly with Y.C. Hsu.
I only played with him once. It was at the regional tournament in Cromwell. We both needed a partner, and so we paired up. I think that we played in a Mid-Flight pairs game. We did about average.
James has always had a reckless style of play. He loves to play in notrump contracts. He also has shown a propensity for underleading aces on defense.
His most recognizable feature was his posture at the table. He commonly rested his scorecard on his lap and crossed his legs at the knee. When he made any kind of a movement the scorecard would fall on the floor. After several years he had more or less perfected this so that it only happened once or twice per session.
I thoroughly enjoyed teaming up with Brenda Harvey at many tournaments, mostly regionals. My fondest memory is the evening when she, her partner Robert Klopp, and I and my partner, Dick Benedict, celebrated at a restaurant in or near Nashua, NH, the day that she made Life Master.
I also enjoyed the one time that I played with her at a sectional in Hamden, but I don’t remember any details of the occasion.
Brenda moved to St. Augustine, FL. In 2023 she was still a member of the ACBL and played quite a bit.
I knew Pat Nye before I played with her in a game at the Cape. I think that we may have been teammates.
Before the round I disclosed to Pat that I regularly made OBAR BIDS (an acronym for “opponents bid and raise: balance in the direct seat”). I told her that if the opponents bid and raise a major suit, I would bid almost any five-card suit to prevent them from playing in an eight-card fit at the two level. However, when I did it, she raised my bid, and I went down. After the hand, she said, “Well, you warned me.”
In 2023 Pat was still a member of the ACBL, but she had not played in any tournaments since the reopening. On the other hand, the only tournaments that she attended before Covid-19 were on the Cape, and D25 has not sponsored any of those in the last two years.
I played against Tink Tysor, a former IBMer from New Hampshire. I knew how he played, and I thought that our styles would be quite compatible.
We finally played together in an Open Pairs game a year or so before the Pandemic. The result was a disaster, If we were not last, we were certainly close to that.
Tink was still a very active player in 2023.
Sally Kirtley.
I knew Sally Kirtley quite well from both the SBC and the HBC. She often played in both clubs with Jerry Hirsch (introduced here) as a partner. When her mother was still alive she also played with her. When Helen Pawlowski retired as Tournament Manager for D25, Sally replaced her.
Sally also has served as a director for both the HBC and the SBC since Covid-19 caused the mass shutdown. I have worked fairly closely with her at the SBC, and we were also (at least in theory) both members of the D25 Tournament Scheduling Committee.
George Bickford.
I think that Sally and I played together once or twice before the reopening. We definitely have played twice at regional tournaments in 2022 and 2023. We did not do well in the Open Pairs. Part of the problem was that, as Tournament Manager, she was distracted by administrative aspects of the tournament.
Sally was an attorney, and she was still practicing in the same law firm as her husband, George Bickford, who has shown up for bridge in at least one emergency.
Paul Pearson, more than anyone else, helped me get started with bridge in the twenty-first century. That story has been posted here. I often communicated with him via email when I encountered difficulties, especially in the area of competitive bidding. Paul understood the Law of Total Tricks (LAW) quite well, and he directed me to sources that explained its complexity. This knowledge stood me in very good stead against players at the lower levels.
Paul and me in Warwick.
After that I played against him and his primary partner, Laurie Robbins, many times, but I don’t think that I ever played with Paul at either the SBC or the HBC. Our first pairing was in a Swiss event at a sectional tournament in Hamden. Our teammates were two people from the HBC, Joan Brault (introduced here) and Michele (mee KAY lay or Mike) Raviele. I think that we had a pretty good result, but Paul did not like the way that Mike bid one hand.
Our greatest success, however, was at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, in 2015. We played in the ABC Pairs and finished fifth out of thirty-eight pairs and won both the B and C flights. The reason that the results sheet at right says that it was “Based on 67 Tables” was because there were an additional 38 tables in the Gold Rush.
We hoped to defend our crowns in the same event in 2016, but I had a commitment to play in a two-day knockout that started on the previous day. Paul died of cancer in December of 2016. Shortly thereafter Paul’s wife Sue contacted me about donating Paul’s bridge books. I kept a few and gave the rest of them to the HBC.
Paul had been a programmer longer than I had. In his day they coded in assembler. He also had a great interest in orienteering. Paul died in 2016. His obituary can be found here.
I played one two-session game with Geoff Phipps, a Platinum Life Master, in Honolulu after Ann Hudson had said that she did not want to play with me any more. It was only a little short of a miracle that he was available. He probably would not have agreed to play with me if I was not already familiar with a large set of conventions that Geoff and Randy Johnson used.
My game with Geoff has been described in some detail here. What I did not know at the time was that a photographer was taking photos of the playing area and that one of those photos would be used on the cover of a book by Bill Treble. I was front and center, but Geoff was not included.
Geoff lived most of his life in New Hampshire, but he moved to Bluffton, SC, at some point. Nevertheless he returned for the 2023 edition of the Granite State Getaway in Nashua.
Sabrina approved this photo of herself and Darryl Legassie.
Bridge in New England has a diverse population. There are two exceptions, however. The first is that old people are disproportionately represented. The second is the shocking lack of representation of Black people. Sabrina Miles was unquestionably the most successful Black bridge player in New England during my association with the game.
I played with her for only one two-session game at a district tournament in (I think) Warwick. We had planned to spend a half hour going over our card before the game, but she got involved in a conversation with someone. I remember that we had a very bad score in the first session. Although I had thought that the second was just as bad, we actually did much better.
Sabrina won several regional events. She did not like the photo that I had used of her and asked me to take another. I agreed, and from that point forward I used that photo. She was the only person who made such a request.
Sabrina lived in Mansfield, MA. She served as the partnership person at tournaments held there several times. She set me up for very pleasant games with the next two entries.
Sabrina was still an active participant in D25 events in 2023.
I enjoyed the preparation session with Ru Terajewicz as much as I did the round. The things that she insisted that we go over before the first session were very well chosen. I already knew how (at least in New England) the best players bid with a six-card major in the fourth seat. Ru, who was (and still is in 2023) an accomplished teacher explained how to handle a seven-card suit in that situation.
That didn’t come up during the round. We both played well enough to score well, but it was not our day.
Although Ru moved to Ponte Vedra, FL, she has remained very active in bridge in 2023. However, we have not seen her in New England.
Me and Darryl.
The other fine player that Sabrina set me up with in Mansfield was Darryl Legassie, who had been Sabrina’s steady partner for several years. Darryl and I also played in the Open Pairs, but we seemed to click better than Ru and I had.
When the last card was played we finished sixth out of seventy-three pairs and first in Flight B. This was a really great result for two guys who had never really met before.
Darryl’s email address started with lorddarryl and in the “Prefix” field on his record on the ACBL I did not check his entry in Burke’s Peerage, but Darryl assured me that I need not use his chosen title when addressing him.
Darryl was still an active player in 2023, but he had not appeared in any regional tournaments in D25.
The only Grand Life Master with whom I have played was Mark Aquino. He was also elected Regional Director of Region 2 during the Pandemic. That meant that he was the only person representing D24 (NYC and Long Island) and D25 on the ACBL board.
Mark (right) won his first NABC championship with Shome Mukherjee.
Prior to that I worked with him closely when he was the head of the B’s Needs Committee, President of the New England Bridge Conference (NEBC), and then District Director. Mark was a consummate politician who knew how to work a room. This was quite rare in a bridge player. He also won the Individual tournament in Newton twice.
I have twice played with Mark. The first time was when he invited me to play in the evening side game at a regional tournament. I remember two hands. On one of them I made a lead-directing bid on a hand that the opponents had been bidding. Mark correctly deduced what I had and bid 3NT. The problem was that if the opponent on his left did not lead hearts, the suit that they had been bidding, he only had eight tricks. On the opening lead he chose a different suit. Mark, however, threw him in a little later, and he succumbed to the temptation and led hearts.
I do not remember the outcome of the other hand, but in that case Mark doubled for a lead. I complied, but he mildly chastised me for not leading the top of my KQJ sequence in a different suit.
Our score for the session was a little over 60 percent, which was good enough for second place.
My memorable round with Mark in Honolulu has been described here.
Bob Bertoni.
Bob Bertoni was known as the Grand Poobah of New England Bridge. He served as VP and then President of the NEBC. At the same time he was President of the Eastern Massachusetts Bridge Association (EMBA). He then ran for District Director against the incumbent, Mark Aquino, and won. He held that position and was running for Regional Director when he died in 2021. His obituary has been posted here.
Tuna Snider.
I may have met Bob in 1977 when I was coaching debate at the University of Michigan. Don Huprich, Stewart Mandel, and I made an epic journey to New England (described here) to participate in the tournament at Boston College and two other colleges. At the time Bob was attending BC on a debate scholarship. Bob’s coach, Tuna Snider, threw a party for some of the people at the tournament. We were invited, and we attended. We met some of the BC debaters; we might have met Bob, who was almost certainly in attendance.
Bob asked me to play with him three times. The first occasion was in the Open Pairs at a District 3 regional tournament in Danbury, CT. Bob was there to negotiate with the D3 officials concerning how much they would pay to District 25 to be able to use the Crowne Plaza hotel there for this tournament. He resolved the issue.
We finished above average in the bridge game. We might have won a point or two.
Our second game was when Bob was campaigning for District Director. He came down to Orange for a sectional and attend the U126 board meeting. We played in the Sunday Swiss together. I have forgotten who our teammates were. We played OK, but I think that our teammates let us down.
The last time that I played with Bob was at an EMBA sectional. Somehow he found himself without a partner. So, he asked me to drive to Watertown to play with him. I was more than happy to do so. We finished near the middle.
In 2018 I had the honor of chairing the committee to elect the winner of the Larry Weiss award. A detailed explanation of the criteria of the award has been posted here. Bob was the winner. In 2022 I talked the Executive Committee into retiring the award and presenting a new trophy called the Weiss-Bertoni award. As the most recent winner of the Larry Weiss award, I also chaired that committee. The details are posted here.
Bob was closely involved in the early years of my career as webmaster, database manager, and email manager for D25. That period is explored here.
I really miss Bob Bertoni. District 25 really needed his leadership after the reopening.
1. I took the name of this widely disparaged event as my nom de plume for the “View from B-low” columns that I wrote about my exploits in District 25 tournaments and elsewhere. They were posted on NEBridge.org. I have created an index for the ones that were still available in 2023 here.
2. Mike joined the HBC in 2010. He may have played at the club a few times, but I never saw him. He dropped his membership the next year. He never came to a game at the SBC. In 2023 he was still an active member of the ACBL, but he had not won any masterpoints in years. In fact, he would still be eligible for Flight C of the NAP. I seriously doubt that anyone has ever competed in the NABC finals of that event three times.
3. For the most part I have kept to this plan through 2023. I played online with Ken Leopold and Eric Vogel a few times in preparation for the online qualifying for the GNT. I played with my wife Sue a couple of times during the Pandemic. Other than that I only have signed on anonymously to BBO to play a few hands against the robots before games at the HBC.
When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, And it’s Eastertime too, And your gravity fails, And negativity don’t pull you through. Don’t put on any airs When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue. They got some hungry women there, And they really make a mess outta you.
Bob Dylan: Just Like tom thumb’s blues
The weather services predicted heavy rain in Connecticut for Wednesday, September 13, and they were definitely correct. When I left the house a little before 9:00 to play in the morning game at the Hartford Bridge Club, it was just starting to sprinkle. I generally did not let rain interfere in any activity except exercise. Walking swiftly through a shower has never really bothered me. At the time I did not even possess an umbrella. The temperature was in the high sixties. I wore only Levis and a short-sleeved shirt.
By the time that my Honda and I reached I-91 the rain was coming down pretty hard. However, the traffic on the road was lighter than usual, and I had made pretty good time when I reached Exit 32, the intersection with I-84 westbound. The next mile or so was always hectic because it required entrants from I-91 to cross four (!) lanes of traffic to the left in order to exit at Flatbush Ave.
By that point I had the windshield wipers working as fast as they could and the fan for the defogger was blasting away. Nevertheless, the visibility was still poor. I cursed the few drivers who had not bothered to engage their vehicles’ headlights.
The usual.
I drove much more slowly than I had on I-91, but I was still pretty much on schedule when my car approached the long ramp for Exit 45, Flatbush Ave. I coasted down to the stoplight, waited for it to change, and entered the mall that contained McDonald’s, where I customarily stopped for my breakfast sandwich, a sausage biscuit with egg. I was surprised to see that no cars were positioned at either window #1, where drive-through customers paid or window #2, where they received their orders.
When I circled around the building to the two drive-through lines for ordering, I was even more surprised to find them empty as well. I drove up to the station nearer the building. Someone asked me if I wanted to use the mobile app. I declined. She then asked what I wanted, and I replied with the same six words that I always used: “One (slight pause) sausage biscuit with egg, please.” Sometimes I needed to repeat it or deny that I wanted cheese, but on this occasion the correct order quickly popped up on the billboard.
By the time that I reached window #1 it was raining as hard as I had ever experienced in my seventy-five years. The lady taking payments had propped up some clear plastic sheeting at the bottom of the window to minimize the splashing. I pressed the button to lower my window and handed her my Citibank Costco Visa card, the one that paid 3 percent cash back on purchases at restaurants. I saw her grab it, and I let go. The card plummeted to the invisible area between the car and the window, a gap of no more than eighteen inches. This had happened to me before with coins, but never with a card.
I opened my door and felt around with my left hand for the card. Nothing. Noting that no one was behind me, I backed up a few feet and then pulled the car to the right so that it was farther from the window. However, I still could not open the door enough to get out. So, I climbed over the gearshift and exited by the passenger door.
With a good view of the area I felt confident that I would recover the card posthaste. I was wrong. There was no sign of it. A minute or so later someone wearing so much rain gear that I could not determine gender emerged from the store and join the search. Still nothing.
The lady at the window assured me that the card was in my car and that I would find it there. She also told me to drive to window #2. I did not believe her assertion about the card’s whereabouts for a second. That would have required one of two events: either she reached through my car’s window or she whacked my hand and knocked the card back through the window. I was quite sure that neither of those had occurred.
I proceeded to window #2 as directed. The person in the rain coat conducted a quick search before the next customer arrived at window #1.
I had great respect for the employees at this particular McDonald’s. They were always friendly and efficient, and they almost never messed up an order. I rated it the best fast-food establishment anywhere. They cemented that assessment when the person at window #2 gave me my sandwich and told me not to worry about paying for it.
I drove to the club and regaled a few people with the tale of my adventure while I ate my sandwich. Everyone who had registered overcame the downpour—people were advised to stay home—attend, and I was the only one who resembled a wet dog, a description employed by my partner, Eric Vogel. In point of fact, I almost certainly looked worse than any canine even after I dried off my face and arms with paper towels. At the end of the 3.5 hour game I was still wet beneath my shirt.
As soon as I arrived back at my house I checked to see if any strange charges appeared on the card. There were none. I then canceled the card. The website said that a new one would arrive in a few days. It actually took nine.
Denouement: I happened to be scheduled to play the next day with Fran Gurtman, who was rather new to the game. I was serving as her mentor in a program sponsored by the HBC.1
I tried to pay and lost my card at 1. I picked up my sandwich at 2. The card was found at 3.
As usual I stopped at McDonald’s and enunciated as clearly as I could my usual six-word order. The lady taking the order, whom I could not see at all, said “Is this Michael?” I pled guilty. She informed me that they had found my credit card, and I could pick it up at window #1. By the time that I arrived at that station the cashier knew that I was coming. She was the same lady to whom I had handed the card twenty-four hours earlier. She told me that someone had found the card in parking space #3, which was reserved for people who had ordered ahead on the mobile app.
Not only was this parking space across the driveway from the side of the building. It was also at least thirty feet farther down—almost directly across from window #2. I later noticed that the driveway between the restaurant and the parking spaces had a significant “crown” on it—the center is at least a couple of inch higher than either side.
So, how did the card get over there? It must have swum, but how it got past the driveway is totally inexplicable to me. Moreover, if it was near the building when I and the person in the rain gear looked for it, why did neither of us see it. The card itself was a very dark grey, but the writing on it was bright white.
Can a credit card even float? I did a simple experiment to test the hypotheses. This card in particular can definitely float. In fact, no matter what I did it popped up to the surface.
I later met the lady who found the card. She said that she was astonished that it had traveled as far as it did. By the way, it survived the voyage in perfect condition.
I wonder if anyone has ever written a murder mystery that was solved by the detective’s familiarity with the buoyancy of credit cards.
Telemachus and Mentor.
1. I cannot get myself to use the word “mentee”. Mentor was a trusted friend of Odysseus and his son Telemachus. Athena took his form to give advice to the latter. So, the word “mentor” should only be used as a noun to preserve the metaphor. Like many nouns it became a rather common verb. That does not bother me too much, but changing it to “mentee” grates on my nerves because it ruins the metaphor. I suppose that it would be too much to call a person being mentored as a telemachus.
In 2023 the lights are always out at the Red Lion in Cromwell.
Presidential Regional: District 25, the New England states, had traditionally held its first major1 regional tournament of the year in February. The site had been in Cromwell CT for as long as I had been playing. However, the demise of the Red Lion Hotel forced it to be moved to Sturbridge MA in 2020. The name of the last four or five events had been the Presidential Regional, because it ended on the weekend of Presidents Day. The name was maintained in 2023 even the the tournament was scheduled for February 7-11, the week before its usual appearance. The site was the Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center, which had also been used for the Spectacle Regional in the previous November, as described here. The 2023 Presidential was was scaled-down tournament of only five days designed to minimize the number of directors needed.
The Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.
I was not excited about the schedule. There were no team games at all on Tuesday or Friday; if I played. I would be in the top flight. Wednesday featured a two-day knockout. Saturday had a three-flighted Swiss. I tried to get a partner from the pairing person, Denise Bahosh, but she could not find anyone for me. Eventually, one of my regular partners, Eric Vogel, agreed to play with me in the knockout. Our teammates were Jeanne Striefler and Jim Macomber from the Hartford Bridge Club.
I had played every day at every regional tournament for quite a few years. However, I decided not to play on Tuesday, Friday, or Saturday of this one. The drive to the hotel was not likely to be difficult as long as the weather cooperated. So, I decided to commute back and forth on Wednesday and Thursday. I also needed to be at the hotel for the meeting of the Executive Committee on Friday evening. I planned to drive then as well.
Jim Macomber and Jeanne Striefler.
The weather was fine. On both days I stopped at McDonald’s in Stafford for my usual sausage biscuit with egg sandwich. Our team had just the right amount of points. We were the top-seeded team in the second bracket. Nine teams were in our bracket. We had to play an eight-round Round Robin, which we easily won. That gave us the right to choose which of the third and fourth teams we would play on Thursday. I chose to play the Sattinger team rather than the team from Vermont. Those two teams had finished with the same number of victory points, and we had defeated them both by the same margin. One of the pairs from Vermont played Precision3. I worried that if Jim and Jeanne faced them, they might have difficulty handling a radically different bidding system.
Our morning round of twenty-four hands was against Michael and Ulla Sattinger of Slingerlands, NY, a team that I have played against many times over the years. Eric and I were East-West. On the very first hand I made an overly aggressive bid that turned out to be costly. Eric also made a fairly serious mistake on a different hand. However, things must have gone better in the other room. At lunch we were ahead by twelve points, which was a reasonably comfortable margin.
Eric Vogel.
Eric and I played better in the second half, but North-South held better cards on most of the hands. Ulla and Michael bid and made a few game contracts, but the hands seemed rather straightforward. I did not see any hands on which swings were likely. I was wrong. Jim and Jeanne did not bid several of those games and settled for setting their opponents in undoubled partial scores.
This was very upsetting to me. I had expected us to play as well as on the previous day. My record in knockout matches in the past was quite good, and I was convinced that things were lined up favorably for us. In retrospect I suspect that Jim and Jeanne might have gotten tired. Neither of them had played in any tournaments since the pandemic, and they had played in far fewer of them than I had before that. They were basically club players, and they had seldom played two sessions in one day, much less on two consecutive days.
After lunch we had to play against a team captained by Abhi (AH vee) Dutta, with whom I had played in a few tournaments. They had the second-best record in the Round Robin, but they had lost to the Vermonters in the semifinal. So, this match would determine who finished third. Eric and I were East-West against Abhi and Paul Johnson, a player from Connecticut with less than 750 masterpoints. Abhi had always been a deliberate player, and, at least in this match, Paul was at times unbearably slow—taking several minutes to make some decisions. At the half they were ahead by six points.
I told Jim and Jeanne that they would switch to East-West to face Abhi and Paul in the second set of twelve boards. Eric and I played against Liv Carroll and Louis DiOrio. Since they came from different corners of the district; they probably had been paired up by the Partnership Desk. We had a very pleasant match with them. Eric and I did not make any serious errors, but neither did they. It was hard to say if we had made up the deficit.
We had been waiting thirty minutes for the other match to finish when Eric announced that he had to leave to go to a meeting. This would ordinarily not have been a big deal, but it turned out that we won the second half by six points, and so our match ended in a tie. Jeanne tried to reach Eric by phone, but he was miles away and unwilling to return to play in a four-board playoff. So, we had to concede. It was the perfect ending to an awful day.
I drove back on Friday for the meeting of the Executive Committee. According to Curtis Barton, the President of the New England Bridge Conference, everything was “fabulous”. Attendance was better than at the 2022 tournaments, and some headway seemed to be being made, but it did not seem fabulous to me. The tournament was better than nothing, but it still seemed rinky-dink to me. To me the most amazing thing was how much money the district still had after a string of disastrous tournaments. The person most responsible was unquestionably Joe Brouillard, the treasurer.
The most hilarious moment occurred after Joe proposed eliminating the stipend to the secretary (Carolyn Weiser) and treasurer (himself) at tournaments. After some bizarre discussion there was a secret ballot. The motion failed 12-1. Everyone thought that Joe and Carolyn were worth every penny. The other important argument was that, heaven forbid, we were faced with replacing them, we needed to have every incentive available.
Granite State Getaway: I could not find partners for the six-day tournament in June in Nashua, NH. That was too bad; I would have liked to play in the knockouts; I even had teammates lined up for one of them.
Sue and I drove up on the morning of Saturday, June 24. The first half of the trip was in the rain, which was particularly heavy on the Mass Pike. By the time that we reached the hotel it was sunny.
I played with Sally Kirtley, the tournament manager, in the A/X pairs. We were badly overmatched. Sue also played in a pairs game and did not do very well.
At the Executive Committee meeting we learned that this was probably the last time that a District 25 regional will be held at the Sheraton. The hotel wants to increase the rate dramatically. Sally solicited and received a large number of suggestions for places with large spaces that were not directly associated with hotels. Joe emphasized that something needed to be done to strengthen the Grass Roots Fund. Before the pandemic most units specified one of their days as Grass Roots days. The district received funds from those games.
There was some discussion about doing the GNT qualifying in person, but I was the only person who felt strongly that it was a huge mistake to award gold points for online play.
No food was served at the meeting. Sue and I ate supper at Lui Lui. I had a delicious pizza and a beer. I questioned the waitress about on of the cartoonish paintings plainly captioned in Spanish, not Italian. She said that she knew nothing about it.
On Sunday morning at the meeting of the Board of Delegates we again heard about how fabulous things were. Only four people represented Connecticut—Peter Marcus, Paul Burnham, Sue, and me. At the end I took a couple of minutes to describe the Weiss-Bertoni award (introduced here) and to present it to Joe Bertoni. He was pretty choked up about receiving it, but, in my opinion, he definitely deserved it. I just hope that he continues the tradition of presenting it to other worthy recipients.
I scheduled an email to go out at 10AM to announce the winner.
The traffic on the return trip was awful. We arrived home more than a half hour later than we expected. It felt weird not to wonder whether the cats were all right.
If it were not for the presentation of the Weiss-Bertoni aware, I would have considered the trip a complete waste of time, gasoline, and money.
Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky.
Ocean State Regional: For some reason that I do not understand the tournament in Warwick, RI, on the Labor Day weekend was scheduled for only five days beginning on Tuesday, August 29. Knockouts were scheduled for Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday. I was fortunate to learn that Jim Osofsky’s regular partner, Mike Heider, would be in Germany with his sons that week. So, Jim agreed to play as my partner for both of the knockouts. He arranged for Abhi and Paul Johnson to be our teammates in the one starting on Thursday. In the first knockout Denise Bahosh, the Partnership Chairman arranged for us to team up with Mike Baker and Susan Swope, two players from Florida who had roughly the same number of masterpoints as Jim and I.
I had decided to play four days, attend the Executive Committee meeting on Friday evening, and skip Saturday. I was able to use my IHG Rewards points to pay for my three nights at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick.
Jim and Mike H. played Precision, but Jim played 2/1 in club games. He lived in Deerfield, MA, and Mike H. lived in southern CT. So, they only played together at tournaments. I had played against them innumerable times.Jim and I had exchanged emails about bidding issues, and we had come to pretty good agreement about the convention card. Still, there were a few issues to be ironed out. So we agreed to meet at the hotel at 9:00 on Tuesday morning.
Judy and Sue.
Sue also wanted to attend the tournament, but, as usual, she did not get any partners until the last minute. On Monday evening she had arranged to play with her friend and long-time partner, Judy Cavagnaro in the Gold Rush pairs. Sue needed gold points to become a Life Master. When I went to bed she had not decided whether she would ride with me or take her own car. I planned to leave at 7:15.
Google Maps recommended taking the back roads to the Crowne Plaza. It took a little over an hour and 45 minutes, but I stopped at McDonald’s.
At 6:30 on Tuesday morning Sue informed me that we would ride together, but she wanted to take her car. Her plan was to provide for the possibility that she might want to come home early. When I asked how I was supposed to get home, she answered that she would drive to Warwick (a trip of at least an hour and forty-five minutes) to pick me up at 7PM on Friday after the meeting of the Executive Committee. I considered this to be ridiculous, but I was wise enough not to press that opinion.
At 7:03 Sue informed me that I should leave at 7:15 by myself. She would drive her own car. I decided not to stop at McDonald’s in Stafford. Instead I set as my destination on Google Maps the McDonald’s on Route 2 in Warwick. I picked up my sandwich there and arrived at the hotel at precisely 9AM.
Jim was already there, talking on his cellphone. His mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, was receiving memory care at a place very close to the Crowne Plaza. He was negotiating whether she needed a private nurse. I got a coffee and ate my breakfast.
At 9:30 we met our teammates, Mike and Susan. We had enough time to converse a little. Mike had a house in Rhode Island. Susan lived in Florida throughout the year.
For some reason the official schedule called the event in which we were playing the “Premier Knockout”. It was limited to players with 4,000 or less masterpoints4. Sixteen teams registered. The directors split it into two eight-team sections. Four of the eight teams in the top bracket had more total points than we did.
Jim and I played pretty well throughout the seven matches. We lost two close matches, including the last one to Abhi’s team, but our total of 91 victory points was much higher than that of any other team.
As in February I was allowed to choose our opponent in the semifinal on Wednesday from the third and fourth teams. This whole scene was eerily similar to what had occurred in Southbridge. On this occasion, however, we had blitzed the fourth-place team Mullin), and the other team included an extremely talented young player named Ethan Wood. It seemed like an easy call to pick Mullin.
Meanwhile Judy and Sue had done very well in the Gold Rush Pairs. They finished fourth out of thirty-six pairs and won 2.32 gold and 0.65 red masterpoints. Sue decided to accept the invitation from Sally Kirtley to play in the evening side game. Apparently she was having a great time and did not want it to end. Also, she seldom turned down an invitation to anything.
You pick up orders at that little red area.
I drove to KFC and picked up an eight-piece family meal. I ordered a large Diet Coke as well, but for some reason the person who took the order and got everything else right, did not include the drink. I had to pay $3.50 for a 10-oz. bottle at the hotel. We were also annoyed to discover that they had neglected to include any napkins or sporks. In my suitcase I discovered some napkins and silverware from a previous trip. Sue ate a chicken wing before the side game started.
While she was gone I ate supper and watched the ninth (penultimate) episode of the first season of Sneaky Pete on Freevee. I loved the show, but the plot was so complicated. I was dying of curiosity to find out the resolution in episode 10, but watching it on the hotel’s free Wi-Fi was almost intolerable. It kept timing out, and I needed to restart it.
After taking a shower I read a chapter of Holy Orders, the sixth of the quasi-mysteries written by Benjamin Black. Black’s style5 is exceptionally good. The plots are intricate, but they do not follow any of the traditional forms for crime fiction. The central character, an Irish pathologist named Quirke does not solve the mysteries. His friend, a police detective who is more Inspector Plodder than Sherlock Holmes, explains the situation at the end.
I went to sleep early. Although I was wearing my eye-mask and earplugs, I was still awakened when Sue returned to the room. I managed to get back to sleep, however, and I was well-rested in the morning.
We went to the Jefferson Diner for breakfast. I had a ham and Swiss omelette. It was good, and the home fries were better than they looked.
The Jefferson Diner.
The Mullin team consisted of a pair of ladies, Susan Mullin and Sheila Middleton, and two men, Steven Colman and Mark Sunderlin. Although Sheila, Steven, and Mark were all from Massachusetts, neither Jim nor I had previously played against any of them. They had the most points of any team. So, they must have been playing for a very long time in club games. We were not impressed by the ladies’ performance in the match in the previous day’s event. The two men were apparently long-time partners. They both lived on Cape Cod.
They opted to switch their chairs so that Jim and I played against the men. They announced that they were playing Precision. I had invented a defense against strong club systems. I called it WavaDONT. I had to explain it first to Jim and then to the opponents:
Overcalls of the 1♣ bid at the one and three-levels were natural—showing five and seven pieces respectively.
With a six-piece suit bid 1NT, which is a relay to 2♣ to be passed or corrected.
With a two-suited overcall bid the lower suit as in DONT.
With a very strong hand double.
Our opponents called the director, Tim Hill, to ask whether it was legal for us to use such a complicated (?) defense against their system in a game at “this level”. Tim said that he was “99.9 percent certain” that we could use whatever defense that we wanted. It turned out to be immaterial. In twenty-four hands they never opened 1♣!
The two guys seemed much better than the ladies. In the first half there were two consecutive swing hands. On the first one our teammates made 3NT. Our opponents went down in 4♠. In the other I went down in 3♠. At the other table our teammates did not defend well and let them make 4♠. In total we had a flimsy lead of one imp.
I thought that we had won the second half easily. One of our opponents had revoked on a vulnerable hand that he might have made or gone down one. However, in the first six hands we found ourselves down by six imps. It was a great relief when we won the last six by eleven. So, we won the match by six imps.
In the finals we played Ethan Wood’s team. His partner was not very good, and we easily won both halves. So, we won the premier Premier Knockout and 20.13 gold points. The Mullin team won third place over a team of guys from Maine.
Jim, Sue, and I decided to eat at the Crow’s Nest, a seafood place that was only a few minutes south of the hotel. Sue and Jim, both from New England, consumed some kind of water-dwelling insects. I tried “The Burger”. which was described in the menu as “1⁄2 lb of all-natural free-range beef topped with cheddar, lettuce, pickles, secret sauce, brioche bun, fries.” The secret sauce tasted a lot like the sauce on a Big Mac, which must have been the intent. The problem was that there was so much slippery stuff that the meat kept falling out the bottom of the buns, and when I did get a taste of meat, it was overwhelmed by the other ingredients.
All in all, we had a good time. After winning a knockout I probably would have had a good time if they served me dog food, and I got ptomaine poisoning.
The drive back to Route 1 featured a body of water on the right. We did not even notice it on the way there, but on the return trip the road was pretty severely flooded. The discussion in the car concerned what has the biggest effect on tides. I was even asked my opinion. As a native of Kansas I had none.
On Thursday morning I ate a piece of leftover chicken, and Sue consumed one of her spherical “crab cakes” for breakfast. I consumed one of the coffee pods in the Keurig and secreted one in my suitcase in hope that the cleaning person (who only came on Tuesday and Thursday)6 might refill the empty slots in the pod holder.
Steve Lister.
Sue had obtained a partner for Thursday’s Gold Rush Pairs game at the partnership desk. His name was Steve Lister. I found a photo of him that was taken at the 2019 event in Warwick when he won a couple if 299er pairs games.
I was not too sanguine about our chances in the Thursday-Friday Knockout, which had the same format as the one that we won. Our team had about 3,000 less points than our victorious foursome. Nevertheless, we were the fifth-seeded team in bracket #1 again. This time there were only seven teams per bracket. We therefore played six rounds of eight boards.
We did not do very well. We barely avoided last place. We got clobbered in the last two rounds by the team that won the event and the team that was in last place. I was slightly upset about the last result. Our teammates missed bidding two slams. On one they settled for a game and made seven. On the other they let the other team play in hearts.
The first of those hands was a comedy of errors at our table. The North-South team was Ulla and Michael. Ulla opened 1[suite x=’H’]. Michael bid 2NT to show a game-going hand with four pieces. Ulla rebid 3♠, which was supposed to show a singleton or void in spades—she actually had a doubleton. Michael cued the club suit; Ulla cued diamonds; Michael bid 4NT, asking for key cards. Ulla showed two of the five key cards (four aces and the king of trumps) without the queen. Michael bid 7♥ even though he knew—or at least should have known—that they were off a key card. If it was an ace, as certainly was likely, the contract was impossible. If it was a 50% play. In short, it was a terrible bid.
Ulla could not believe that he went to seven with only two key cards, but the one that they were missing was the Jim’s king of trumps, which could easily be finessed. So they made it. This was the first hand of the match. I knew that we were doomed. My play during the next five hands was uninspired.
So, on Friday we had to play in the Open Swiss or a pairs game. We decided to play in the Swiss.
Sue and I went out to eat with three people from the Northampton, MA, Yan Drabek, Rich McClure, and Allison Ryan. I really needed to get away from Jim O. for a while. He talks during every break between the hands, and I grew tired of listening to him. I was also down on Abhi and Paul after the last two rounds.
The parking lot was full when we visited The Shanty.
Our destination for supper was the Shanty, a small restaurant on Route 1 not very far south of the Crow’s Nest. It was another seafood place. We had two appetizers, yam fries and sweet soy chicken wings. The service was slow and Yan was very hungry. Everyone else liked them a lot. I thought that they were OK, but I would have preferred the wings without the sauce.
I ordered the baby back ribs, which were described as “honey glazed ribs, patatas bravas, corn, sriracha mayo, Parmesan, cilantro.” The last four were all mixed together and also covered with the glaze. I must say that this was the first time that I have ever been disappointed with the way that a restaurant prepared baby back ribs. I ate all the meat, but I barely touched the other stuff. I also had a beer.
The conversation, however, was great. I really perked up when Rich first asked about how to defend against Precision and then how to bid when the opponents play a Weak 1NT system. Everyone also laughed at my impression of Jim explaining things. He was a nice guy and a good player, but he just talked and talked. Yan, Allison, and Rich know him well; they all play in the Northampton Bridge Club.
The most amazing thing about this meal was that the other three participants seemed to have no idea how to split a check. I had to step in and do the arithmetic for them.
I went to sleep shortly after we arrived back at the hotel. I awakened at 3:30, and I never did get back to sleep. I finished up the chicken for breakfast. The rest of the day I stayed awake by imbibing caffeine.
Sue decided that she would not play on Friday. Steve L. was required to be home to celebrate his birthday. If he had been willing to play, she probably would have stayed. Her plan was to use the pool after all of the bridge players were busy playing and then check out of the hotel.
I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep. This happened to me on a fairly regular basis. By the time of the first round I had been up for 6.5 hours. I had consumed plenty of caffeine in the interim, but I was still groggy in the first round. I failed to recognize a splinter and identified it as a weak bid. This resulted in a big swing that cost us the first match. I righted the ship after that shocking mistake.
We bumped around in the middle for most of the day, but we had a couple of big wins. We lost the last match on a hand on which I opened 1NT with a flat 15 and everyone passed. I went down one. Somehow our teammates lost 200 points even though neither side was vulnerable. I did not even ask how they did it.
I rushed off to the Executive Committee meeting with out checking our results. It turned out that we had 84 victory points, which was good enough for fourth in B and 2.66 gold points.
Hardly anyone was there when the Executive Committee meeting was schedule to begin. Someone decided that we should have food again, but we had to order from the sandwich menu. My Reuben sandwich was on the counter with a silver cover that bore my name on a tag. The French fries were surprisingly good. but the sandwich was cold. The sodas were brought in halfway through the meeting.
Curtis.
Curtis Barton, the president, called the meeting to order and, as usual, announce how fabulous everything was. He mentioned the fact that Mark Oettinger had resigned as vice-president, and he had appointed Sue Miguel as temporary vice-president.
Mark Aquino, the Regional Director, said that Bridge Base Online (BBO) was sold to a French company with no concern for the state of bridge. They were only interested in money. The ACBL’s contract runs out in 2025.
The table rate for youth players was set, as was a new rate for online NAP and GNT games. This was done to help boost the balance in the Grass Roots Fund.
I suggested that the Tournament Scheduling Committee should consider offering the Pro-Am game in the evening. After some cajoling I volunteered to manage it for the tournament scheduled for Southbridge in February of 20247.
I took a can of Diet Coke and consumed it on the drive home. I arrived at exactly 9 PM, and the miles-per-gallon read 40.1, but I have long suspected that it overstates the car’s actual mileage by about 5 percent.
The last tournament of the year, which was called “The Return of the Gala“, was held in Marlborough8, MA, from October 31 through November 5. The original Gala was held at the same site in May of 2022. I missed it because I was on the European cruise that was described here.
I planned on playing for five of the six days, but I had a very difficult time finding partners and teammates. I was fortunate that Eric Vogel agreed to play as my partner in the two knockouts held the first four days, but he could not play on Saturday. More than a month before the tournament started I submitted electronic forms to the partnership person, Denise Bahosh, for teammates for the knockouts and for a partner for Saturday. I had to pretend that I wanted to play in the open pairs on Saturday. If I could find a partner, I would try to convince him/her to switch to the Swiss.
The playing area was on the ground floor on the far right.
Sue Miguel had sent an email in early September that claimed that the hotel, a Best Western (BW) property called the Royal Plaza Hotel and Trade Center, was only recognizing the tournament rate until the end of September.9 So, I made reservations for one double room for four days.I planned to drive home after the Executive Committee meeting on Saturday evening. I had forgotten that there would be a meeting of the Board of Delegates on Sunday, and I was unaware that the Executive Committee meeting had been scheduled for Friday.
Denise tried to match Eric and me up with Alan Godes (introduced here) and an unknown teammate. I was somewhat reluctant to commit us to join up with them, but it turned out not to matter. Alan did not respond to my email for some time. In the interim Denise proposed that we play with Carol Seager and Michelle Blanchard (introduced here) in the first KO. I had played with them before and had a reasonably good experience. So, I agreed to teaming up, and so did they.
Meanwhile Alan wrote me to say that he had teammates for the Thursday-Friday KO, but he needed to find someone for the first one. I explained that we had just found teammates for that event. I don’t think that Alan ever found teammates.
Just before the tournament Denise informed me that she could not find a partner for me for Saturday. So, on the eve of the tournament I had big gaps in my dance card.
Sue could not find partners either. She wanted to attend the Board of Delegates meeting on Sunday, but it did not make much sense for her to drive up just to attend. It would be about a seventy-five-minute drive even on a Sunday morning.
On the morning of Tuesday, October 31, I set off in my Honda for Marlborough by myself. The drive was relatively easy. The only problem was that the first leg of the journey was due west on Route 190. In a few places the sun was directly in my eyes. I had my sunglasses on, but even so it was blinding. Still, even though I made my customary stop at McDonald’s in West Stafford, I made excellent time. I arrived at about 8:45, much earlier than I expected.
The only difficult part of the drive was finding the hotel. On I-495 the exit for the hotel was labeled Route 20 west. The street’s local name was Boston Post Road.
The hotel was located on a road that went north from the Post Road called “Royal Plaza Drive”, which was really more like a driveway. There was no street sign that I could see. Later I noticed a large “Best Western” sign, but on my first pass I was searching for a street sign, not a sign with five or six logos on it. Because the Post Road had a median I had to continue to the next stoplight and then make two U-turns to return to the spot where Google Maps had told me to turn.
I definitely did notice the sign for the Hampton Inn, which was located right on the Post Road. I definitely took mental not of the fact that the Hampton and a lot of other more modern hotels were quite close to the BW.
The road to the hotel had one striking feature—an oversized speed bump that was quite jarring if taken at more than 5 mph. The hotel’s parking lot was gigantic. It was mostly empty when I arrived, but at night a large number of big trucks parked there. I don’t know whether the hotel charged them for this privilege.
I parked on the right near the door to the exhibition center. Many of the people who were already there had on costumes. Gary Peterson (introduced here) had by far the most elaborate one. He was dressed as the King of Hearts, complete with crown and mace. One woman wore a long bathrobe; I think that she intended to be a geisha. I thought that all of the costumes seemed creepy. I had on my black trousers and shirt and my Halloween tie. The neck on my shirt must have shrunk. It had become too small for me. I was uncomfortable all day.
Sally Kirtley was wearing some kind of semi-costume, but what caught my attention was the fact that she had on her Tournament Manager badge. That reminded me that I had accidentally left my Goodwill pin and Executive Committee name tag at home. I remembered getting them out of my backpack. What I did not remember was that I had also put them back in the pack. Later I decided that I did not need to bring the pack.
When I arrived the playing area was very cold. For the first half hour or forty-five minutes there was no coffee. I sat by myself and shivered even though I was wearing the jacket that I had bought (and almost never needed) for my European cruise eighteen months earlier. A few people dropped by to say hello to me.
At about 9:30 I located Carol and Michelle. I expected Eric to be there at any minute. He was still missing ten minutes later, and, in fact, there were very few people around the table where they sold entries for the two knockout events. Carol gave me her credit card, and I used mine for Eric and me when I bought the entry. Our preliminary number was 102, which meant that only one other entry had been sold.
I had my phone in my hand to call Eric at about 9:50, but I saw him before I could find his name in the contacts. He reported that he had arrived early, and the hotel let him check in. So, this was my first clue that our group constituted the vast majority of the hotel’s guests.
Unused knockout enty.
I asked the director, David Metcalf, how many entries they had sold. He replied that four teams were in the top bracket and four in the 0-4,000. Carol insisted that we drop out and play in the pairs, and I agreed. Two of the original four teams played in the open KO and were given handicaps.
Eric and I won some points in both sessions of the open pairs, but we did not set the world on fire. There were about twenty-two tables in each session. None of the hands stood out for me.
I am not sure why so few people chose to play in the knockouts.
The lunch break was more than an hour. After I ate my roast beef sandwich and chips, I checked in and went to the room that I had been assigned, #263. I discovered when I opened my shaving kit that I had forgotten my toothbrush. I used one end of a Q-tip to paint my teeth with toothpaste. I also used a proxabrush and floss.
Eli had a beard in Marlborough.
I sent an email to Eli Jolley, who had filled out a card looking for teammates for the Thursday-Friday KO. He had 3,000 masterpoints, and his partner had 2,000. A few minutes later he replied that he would like to team up. I said that I would be around the partnership desk at 9:30 on Thursday morning, and many people would know me.
In the second session we played two hands against a couple who played the Polish Club, which has a three-way 1♣, Kris and Dorota Jarosz. I decided that we would play the defense that I had devised against what I called faux club systems. It involved using a 1♦ bid to make a two-suited overcall. We did well against them.
Sue Miguel kept interrupting the bridge to give awards for costumes. There were also gift cards given as door prizes. She must have used the word “fabulous” ten times. I was ready to puke.
Eric and I got points in both lackluster sessions. If I had had my druthers, I would have just driven home after we found out that there would be no KO.
When I got back to the room after the second session I phoned my wife Sue at home to tell her about the fiasco in the KO.
On Tuesday evening Eric, who is a vegetarian who sometimes eats fish, and I went out for supper. He wanted to try a place called Atlantic Poké. He tried to figure out how to get there from a map that was available near the welcome desk. We finally found it, but it was just a small place that seemed to specialize in takeout. The accent on the “e” made me think that it was probably sushi, the one thing that I have always refused to eat.
So, Eric said that the Longhorn Steakhouse was acceptable. I dialed it up on Google Maps, and we found it rather quickly in the corner of a strip mall. Eric had salmon, and I ate the baby back ribs. We talked about our careers. I learned that after Eric had been laid off from Pratt & Whitney he went to CPI and learned to program. He spent the rest of his career in IT at insurance companies.
I also learned that Eric had done quite a bit of work on Y2K. The part that he did sounded ugly indeed. He also mentioned that it was impossible to get Fortran programs converted to COBOL because they had different rounding mechanisms. He probably would have liked working at TSI, and I would have liked to have him.
I tried to watch an episode of The Bridge on my laptop, but I couldn’t get interested in it. I also tried to read from the book that I had picked up at the Hartford Bridge Club, Mexico Days by Robert Roper, but the light in the room was so dim that I gave up after about one page.
When I went to get into the shower the tub had water in it. I slipped and fell on my back on the floor of the bathroom. I was not seriously injured but I smashed my right hand against the baseboard. I put bacitracin on the small cut after the bleeding stopped. By the way, there was a handle outside of the tub, and I did grasp it as I entered the tub. Nevertheless, I could not stop the fall.
To get the water out of the tub I needed to shove a plastic Bic razor that I always brought for emergencies between the stopper and the lip of the drain.
I did not think much of my room. However, it did have a refrigerator into which I placed the two bottles of water that the desk clerk gave me when I checked in. There was also a microwave, but I did not use it. The bed was quite comfortable, and the heat worked without a problem.
Breakfast was free. I met Eric in the restaurant (which only served supper on Fridays and Saturdays) at 8:15 on Wednesday morning. They served pretty much the same thing every morning: scrambled eggs (plain and with something added), meat (sausage or bacon), French toast sticks with syrup, fruit, and yogurt. Juice and coffee were available from extremely old machines. The sausage that they served on Wednesday and Friday was much better than Thursday’s overcooked bacon. The French toast was much too chewy.
Afterwards we played with Michelle and Carol in the open Swiss. There were only twelve teams. In the first round I played 3NT two hands in a row. The first one was routine. On the second one I had eight tricks. There was also some potential for more in some suits. The problem was spades, where the dummy had only a doubleton, and I held Kx. Sure enough, the lead was a low spade. I played a card from dummy. Then the player on my right pulled two cards from her hand, the queen and ten of spades, and dropped them on the table. We called the director.
Tim Hill came to the table and explained that she could play either card. The other would be a “major penalty card”. She chose to play the queen. I scored my king. Now I only needed one trick. I crossed to the dummy in hearts and took a finesse in clubs. It lost, but I was allowed to tell the left-hand opponent not to lead a spade. In the end I was able to win ten tricks before they got their spades. If she had dropped the cards on the table, I could never have made it.
When we returned to our teammates’ table, I said that unfortunately we had probably used up all of our luck for the day in the first round. They thought that they had done badly, and they had, but the gain from my lucky 3NT game was enough for us to claim victory.
The celebration was short. We played against Mark Aquino’s team in the second round and got blitzed. That was the first of four consecutive blitzes that we endured. This was even worse than the performance in the Swiss at the NABC in Boston (described here).
I played none of the thirty-two hands in the four blitz rounds. One hand in the middle of the blitzkrieg deserved emphasis. I held KQJ10 and three little clubs, a singleton diamond, Ax in hearts and Kxx in spades. Eric opened 1♣! I wasted no time and bid 4♦, which asked him how many aces he had. His answer indicated all three! I thought for only a few seconds before bidding 6♣.
Eric had to play it. I could tell from the look on his face that it was going to be difficult, and it was. He won only my seven clubs, the three outside aces, and the ♠K. At the time I thought that it was due to an unlucky lay of the cards, but I should have known better.
Eric’s opening bid indicated that he had either three clubs or more clubs than diamonds. In any case he had four or fewer hearts and spades. Unless he had precisely one diamond and four in the other suits, he had less than 15 points. If he had had 15-17 points with a balanced hand, he would have bid 1NT. So, he was very unlikely to have either of the missing kings. I was essentially gambling that he had the ♠Q! It was possible, but not very likely.
I should have just responded 2♣ to set the trump suit. We would then bid stoppers up the line. When I was certain of stoppers in every suit, I should have signed off in thee lowest available notrump bid.
In the sixth and last round we played against Alan Godes’s team. The match ended in a tie. Somehow it seemed fitting.
At that point I considered it to have been an unspeakably bad tournament. It got a little better at supper, which we ate with Ben and Ginny Bishop. At the time Ben was the president of the HBC. One of Ben’s sons had recommended a restaurant called Welly’s in the neighboring town of Hudson.
I found a shortcut!
For some reason we took two cars. Ben knew where it was. I was confident that I had programmed Google Maps to report the directions to Welly’s Restaurant in Hudson (there was also a Welly’s in Marlborough).
Somehow I got the directions for Willy’s Steakhouse in Shrewsbury, MA. So I turned a fifteen-minute trip into one that took much more than half an hour. Ben and Ginny had to wait for us.
I don’t think that I spoiled the evening. I had a Reuben sandwich, which was pretty good. The stars of the meal from my perspective, however, were the tall glass of Guinness and the onion rings. The latter were both delicious and plentiful.
We got to learn a little about Ginny’s career in nursing. The rest of the evening was spent with Ben, Eric, and I swapping war stories about working with computers. They were both pretty impressed to learn that I had personally installed thirty-six AdDept systems.
Ben also told us about his two sons. They both had worked for the MITRE Corporation. I had never heard of a non-profit that worked with the federal government.
We found our way back to the hotel without any problem.
On Thursday morning I learned that Eli was a relatively young pro from Auburn, AL. I already knew his partner, Judy McNutt from western Massachusetts. She was wheelchair-bound.
Judy McNutt.
This time there were two brackets of eight teams in the 0-4,000 KO. We were the top-seeded team in the upper bracket. We won our first three matches rather easily. I decided to spend the break in my room resting and dining on the gifts that the lady at the front desk gave me when I checked in—a bag of chips, an energy bar, and water in a bottle. When I returned to the playing area I bought a can of Diet Coke.
Our streak continued after lunch We won the first two matches. At this point we had pretty much clinched a spot in the knockout on Friday. However, we were blitzed in the sixth round, which allowed the team that beat us to pull even with us. Both teams won blitzes in the last round. We were awarded first place based on the fractional victory point score that was in effect.
Eli asked me if I cared about whom we played. I told him that it was a difficult choice. The two teams, Page and Clay, were only one victory point apart, and we had defeated both of them in the Swiss by small margins. I picked to play the Page team because the other team seemed to me to have a stronger East-West pair. I hoped to protect Judy, who was definitely our weak link.
Eric and I ate supper with Donna Feir, the manager of the HBC, and Sally Kirtley. At my suggestion we went to Evviva, a casual Italian restaurant. Two HBC players, Tom Gerchman and Dan Finn were already seated nearby. They were going over the hands from the pairs game. I ordered the Bolognese (at Evviva they put the bowl in Bolognese) and a glass of Montepulciano.
Donna Feir.
The conversation at supper was not extremely memorable, but I enjoyed it. It was the first time in my fifteen years as a member of the HBC that I had been in a social situation with Donna. I did learn that the tournament in February would be the combination sectional and regional, and it would be held in Mansfield. The Presidential Regional had been assassinated. The tournament in Southbridge would be in April.
After we drove back to the hotel Donna and Sally played in the side game. I went to my room and watched part of the football game between TCU and Texas Tech. Texas Tech was ahead 20-7 when I turned it off at the half, and the Red Raiders held on for the victory.
I got the bright idea of dragging the pole lamp over to the side of the bed. I cocked the shade so that it produced enough light to read by. I read a chapter or so before I took a shower and then went to bed.
At 3:00 I awakened and spent an hour and spent about an hour working out the combinatorial probabilities of that slam hand that failed. I only went to sleep when I realized that it was almost impossible for Eric to have either missing king.
I wore an N95 mask the first three days. Less than 10 percent of the other players did so. However, the rigidity of the mask bothered the bridge of my nose, and I had deep gouges in the side of my face. Since I would only be at the same table as four others, I decided to leave it in room 263.
Mark Oettinger.
After breakfast on Friday I went over to the table occupied by Steve Ackerman and Sue Collinson from Vermont. I asked them if they knew what the backstory was for Mark Oettinger’s sudden and—to me, at least—shocking resignation. Steve said that Peter Marcus had called Mark and insisted that he should resign. Steve said that it was “pretty nasty”. Later that morning I met up with Joe Brouillard. I asked him if he knew what had happened. He said that he had been surprised by it and knew no details.
I thought back to an email that I had received from Sandy DeMartino asking me about Mark’s performance. I explained that he seemed OK to me, but my interaction with him had been limited by the fact that I was unable to attend three consecutive meetings of the Tournament Scheduling Committee, at which the strategy for recovery from the Pandemic was decided. I had then resigned from the committee because I was spending so much time on the HBC, the CBA, and this project.
Sandy DeMartino.
Sandy said that Peter Marcus had telephoned her and asked her to support Sue Miguel as the next president of D26. Sandy declined to do so. I think that this must have been before the call to Mark.
I found all of this to be deeply disconcerting. At the close of my conversation with Steve and Sue I asked them if they thought that I should make a stink about this at the Executive Committee meeting on Friday evening. Steve advised against it. Sue was silent.
We lost the match against the Page team. All of the swings in the first set were in the first six boards that Eric and I played. I did not think that we had played badly. We won the second set by eight, but that was not nearly enough.
I bought a salad, which was barely edible, and a Diet Coke for lunch. I ate by myself and had a hard time keeping the Oettinger affair out of my head.
I checked the cards on the partnership desk. I could scarcely believe that no one was looking for partners for Saturday’s open pairs game. I don’t know what I would have done if I had not canceled my hotel reservation.
The first set of the consolation game after lunch was easy to analyze. We did not bid three games that our opponents did. Two of those were my decisions. The games came home because on both hands Eric and I had a secondary fit in the diamond suit that, because of aggressive interference by the opponents, neither of us got a chance to show the other.
Wee came back strong again in the second set. However, we lost ten imps because Eric opened a flat hand with a 12-count, something that I would never do. I had nineteen points. I responded 2NT, which for us showed 12-14 or 18-19 points. Eric bid 3NT, which indicated that he had no short suits. I bid 3NT, which went down. If Eric had had the thirteen points that I expected, I would have made the bid, and we would have won the match. If he had opened a minor with the hand that he had, we would have fallen a few imps short.
I was pretty sure that I had ordered a roast beef sandwich for the box lunch that the hotel provided for the Executive Committee meeting. However, there was nothing but turkey and tuna. I certainly did not order tuna. So I took a turkey sandwich that had a lot of dry meat and bread. I can’t complain. An apple and a bag of chips were also provided.
Mark Aquino.
The main topic of conversation was whether we should worry about scheduling regionals the same weekend as the regional in Lancaster, PA. Mark Aquino said that he had gotten an earful from the president of District 24. Peter Marcus and Sue Miguel were adamant that the “500-mile rule” that D24 cited did not exist. Evidently they hoped to draw more pros from New York City.
The schedule for the tournament in Southbridge February, which because it was near the Super Bowl, would have a football theme. I didn’t plan to go unless someone really wanted to play with me. I would not be eligible for the regional events, and the sectional events did not include any bracketed events. Maybe they will change that.
The meeting closed with a long lecture by Sue Miguel about how we all needed to get off of our butts and to participate in her many programs to recruit people to rejoin the ACBL and play in our tournaments. I found much of this offensive and wrong-headed, but she and Peter will not brook any opposition.
I am also convinced that the basic analysis is wrong. To me the problem was not the Pandemic so much as the ACBL’s reliance on online bridge as a source of money. Maybe it was necessary for the ACBL to survive, but it has now ruined some of the tools that we had used to put on attractive tournaments that made money. The current D25 administration has abandoned most of the aspects that I judged made the events compelling. No one seemed to want to hear this. Instead we have been treating our players like kids in junior high. Costume contests, door prizes, unsharpened pencils with “Day of the dead” figures on them: give me a break! All of the incentives were provided to new players. I saw no effort at transitioning anyone into the games that the district sponsors.
Also, I was supposed to represent Connecticut. There have been no regional tournaments in Connecticut since 2021, and none have been planned. We were told that there were no hotels. Is that possible?
I came away from the meeting with a very bleak outlook. For ten years I have loved to attend regional tournaments. At this point I could barely tolerated them, and they were expensive.
The drive back to Enfield was uneventful. The Honda entered the garage at 9 p.m.
1. Until 2016 there had been an Individual Regional in Newton, MA. It was discontinued because it was unprofitable. My report from the last such event was posted here.
2. The Red Lion was the last name of the hotel in Cromwell, CT, that hosted District 25’s regional tournament in February. In 2020—just days before the Presidential Regional—the state of CT closed down the hotel for failure to pay taxes. It never reopened. The tournament was moved to the Sturbridge Host for that one year.
3. Precision is a bidding system in which the strongest opening bid is at the lowest level—1♣. The Wikipedia article about it is here.
4. I had played in the previous 0-4000 Knockout at least five years earlier. It was a fiasco. Only five teams participated. We played all day in two five-way sessions to eliminate one team. One team had much less experience than the other four; they did not do well. Our team lost in the semifinals and was relegated to the Single-session Swiss.
5. Benjamin Black was the pen name assumed by award-winning novelist John Banville when he began writing genre fiction late in his career.
6. On my previous two visits to this hotel in 2022 no cleaning service was provided at all.
7. I learned months later that there would not be a tournament in Southbridge in 2022. This is explained in the Marlborough section.
8. The name of the Massachusetts town is officially Marlborough. There is a “hamlet” named Marlboro. The town in New Jersey with the same name shortened it to eliminate the “ugh” at the end, but the one in Massachusetts did not. Nevertheless, the highway signs mostly use the short version.
9. The hotel was not actually filled to anything approaching its capacity. I had to wonder it the hotel really enforced or even announced this policy.
Preparation: For several years I have maintained a spreadsheet that contained one line per bridge partner. I only kept track of ones with whom I had played at least one complete session at a sanctioned game. I also had bookmarked the ACBL’s web page that contained the records of club games. However, when I started working on this entry, I was disappointed to discover that the link no longer worked. So, I have needed to rely on my memory more than I hoped.
This document contains stories about partnered with whom I played several times. Part 2 (posted here) describes the ones that I met through the mentoring program or the High-Low game on Sundays and people that I only played with once or twice.
The HBC: The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) was founded in 1931. It is the oldest continuously operating bridge club in North America. Its headquarters since October 1995 has been at 19A Andover Drive in West Hartford. I played my first game at the club and became a member on January 1, 2008. My partner that afternoon was Dick Benedict (introduced here), with whom I had been playing on Wednesday evenings at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) for several years. At the time the club was charging $30 for a membership. The table fee was $5 for members and $6 for others. At the time I had only been playing in Simsbury. I joined the HBC because I had been asked to play in the games it ran on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons. So, I figured that if I kept to that schedule all year1, it would be a good dealT
Tom Gerchman.
The person who asked me to play was Tom Gerchman. In preparation for playing with him I taught myself thirteen conventions that I had found in a book by William S. Root and Richard Pavlicek. I also bought Michael Lawrence’s CD about 2/1 (pronounced “two over one”), the set of bidding principles used by most players at the HBC and at tournaments. He had played 2/1 with his previous partner, Mary Witt2, and I eventually persuaded him to play it with me as well. At this point I knew enough conventions to be comfortable playing with nearly any new partner.
Tom drove a red BMW convertible. Between 2008 and 2023 he has purchased several new cars. Each one was a red BMW convertible. The license plate was GERCH. On trips he liked to drive, but the back seat was uninhabitable. If we were playing in a team game, the BMW was not big enough to hold four people. He borrowed his mother’s car.
I soon discovered that Tom wanted to play with me because Mary had resigned from their partnership. She wasn’t angry at him; she just did not like sitting across the table from him. I learned this when Tom and I played in a knockout with Mary and Ruth Tucker3 as teammates in the regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We made it to the semifinals of our bracket. After we had been eliminated Tom kept telling Ruth, “I got you gold!”
That evening the four of us went out for supper. I learned at that meal that Ruth had been a small child in Nazi Germany during the Kristallnacht in 1938. She was surprised that I knew quite a bit about the event. I had read about it when I had researched the backgrounds of two popes4, Pius XI and Pius XII, who had both been in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. Tom had never heard of it.
For quite some time I enjoyed playing with Tom for several reasons. The first was that he liked to go to tournaments, and so did I. In addition, he was still working5, which meant that he could only play in evening games, and on weekends and holidays. That schedule conformed to mine. However, he was an avid golfer. So, in nicer weather he played less bridge. I also like the fact that he was not averse to learning new conventions. Bidding has always been my favorite aspect of the game.
At the SBC Tom occasionally played with his mother, Sue. He was sometimes pretty hard on her when she made mistakes. Wen she died in 2012 (obituary here) I was still playing regularly with Tom, and I went to her wake. I was the only bridge player who attended, but a number of Tom’s golf buddies were there.
After the evening games Tom and a small group of the other players went to the Corner Pug in West Hartford to discuss the hands and drink. Tom might have eaten a very late supper. I don’t think that he cooked, and he was not married.
It took me a while to realize it, but Tom definitely was obsessive-compulsive in some ways. For example we played together on two separate days at the NABC held in Boston in 2008. I discovered that he had memorized in terms of minutes how long it took to get to the site of the tournament from several spots on the route. Furthermore, on the day that I drove I let him off to register us while I parked the car. He insisted that I must park in precisely the same spot that he had used on the previous day. Just to be peevish I parked in the same spot, but one floor lower.
On that occasion we played in an Open Swiss with a pair from the partnership desk. We won our first round against a team from Connecticut. After that it was one humiliating defeat after another. Our teammates were upset at us. We beat a hasty retreat after the last round.
I heard from Mary Witt that Tom read the Hartford Courant every morning and always started with the obituaries. She also said that he had a huge stack of old newspapers in his house. I never went to his house, and so I cannot verify this.
Tom was much more obsessed with the scores than I was. He was pretty hard on me at club games, but he very seldom talked during rounds at tournaments. He also stayed after club games and audited the scores. He once told me that he loved to check calculations. He confided once that he should have been an auditor.
I was still playing with Tom at the time of my Life Master parties at the HBC and the SBC in early 2010. I remember that he gave a little speech at the HBC in which he talked about my habit of sending him emails about what I thought we could have done to do better in the previous game. In my acceptance speech I thanked every single partner that I had had at that point. I thanked Tom for teaching me “that in a six-team Howell, you don’t play against the pair that you follow and the pair that follows you.”
I don’t have any great memories of playing with Tom. We did not do very well at most tournaments. Eventually, I stopped playing with him. I just could not stand the fact that he said and did the same things over and over and over and over. He also talked about the hands too much in club games while we were still playing. I found myself pounding the steering wheel while driving home after playing with him. Fifteen years later I still react negatively to the sound of his voice.
Actually, I quit twice. After the first time he persuaded me to try again. It took me very little time to realize that he was never going to change. I quit again.
I still teamed up occasionally with him for team games. We had much better results when I did not have to sit across from him.
Tom invited me and Sue to the party that he threw for himself on his sixtieth birthday. It was at a restaurant on the west side of town. He was celebrating the fact that he had survived that long. Apparently both his only brother and his father had died from heart attacks when they were in their fifties.
Michael Dworetsky.
After my partnership with Tom was dissolved, on most Tuesday evenings I played with Michael Dworetsky. He had been playing for quite a while before I returned to the world of bridge, but he had only occasionally played in tournaments. I never was quite sure why he had avoided tournaments before I began playing as his partner.
I have several vivid memories of playing with Michael. We drove to a sectional in Johnston, RI, and did well enough to finish first in the C Flight in the afternoon session of the Open Pairs. As the director read the results, I said to Michael, “Let’s see how he does with our last names.” He butchered both of them.
The most catastrophic mistake of my bridge career occurred in the penultimate round of the Flight C qualifying tournament for the Grand National Teams (GNT). We were definitely in contention when Michael made a Help Suit Game try by bidding 3♣. I needed to bid 4♠ if I thought that we could take ten of the thirteen tricks or 3♠ if not. I considered all that I knew about the hand and finally decided that we probably did not have enough. Unfortunately, I did not bid 3♠, I mistakenly passed, leaving Michael in a ludicrous club contract.
I played with Michael when he made Life Master in a sectional in Westchester County. He drove us into New York City to a deli to celebrate. I had a Reuben sandwich; he had pastrami. We had a great time, but it cost him a fortune to park the car.
He almost always drove us to tournaments. On one occasion I spilled some coffee on the rug in his car. He did not yell at me, but I knew he was upset. He had a very nice car. It was the first that I had ever been in that had a both a built-in GPS and a hand-free telephone.
One of the best calls that I ever made in bridge was when Michael and I played against two ladies, one of whom needed to win the match in order to make Life Master. I opened 1♠, the lady overcalled 2♥, Michael doubled, indicating that he had a pretty good hand with clubs and diamonds. I had six spades, five hearts that included two honors, a club, and a diamond. I passed. We took the first nine tricks. She was down four for 1100 points. She did not make Life Master that afternoon.
I gave a little speech at Michael’s Life Master party. It might have been the best speech that I ever gave. It was not as effective as Urban II’s call for a crusade in 1096, but mine got more laughs. I began by claiming that Michael was a founding member of the club in 1931. I also mentioned the hole in the sole of one of his shoes.
Michael and I played together at the NABC in the summer of 2013. I posted my recollections of this adventure here. We also flew down to the Gatlinburg Regional Tournament in Tennessee in 2013. I took notes and posted them here. We won a knockout and a lot of masterpoints there.
The house in Bloomfield in which Michael lived with his wife Ellen was struck by lightning. Eventually they moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL, but I have seen Michael at bridge tournaments in New England a few times. He usually was playing with a teaching pro named Bob Lavin.
Dan Koepf.
The nicest person whom I ever met was Dave Landsberg. When I started playing on Tuesday evenings, Dave was playing regularly with Dan Koepf. I invited them to team up with Jerry Hirsch and me in Flight C of the GNT event one year. They accepted, and we did quite well. I then wrote to both of them to ask if either one wanted to play in a tournament with me. Dave responded positively, and we were partners and good friends right up until his death (obituary here) in 2016. In fact, he was planning on playing with me in the Cape Cod Senior Regional the week that he died. I wrote up my experiences at that tournament, including my thoughts about Dave, and posted them here.
Dave was on the HBC’s Board of Trustees, and I was not. I once asked him what the BoT meetings were like. He told me that at that time there was a big controversy over toilet paper. He said that the women on the board were complaining that the toilet paper in the ladies’ room was too flimsy. Dave informed me that his position was that we should give them better paper, but it was only fair that they should agree to pay higher table fees. I laughed for several minutes.
Dave and I won a couple of events together. The most memorable one was in Cromwell, CT, when Dave played with Kay Hill, and I played with Ginny Iannini (introduced here). I posted a photo6 of us on the District 25 website, NEBridge.org, as I did the winners of all events at D25’s regionals. When Dave’s wife Jackie saw the photo of Dave and Ginny side-by-side, she told him that he could not play with her again. When Dave told me this, we both broke out laughing. However, it made me wonder why Sue never complained about me playing with Ginny.
Pat Fliakos.
I was playing with Dave and three other people when I set the world standard for captaining a five-person team in a sectional Swiss in Auburn, MA. We were playing with Pat Fliakos,7 one of Dave’s regular partners, and a pair that we picked up at the partnership desk, Charlie Curley (introduced here) and Mike Colburn. Since Mike and Charlie were regular partners, I assigned them to play all eight rounds. Pat and Dave would play six rounds, four together and two each with me. I would play the middle four rounds. This would allow me to leave early and mow the lawn, which needed it badly. When I departed, our team’s score was slightly above average, but in my absence my four teammates won both of the last two rounds, defeating the best team in attendance in the last round. We finished third overall and first in B and C.
The accident occurred between Worcester and Springfield.
The grass did not get mowed. On the trip home my 2007 Honda was rear-ended on the Mass Pike by someone driving a rental car. I did not yet have a cellphone, but he did. He did not speak English very well, but I did. So I called 911 on his phone. After about twenty minutes a state trooper appeared. After a few minutes he told me that he had given the other man a ticket for following too closely. I already had his insurance information; he had Progressive. So, I just drove home.
A few days later a Progressive adjuster examined my car and assessed the cost to fix a small dent on one bumper at $1500. I later was contacted by someone from Avis, who had rented the car to the other driver. They said that they would accept Progressive’s assessment and asked me to settle for $2,000. I spelled my name for them, and gave them my address. The check arrived a few weeks later. Four or five years later I traded in the car. I never considered getting it fixed.
Dave’s Life Master party at the HBC was shared with Sue Rudd (introduced here). I told the above story (minus the car crash and insurance). I balanced it with the tale of the first sectional in Hamden, CT, in which Dave and I competed as partners. We finished dead last in both the morning and afternoon session. I have never heard of anyone who could match that performance.
The best time that I spent with Dave was when the two of us dined at an Italian restaurant in Hyannis, MA. I recall that I ordered the Bolognese and a glass of wine. The food was good, and the conversation was better. For some reason it was very easy to talk to and to listen to Dave. By the time that we left, we had solved the most serious of the world’s problems.
I went to Dave’s wake and the ceremony for him at Wesleyan, where he had worked. When I met Jackie, I told her that Dave really loved her. I was certain of this because he never rolled his eyes when he talked about her. I really miss him.
A photo of Dave is in the Felix Springer section of this entry.
Peter Katz and I started playing together on Saturdays and Tuesday evenings after I stopped playing with Tom Gerchman. In 2023 I still played with him whenever the HBC had a game on Saturday. We had one great showing in August of 2023, which I have documented here.
Earlier in our partnership Peter and I played together in a few sectionals that were held in the Hartford area. At one of them we happened to have the last sitout in the afternoon session, which meant that we could go home early. Before we left we picked up hand records for that session. It did not take us long to realize that some of the hands that we played did not correspond to the ones on the printout. We reported this to the director, Tim Hill. He did not tear his hair out, but I am pretty sure that I saw his bow tie spinning around.
How could this have happened? Some directors like to play “web movements” when an awkward number of pairs are playing. If, for example, thirty-eight pairs are playing, the standard way to play it would be to have two sections, one with ten tables and one with nine. Both sections would be playing nine three-board matches. Each pair would only play against nine of the other thirty-seven pairs. A web movement would allow for one very large section playing fourteen two-board rounds. This requires two identical sets of boards, and they must be handled precisely correctly, but the directors who do this are very reliable about setting them up correctly.
In this case, however, the directors were not at fault. The two sets of boards were NOT identical. I don’t know how they were able to score this, but they eventually did. The directors definitely earned their salary that day.
When I first began playing with Peter he was something of a local celebrity. He and his wife (whom I never met) attended all of the home games of the Hartford University men’s and women’s basketball teams. Peter wore outrageous wigs to the games. I never met his wife, and I only saw photos of him in his super-fan getup.
At some point in the teens the couple got divorced, and Peter stopped attending the games. The marriage must have been stressful on him. He mellowed out quite a bit after the divorce.
At first Peter and I played a version of 2/1 that was not much different from what I had played with Tom Gerchman. At some point Peter began playing on Tuesdays with one of the best players at the club, Tom Joyce. They played a version of the Kaplan-Sheinwold weak 1NT system. I agreed to learn this and play it on Saturdays with Peter. That was what we employed in our big game.
Peter served as webmaster for the HBC. In 2023 I began working with him on posting the club’s monthly calendars.
Before the Pandemic I played regularly with Felix Springer. In fact we played together (and won!) in the very last game on March 15, 2020, before the HBC closed its doors for over a year. We also played together at a few tournaments, including a week at the Fall NABC in San Francisco in 2019. We also played together on a large number of very successful teams, but I usually paired with someone else.
Felix shared his Life Master party with Ken Leopold (introduced here). They asked Dave Landsberg and me to be their teammates. Before the play started, Dave turned to me and said, “Did you read their background stories? Why are they playing with us?”
I don’t know, but it was a good idea. We won our first four rounds. In the fifth round, we faced the other unbeaten team. They had at least five times as many points as we did. It was a very close match that turned on one hand. Laurie Robbins, an excellent bridge player, and I were both West holding the same cards. We each had to make a decision similar to the catastrophic one that I had made in the GNT with Michael Dworetsky. Laurie chose to try for game and went down. I settled for the partial.
Donna Feir.
Donna Feir, the longtime club manager, said that it was the only time that she could remember that the honorees won such a game, and also the only time that they were undefeated.
Felix, as president of the HBC, guided the club through the perilous times of the Pandemic. The club had almost no income, and it still had considerable expenses. He kept everyone involved with periodic newsletter, analysis of playing bridge with robots, and walks in the park. Donna confided to me that without Felix the club probably would not have survived.
In 2022 Felix did something that I never would have expected him to do, and it hurt me deeply. The story is related here.
Ann Hudson.
Ann Hudson lived across the river form Enfield in Suffield, CT, with her husband, Randy Johnson. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with both of them. The card that they played was very sophisticated. I must admit that I had a difficult time to remember the modified Manfield responses to an opponents takeout double.
For a few years Ann and I were rather regular partners for the half of the year that Ann and Randy spent in New England. The other half of the year they lived in South Carolina. In 2022 they moved from Suffield to Hadley, MA.
The only times that I got to play at the HBC with Randy were when Ann had to cancel at the last minute. It only happened a few times. He was an exceptionally good player. We played together in the open pairs in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA, one year and won the afternoon session.
Randy Johnson.
I met Ann while I was working at the partnership desk at the NABC in Providence in 2014. After that we played together pretty regularly at sectional, regional, and NABC tournaments and occasionally at the HBC if she could get away from her chores on their mini-farm.
I usually stopped at the McDonald’s on the south side of Hazard Ave. on the way to either their house in Suffield or at the Hampton Inn that was about halfway between us. On one occasion I was sitting in my blue 2007 Honda in the parking lot while I ate my sausage biscuit with egg. I had turned off the Honda’s engine while I ate. I could not get the car to start, and I did not have a cellphone yet. I had to go in to McDonald’s to use someone’s phone to call Sue, and I had to cancel my game with Ann. If was embarrassing. The best thing about Hondas is their reliability. Mine was telling me that it was time for a trade-in, and I listened.
Ann had actually been born in China. Both of her parents were university professors. They brought her to the U.S. when Ann was very young.
In 2015 my wife Sue and I decided to fly to Denver to play in the Fall NABC. Randy and Ann also planned to attend. Ann and I decided to play in two NABC events: the 0-10,000 Swiss and the 5K Blue Ribbon Pairs.
Kathy Rolfe.
Before those events started I picked up a partner for the evening side game, Kathy Rolfe. I had met her at a previous NABC when we were both playing in the lowest level of the Life Masters Event. When we came to her table she asked me if I was related to Vic Wavada in Kansas City, and—get this—she pronounced my name correctly. It turned out that Kathy knew Vic’s wife Theresa very well, and she had mentioned that I played bridge.
Kathy and I finished near the middle in the side game. We probably should have done a little better.
I had arranged to play in the 10,000 Swiss with a woman from Arkansas named Ti Davis.8 I told her that I was 6-feet tall, grey-haired, and skinny, and I would have on my red and blue Barça hat. She was playing with an Asian woman whom she met at the partnership desk. Unfortunately, we were overmatched in the event and only won one or two rounds.
Leonardo Cima.
On the next day Ann and I teamed up with Randy and one of his regular partners to play in an Open Swiss event. In the second round we played against Leonardo Cima and Valerio Giubilo, famous players from Rome. We had a little time to talk with them before the match. They told me that they were both from Roma. I told them that it was “la mia città preferita in Italia.”
Valerio Giubilo.
In the match Giubilo made an incorrect bid on an important hand causing them to miss a slam. Cima gave him a severe dressing-down. During the rest of the match they both spoke impeccable English, but during this post mortem Cima filled the air with Italian curse words.
We won the match, but we did not do well in the event. Giubilo and Cima won over 100 points in the tournament.
In the Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs Ann and I played as well as we have ever played. I was very excited when we made it to the second day. We played pretty well then as well, but not quite well enough.
I was too intense for Ann in the Super Senior Pairs and Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs at the NABC in Honolulu, as described here. She was not angry at me; I think that she felt sorry for me more than anything. After the tournament she drove to the airport and drove Sue and me to Enfield. Ann and I have played together in less stressful situations a few times since then.
I played with Michael Varhalamas a few times at the Saturday game at the HBC. I also played with him at least once in a Swiss in a sectional somewhere in Westchester County. I remember that he drove us there in his truck. Our teammates were two women from, I think, New Jersey. I don’t remember their names. Michael made the arrangements.
Twice during the game he bid dicey grand slams that I had to play. I made the first one without too much difficulty. The second one, however, was in the last round and required a squeeze—not my specialty. However, I pulled it off, and we ended up with a very good score.
Michael and his wife eventually moved to Saint Petersburg. Sue and I went to a bridge game there, and my partner, Chris Person, and I played against him in the first round of a pairs game at the local club. On one hand Chris opened 1[Suit x=”C”]. I passed with three or four points and only one or two clubs. Chris had only three clubs; it was a bloodbath. Michael recommended bidding in that situation, but only over 1[Suit x=”C”], not over any other opening bid.
Connie Dube
Before the Pandemic I played fairly regularly at the HBC with Connie Dube ( pronounced DOO bee). I met her when she and Myrna Butler agreed to be teammates with Ken Leopold and me at a regional tournament. They were late for the first round. Helen Pawlowski and Sally Kirtley sat in for them for one or two hands. In case you are wondering, this was definitely not legal. Since Helen told me that Myrna was always late, I did not hold it against Connie.
Connie and I played at a few sectional tournaments. Her availability was quite limited because her husband was suffering from severe chronic illnesses. As of 2023 she has not resumed playing after the Pandemic.
Joan Brault.
At the HBC I have played with Joan Brault quite a few times when one of her regular partners, Mike (really Michele) Raviele or Aldona Siuta, could not play. We have never set the world on fire, but we have played together a few times in 2023.
Paul Pearson and I teamed up with Mike and Joan at a sectional Swiss in the Hartford area. I think that we did pretty well.
She was a very talented artist. She also had a grandson who was a pitcher/outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Over the years I have played with Mary Eisenberg both at the HBC and at a few tournaments. She asked her to help her to get her Life Master designation at an upcoming regional tournament in Danbury, CT. We played together in club games at least twice so that we could accustom ourselves to each other’s styles. One of those was a STaC (Sectional Tournament at Clubs) game that we somehow won. We earned a lot of silver points for that, but Mary still needed a small fraction of a gold point.
Mary asked me to drive us to the tournament. She had apparently been in an automotive accident a few months earlier, and she was still shaky about driving, especially at night. I picked her up at a parking lot at a supermarket near her home. I never did understand why this arrangement was necessary, but I did not question it.
We played in the Golden Opportunity Pairs at the tournament. It was a two-session event limited to players with less than 750 masterpoints. At the time I was within a few points of the limit. So, I was not afraid of any of our competitors. It was safe to say that I had more tournament experience than any of them. Gold points were awarded to players who had a good combined score (known as “overalls”) for the two sessions, but a smaller amount of gold was also awarded to the pairs that finished first (both North-South and East-West) out of the ten in each section of ten tables for each session.
We did very badly in the morning. I remember interfering against a team playing Precision. The player with the strong hand doubled my bid, and it resulted in a four-digit score in the minus column. Mary did not play very well either. Our score was bad enough that we had very little chance of getting one of the overall awards. Mary was very disappointed. She asked me if I wanted to go home. Go home? I hadn’t driven all this way when there was still a chance of achieving the objective. I said that we just had to win our section in the afternoon session, and that was (at least from my perspective) a reasonable goal. If we played as well as well as we had in the STaC game, we would prevail easily.
We did much better in the afternoon. I have always had a pretty good feel for anticipating results. I reckoned that there was a pretty good chance that we might have won. You never knew for certain; someone may have received a lot of “gifts” from their opponents.
During the last round they posted the standings after the penultimate round. We checked it when we finished playing the last round. We were in first in our section, but only by one point. I thought back on the last round. On the first hand one of our opponents had made a grievous error that should have given us a good score. On the second hand we bid to the best contract, but Mary made some mistakes in the play. The third hand was mediocre, but we did avoid possible errors.
It took the directors nearly half an hour to post the final scores. Mary was beside herself with worry. They finally posted the scores. We tied for first place, and so we had to split the gold award with the other pair. Fortunately, that was just enough for Mary to become a Life Master.
On a good day the drive the hotel to Hartford took an hour.
The trip back to Hartford was in a downpour. However, my Honda had good tires, and so I was not much concerned with the water, and I still had pretty good vision for night driving. So, I was going the speed limit. I nonchalantly passed trucks that were going slower. Mary had to hide her face for most of the ride. She was terrified of another accident.
When we got to Hartford Mary could not remember how to get to the parking lot when coming from the west. We drove around for five or ten minutes before she got her bearings. Since I still had a half-hour drive to Enfield, I was annoyed by this.
Some months later the club sponsored a Life Master party for Mary. I gave a short speech that highlighted two aspects of her activities. At the time she often brought baked goods or other goodies to the club. She also cooked professionally. She even cooked for the Archbishop of Hartford for a while!
The other aspect was her fear of driving. I claimed that she had taken up racing on the Formula 1 circuit, and I held up a large picture of her alleged Ferrari. This reference went right over (or maybe under) Mary’s head, but a few people in the audience understood what I was talking about.
I may have played with Eric Vogel at the HBC more often than any other player. He started playing a few years after I did, and he amassed a terrific record. After I played with him a while I realized that he shared my interest in conventions. Together we put together a good card.
We also have played together in tournaments. We won one session of the open pairs at a sectional in Connecticut. That story has been told here. At the Presidential Regional in Southbridge, MA, in 2023 we played in Bracket 2 of the knockout. We won the qualifying Swiss very easily but only finished a very disappointing fourth. That tale of woe can be read here.
Eric is another talented artist. He also became the club’s treasurer in 2022. He has not had an easy time with accrual accounting.
Eric unobtrusively became a vegetarian at some point during our partnership. He certainly was one in 2023, but I remember that he complimented me on my chili at one of the pot-luck lunches at the HBC.
Eric’s daughter died in 2022. I went to the service at his church. His wife gave a very nice tribute.
Partab.
Prior to the Pandemic I was playing at the HBC nearly every Tuesday with Partab Makhijani. I expected to resume playing with him when the club reopened, but he did not return to play. I think that he, like many others, might have health issues.
His LinkedIn page (here) said that he was on the adjunct faculty at the University of Hartford.
Buz.
I met Buz Kohn (LinkedIn page here) when he was playing with his mother Joan occasionally on Tuesday evenings. We have played together several times at the HBC both before and after the club closed for the Pandemic.
Although Buz was as good at playing the cards as anyone he was not very tolerant of conventions. I had trouble getting him to even use a convention card.
Buz was still playing at the HBC in 2023, but I think that he also had a house in Florida.
Sonja Smith was Steve’s mother, and she also had triplet girls. When I began playing at the SBC in 2004, Sonja played there regularly with a partner who subsequently moved away.
We played together at the HBC several time before the Pandemic and once or twice afterwards—including one of the sectionals in 2022—before she and her family moved to the South.
Sonja attended the 2018 NABC in Honolulu. Afterwards she and her husband Chris spent a few days in Maui, as did my wife Sue and I. Sonja, who was staying at a resort hotel a few miles north of our base of Lahaina, invited us to join them on Monday, December 3, for an expensive sunset cruise of Maui’s west coast. I described it in detail here. It turned out to be a booze cruise with very loud music. I did not enjoy it at all.
Jeanne Striefler and her husband Fred invited Sue and me to their house in West Simsbury several times before the Pandemic. Jeanne and I also played together at the HBC several times and played at teams events at nearby sectionals and regionals. She was part of our ill-fated team at the Presidential Regional described in Eric Vogel’s section. She served as the club’s secretary for many years.
Jeanne also played regularly at the SBC both before and after the closure for the Pandemic.
Jeanne was from Omaha, Nebraska. She grew up closer to my old stomping grounds than anyone else in the HBC.
Ron Talbot.
Ron Talbot, who attended Notre Dame, was the president of the HBC for two years. Before the Pandemic I played with him fairly often at the HBC as well as at a few sectionals in Rhode Island. If his partner was male. he wore a baseball cap while he was playing. If female, he was bareheaded.
Ron told me that he walked three miles every morning. I much preferred to do my walking in the evening. He also walked fifty miles in three days on the Appalachian Trail with his children and/or grandchildren. I don’t know if I could have done that.
Ron moved to Naples, FL, before the Pandemic. He has returned to the HBC once or twice.
Trevor Reeves.
Trevor Reeves served as president and then treasurer of the HBC. He implemented the budgeting system that was instrumental in helping to get the HBC through the Pandemic.
I played with him a few times at the club and at tournaments, including an open pairs game at the Summer NABC in Toronto in 2017 in which we were first in our section in the evening session.
Trevor was involved in the GNT difficulty that I described at the end of Felix Springer’s section.
The player with whom I have played for the longest time is my wife Sue. W have played together at the SBC, the HBC, at tournaments, on cruises, and clubs while we were traveling.
Sue’s HBC photo.
Sue had never played bridge when we met in 1972, but she had played a lot of setback, a much simpler trick-taking game, with friends and family members. She had no trouble learning the rules of bridge, but she had a difficult time understanding even the basics of the strategic principles concerning bidding and play.
I vividly remember one of the first times that we played as partners. It was at the house in Wethersfield of friends of ours, Jim and Ann Cochran, who were introduced here. I may have had a gin and tonic or two. It was a friendly game of rubber bridge. Nothing was at stake.
Sue and I got the bid in a suit contract, and Sue had to play it. The hand was not very challenging; all she had to do was to lead a few rounds of trump and then take her winners. Unfortunately, she neglected to take out the trumps before taking her high cards. So, the Cochrans were able to ruff several of her winners, and the contract went down.
Ann helpfully provided Sue with a way of remembering the importance of drawing trumps before attacking side suits. She taught her the old adage, “Get the children off the street!”
A few hands later Sue played another suit contract. She once again forgot about her opponents’ children, and they once again made enough mischief to set the contract.
On the third hand that I witnessed from across the table in my role of dummy, Sue’s failure to draw trumps led to another failed contract, I lost my temper, slammed my fist down, and broke the card table. I would have offered to buy them a new one, but at the time we were, as the British say, skint.
Nearly forty years passed before Sue and I played together at a sanctioned game. She joined the ACBL in 2011, seven years after I did. By the time that she started to play, I was already a Life Master. She blamed me for not warning her that the ACBL had changed the requirements for that rank on January 1 of 2011. The organization increased the number of required points, but they also made available new opportunities for obtaining them.
Over the years Sue and I played together at a few NABC tournaments, two bridge cruises, and at a few clubs in New England and Florida. At first I tried to get her to go over the hands with me after a session of bridge, but she really hated to do so. Our games together did not improve much over the years.
Sue has a lot of trouble with time, and in competitive bridge only seven minutes are ordinarily allotted for each hand. Contributing to this difficult are the facts that she plays—and does every other thing—rather slowly, keeps a very detailed score, and insists on playing North, the position that maintains the official results.
Mary Petit
I remember one Sunday in which we played in the High-Low game at the HBC. By chance I declared more than my usual share of contracts. We finished first! I cannot remember any other occasion on which we enjoyed even a modicum of success.
Sue would like to do better, but she does not have the drive that I have always had to improve one’s game. In short, she never reads books or bridge articles. She sometimes goes over a result sheet, but never with a critical eye.
She participated in the mentoring program once. Her mentor, an experienced player named Mary Petit, offered her some tips. Later Mary asked me why Sue did not use any of them. I knew the answer, but I could not explain it in a way that anyone else could understand. So, I just said, “That’s the way that Sue is.”
Document here are more of my partnerships at North America’s oldest bridge club before it closed for the Pandemic . Partnerships after the reopening are described here.
1. I naturally thought that I had twelve months of play. In fact, however, the year started on October 1 at the HBC. So, I needed to play 25 times in nine months, which I did.
2. I never got a chance to play with Mary Witt before she moved to Cary, NC. I have occasionally communicated with her by email.
3. Several years later Ruth asked me to play with her at the HBC. I remember that I made a mistake of some kind on one hand that prevented us from getting any points. She mentioned that she knew that I was going to do that. Ruth was a good player, but she never made Life Master because she did not like tournaments. She died in 2020 at the age of 86. Here obituary can be found here. Her parents brought her to the United States in 1940.
4. An abbreviated recounting of my long obsession with papal history has been posted here. The chapter of my book about papal history that makes reference to Nazi Germany is posted here.
5. Tom was an actuary, but he never made FSA. In 2023 he was still working part-time at a pension consulting firm called PCI.
6. This photo was unfortunately lost when the server on which NEBridge.org ran had a catastrophic system failure in 2015. I also had a copy of the photo, but I cannot find it.
7. Pat still plays bridge, but she moved to Charlottesville, VA.
8. As it happened, we played against Ti’s team in the semifinals of the Summer NABC in Washington in 2016. Her team won the match and the event. I did not play against her. She and her partner played the same direction as Felix and me.
