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.
My notes from 2022 are rather comprehensive. Tournament bridge finally started again in that year. My experiences at the sectional tournaments in New England have been recounted here. The events sponsored by District 25 (D25) are described here.
I decided to organize this blog entry chronologically. Several other major events that occurred during the year received their own entries. Links to those entries can be found in the appropriate month.
I was looking forward to 2022 with hope of a return to some degree of normalcy. Both of the bridge clubs in which I played regularly seemed to be doing fairly well, and tournaments were scheduled nearby at the unit (state), district (New England), and national level. Furthermore my wife Sue, my friend Tom Corcoran, and I had an exciting trip planned for May. Finally, although the U-M football team lost its last game of 2021 badly, it was a gigantic improvement over the team that won only two games in the first year of the Pandemic.
January: On New Year’s Day the temperature reached 50 degrees. I walked five miles outdoors with only one stop. I also found René Conrad’s (introduced here) LinkedIn page.
Ohio State was lucky to beat Utah 48-45 in the Rose Bowl. Both teams had great offenses and terrible defenses.
On the next day I received an email from René. I wrote back to her, but there was no further interaction.
On January 3 I brought the car into Lia Honda because the windshield washers were not squirting. The service guy told me that mice had chewed a hole in the hose. He put in a new one and advised me to put traps in the garage in which the car was stored.
On the morning of the 4th I used the Dealer4 machine at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) for the Wednesday evening game at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). I encountered no problems that I could not immediately resolve. On the way home from bridge I bought some mouse traps.
At the Zoom meeting of the HBC Board of Trustees (BoT) the big news was that Linda Starr, the director who had sent out so many clever emails during the shutdown via MailChimp, was resigning from communication duties. I thought about volunteering, but at that point I was still busy with my work for D25.
On January 6 I caught a mouse in a trap that I had set near the wooden chest on the northern wall in the garage.
I suspected that I might be charged by the BoT with finding and/or training a replacement for Linda. So, I asked for and received copies of Linda’s write-ups of what she did in MailChimp. It was certainly nice (and unusual) to work with someone who had thoroughly documented her responsibilities.
The traps for the first two mice were set just to the left of this chest.
On January 7 I caught a second mouse in a trap set in the same spot.
I had ordered a blue sweatshirt with Michigan spelled out in yellow (actually maize) from someone on Espy. I received it on January 8. I already had on that I liked a lot, but the collar and the cuffs were quite frayed, and it was a little too big. The color was right and it seemed comfortable, but the letters were not precisely yellow. They had blue specks in them. I decided that it was close enough, and I did not send it back.1
On the 10th I caught a third mouse. By then Bob (the cat) seemed to have moved into the new bedroom with Sue. Bob and our other pet for 2022, Giacomo, were black cats. They were both introduced here.
The plain old mousetrap of decades gone by still worked perfectly well.
I cooked carne asada tacos using a seasoning packet that Sue had purchased, but I did not think much of them. In the national championship game Georgia beat Alabama with s fourth-quarter rally. U-M finished third in the final voting, the highest that they have been since the shared national championship of 1997-98.
On January 11 a fourth mouse was executed for illegal residency in the garage.
The computer in the office at the HBC was on the fritz. I had to make the the boards for the SBC game on Wednesday manually. John Calderbank and I somehow finished first out of twelve pairs.
On the next day I trapped mouse #5. In the morning game at the HBC the boards did not match the hand records. Somebody messed up when making the boards
I caught no more mice in the garage, but on the fourteenth I trapped one in the kitchen. They can run but they love cheese too much to hide.
On January 18 Giacomo had trouble getting to his feet. That was also day on which I learned that after the latest rebooking of the cruise for May, Tom was not on the same flights as Sue and I. Tom remembered that we had paid extra to be on the same flights.
Linda had made .pbn files on Tuesday evening for me to use when making the boards. On Wednesday the 18th at 9 am I made boards for the Simsbury game. We had four tables at the SBC.
On the 20th Giacomo was frantic when he could not get to his feet, but he finally made it. He could get around OK after that. Obviously his 19th year is going to be a difficult one for him. He had never been ill or injured. Occasionally he coughed up a hair ball, but that affliction is common to almost all long-haired cats.
On the next day I made a MailChimp “audience” (the MailChimp word for contact list) for the HBC using my laptop. I had to reuse the audience that I had previously created for emails from the president of the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA) that welcomed new members.
Not a litter box.
On January 22 Sue’s cat Bob had for some reason spent the last three nights in the bathtub in which I take a shower every evening. This morning he left behind a turd when he departed. I did not thank him for it.
Tom negotiated with Viking and got us all on the same flights: SwissAir to Budapest and British on the return.
On January 23 I walked nine laps (five miles) wearing a mask in the Enfield Square mall to investigate using it as an option for exercising in foul weather. What a sad place! Hardly anyone was shopping in the few stores that were open. The two restaurants each had one table occupied. No one seemed to be in the movie theater. I encountered a dozen or so walkers, some with dogs! An obese guy in a white strapped undershirt with a shopping cart full of stuff was at the Asnuntuck kiosk. He had plugged in some kind of weird machine. This trip inspired me to keep a rather complete log of my subsequent walks. It has been posted here.
On the next day my left lower back was sore in the morning, but it did not prevent me from walking another five miles.
On January 25 both sides of my lower back were sore when I woke up. If I did not know better, I might conclude that I was getting old.
The Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) for District 25 (D25) scheduled another meeting for Wednesday night, the only time all week that I cannot attend! This infuriate me. I complained, but I did not know whom to be angry at.
I learned that Unit 126 (Connecticut) was facing the possibility of holding two major face-to-face STaC2 games a week apart.
On the 26th I could barely walk with the pain in my left lower back. For some reason lying down made it worse. I immediately took an ibuprofen tablet. It helped a lot.
On the next day I spent an hour and a half on the rowing machine; the back felt OK.
On January 28 a “bomb cyclone” was predicted to arrive at about 10 pm. I forgot to pay the bill for the Chase credit card because Sue was “checking” the charges. I received a nice email from Rick Cernech. He was living in Florida and was either working as or had worked as a cruise planner.
There was plenty of snow on January 29. I decided while using the rowing machine that the creaking sound that I could hear in my bedroom was really coming from the shelves in the basement directly below it.
Joe Brouillard, a co-chair of the committee that was running the event, reported that the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) had finally posted the schedule for the summer North American Bridge Championship (NABC) that was scheduled for July. The preparatory work that Joe and his team (of which I was in charge of email publicity) did for the NABC has been documented here.
On the last day of the month I decided to try to bleed as many of the radiators in the old section of the house as I could. Since boxes, bags and furniture were virtually everywhere, this was not an easy task. One that I was able to get at in the living room started pissing after I bled it. It was extremely difficult to get the screw back all the way in. The hot water burnt my hands pretty badly, but I finally prevailed.
I watched episode 1 of season 2 of the series “Resident Alien.”3 It didn’t seem as good.as the first season, but I still enjoyed it.
February: On Groundhog Day only five pairs registered for the evening bridge game at the SBC. I had to cancel the game. Eric and I were first at 68% in the morning game at the HBC. In the afternoon game online Sue by tied for first. Her partner was John Willoughby.
In the evening I went to see Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Cinemark in Enfield Square. About ten people were in attendance. I thought all of the performances were quite good, especially Rosa Feola’s portrayal of a more Gilda who was more mature than usual. However, I hated the production decisions in the last act.
On February 5 I sent 20,000 emails for the NABC. I played pretty well but got a bad result at the HBC game with Peter Katz. I realized that I had forgotten to send the invitational email to SBC players on Friday. I set Outlook up to remind me to do so on Fridays and Mondays.
On February 8 I received the toner that I had ordered from Ink Technologies LLC.
February 11 was astoundingly warm—55 degrees. I walked 3.5 miles outside. Sue’s left big toe was very sore from gout.
The next day was 60 degrees! I finished the blog entry on Enfield Square, but I planned to update it as stores closed and (hopefully) opened.
On February 13 I received a mysterious email from Floyd Smith in response to my query about the name of his boss at Stage Stores (introduced here). It said “Sure. She is also on Facebook. Good luck and great to hear from you!”
Two inches of snow appeared on the grass, but the surfaces were clear. I drove Sue to the Urgent Care place on the north side of Hazard Ave. for her toe. They prescribed some drugs for her.
On the next day Sue’s toe was much better. I drove her to heart doctor. The appointment was for 10:15. I made sure that she was awake by 7:45. Nevertheless, it was 10:50 by the time we reached 1699 King St., which is just north of East Windsor. They would not see her. We were home at 11:30. The temperature only reached 20 degrees, which made it one of the coldest days of a very mild winter.
On February 15 I received this email from Floyd: “Suire is her last name. Sorry about that; spell check changed it last time. “
That evening the HBC’s Planning Committee held a Zoom meeting. Earlier I had committed to playing in the Swiss game at the HBC on February 27 with Ken Leopold, Y. L. Shiue, and Frank Blachowski. Frank and Y.L were very good players with a lot of masterpoints.
On the 17th the temperature reached 60 degrees, but it was very windy.
At a Zoom Meeting the D25 Executive Committee (EC) approved the Gala tournament on May 19-22 (coinciding with the dates that I planned to be in Europe on the cruise). The plan was to charge full price for events with lots of hospitality. I abstained; the other representative from Unit 126 (U126), Sonja Smith, did not attend. She may have already moved to North Carolina.
On February 18 the temperature hit 55 degrees in the morning but it fell throughout the day. I had to return the toner to Ink Technologies. I ordered the wrong thing. The company gave me a partial refund of $31 out of the original charge of $78.
On February 21 Russia sent troops into breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. I walked four miles outdoors in the rather warm 52 degrees. Rob Stillman and Y. C. Hsu agreed to play as the third pair for the Wednesday evening game in Simsbury. Sue will play with Maria Van der Ree.
On February 23 it was 72 degrees when I left the HBC after winning the open pairs game with Eric in morning. An email at 3:00 from Judy Larkin informed me that Ida Coulter could not play. Minutes later Renee Janow and Lucie Fradet asked to play. Sue was too tired to play, and so Judy ended up playing with Maria. I played terribly. I was stressed out from juggling the schedule.
On February 24 Russia invaded Ukraine. I walked nine laps in the mall.
In the Swiss on the 26th we lost our first two matches on flukes. We came back to win the last three by 18, 18, and 20 victory points to finish second out of twelve. YC made 6NT after he underled his ♠A.
March: For Sue’s birthday party on March 2 at the SBC she brought cupcakes for everybody. There were only 3 tables, but we had a good time.
On the next evening Sue and I went to supper with Tom at the Puerto Vallarta Mexican restaurant. The tacos al carbon were not as good as I remembered them. Tom ordered his usual gigantic bowl, which was no longer on the menu. I don’t remember what it was called.
On March 6 I walked 5 miles outside. The temperature was 62 degrees, but I needed to circumvent many puddles from the snow melting.
On March 9 about two inches of snow was on the lawn. The streets had been cleared, but Eno Hall was closed, and so the SBC could not hold a game.
By March 10 I had read the following books from the Enfield Public Library: T.C. Boyle’s Talk Talk; Max Barry’s The 22 Murders of Madison May and Lexicon. I liked Lexicon the best, but they were all good.
On March 18 the temperature hit 76 degrees, a new all-time record for the date. I walked five miles in a tee shirt. I learned that the Xiaos (aged 10 and 13) won the 0-10K Swiss at the NABC in Reno. The two youngsters
On March 20 Sue and I played in the “8 is enough” Swiss with Mayank and Aarati Mehta. Finished in the middle because of a hand in which Rob Stillman and Ronit Shoham bid 4♥ against Sue and me, but the Mehtas let Y. C. play 3♦.
On March 27 there was no pee or poop in the litter box. I brought the box upstairs, and Giacomo took a pee and then lounged in the box. He had never done this before. It was not a good sign.
On March 30 Ken and I won a five-table STaC game at the SBC. Sue and I could not find Giacomo when we returned to Enfield.
The cat’s door as seen from the back yard.
On the next morning I found Giacomo’s body lying in the back yard just outside of the cat door. He had not gone outside in weeks, maybe months, and he had not been downstairs for days. Nevertheless, he must have used up all of his remaining strength to descend the stairs, walk over to the ramp, climb up the ramp to the cat door, and exit through that door.
He was a wonderful cat. I really mourned for him, and I still miss having him on my lap while I watch television. More details about long relationship with Giacomo before the Pandemic can be found here.
In the last few years of Giacomo’s life I apparently became allergic to something about him. Several times I had rather severe outbreaks of hives, and I got the sniffles when he sat on my lap. After he died these symptoms disappeared.
I did the income taxes using FreeTaxesUSA.com. My federal tax was $0, and I received a refund of over $900 from Connecticut.
A lot of other things happened on the last day of March. An oil bill for $780.52 arrived. I brought the litter box, which now is officially Bob’s, back downstairs. While I was doing so, I fell into some empty boxes and bruised my left hand. It hurt, but it was not fatal. The Sony audio recorder that I ordered for the cruise arrived. I played with it enough to feel fairly comfortable using it.
April: On the 2nd of the month M&T Bank took over our previous bank, Peoples United Bank, which had a few years earlier purchased United Bank. United had purchased Rockville Bank, from which I negotiated our final mortgage, as documented here. This changeover seemed to go rather smoothly, and I like the new website slightly better than the old one.
Bob has found the litter box. Thank goodness.
Peter and I won the six-table STaC game at the HBC. On consecutive hands grand slams could be made in hearts. We only bid one of them, but no one else took all the tricks on the other one.
On April 6 the switch for the lights in the basement did not work. Two days later I got it to work, but it was difficult. Eventually this problem disappeared or maybe I just adjusted to the toggle.
On April 11 I received the second booster shot at a pharmacy in Springfield. Sue had already gotten hers
On April 15 I downloaded the VeriFly app that Viking had recommended for my phone and eventually got it to work. This was a complete waste of time, and it stressed me out. It was never needed or, for that matter, useful on the entire trip.
On April18 Ken and I learned that we had been dumped as teammates for the upcoming Grand National Teams (GNT) online qualification tournament by Felix Springer and Trevor Reeves again. Details can be found here. I was not looking forward to the online part again, but I thought that we would have a pretty good chance of qualifying. Playing in the GNT in Providence in July had been my goal for many months, and I had avoided accumulating masterpoints throughout the Pandemic in order to maintain my eligibility. I ordinarily do not hold grudges, but I still feel bitter about this more than a year and a half later.
On April 29 Peter Katz and I won the last Saturday game at the HBC before it went on hiatus. There were only three tables. I faked out Y. L with a terrible overcall.
The huge hump of hair on Bob’s back was an embarrassment to all of us.
May: Something incredible happened on May 2. Sue took Bob to the veterinarian. She learned that the big clump that had been on his back for years was just hair. The vet shaved it off, and it never grew back. How can this be? He would not let us touch it; why was it so sensitive? What cat has that much hair? What made it keep growing for such a long time? Sue said that the vet said that it was just bad grooming. He also said that Bob was at least thirteen years old.
That cat never ceased to amaze me. After his haircut he suddenly liked to be petted, he also became more friendly to me. One untoward result was that I developed very small bumps around my ankles that were itchy and a little painful. I must have been allergic to him or at least his dander.
I downloaded the Uber app for possible use in Vienna to get back to the ship from the opera. The rest of the bizarre preparation for the European cruise has been catalogued in some detail here.
I learned that thirty staff members of Henry Barnard School have Covid-18! I did not realize that the school even had that many employees. The state of Connecticut was showing a 9.4% positivity rate. The good news was that Germany’s level, which I had been following closely, was down by quite a bit. The other three countries on our itinerary were also improving.
The European cruise trip began on May 5. The incredible story of that day and the rest of the journey is well documented here. One thing that is not related there is the fact that the little bumps on my ankles cleared up while I was in Europe. The ones on my right ankle began to reappear in June or July.
On May 23 I mowed the lawn, which had by then become a jungle. While doing so I realized that I had to attack the poison ivy, which was much more prevalent than in 2021. I ordered some Roundup that could be sprayed on the plants from Amazon.
Only five pairs had registered for the Wednesday night game in Simsbury, but I had not yet heard from Lori Leopold. She could usually find a partner on short notice.
The next morning brought another frustrating bridge game. When I got back to the house I needed to cancel the Wednesday evening game at the SBC because only five pairs had registered.
I brought to the Verizon office on Hazard Ave. the Pixel 2 cellphone that had failed me on the cruise. The tech guy at Verizon showed me that the phone was considerably thicker in the middle than on the edges. He explained that this was a symptom of overheating. So, the phone was officially dead. In retrospect I concluded that the transformer in the cable that connected the phone to the outlet in my cabin must have failed to convert the current to 110 at least once on the cruise, and the European current fried the battery or something. I kept the phone plugged in virtually all of the time that I was in my cabin.
We planned on eating at the Kebab House before entering the Cinemark at Enfield Square to see the opera, but it was not open. We watched the rust-belt production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The character of the priest just did not work. Otherwise, the first two acts were very moving, but the third act was a total mess until Javier Camarena’s outstanding performance near the end. The many interviews during the breaks. were insipid. Sue and I settled for popcorn for supper. Incredibly she stayed awake throughout the performance.
On May 25 I discovered that our mortgage on the house was completely paid off! I was not expecting this news for several months.
June: At some point in June Sue purchased for me a new (well, new to me) cellphone. This one was a Samsung Galaxy S7. It was similar to Sue’s, and so she could sometimes help me with it. A year and a half later I still hated it, but not as much as I loathed the Pixel 2. The Samsung had not ordered any pizzas for me, but, then again, I had not downloaded the Slice app. I could almost never figure out where the app that I wanted to use was hiding, and it randomly plays YouTube videos and other stuff from the Internet. I figured out how to answer the phone in a minute or two, but it took me eighteen months to figure out how to hang up.
On the 1st I learned that Sally Kirtley, the director at the SBC, had tested positive for Covid-19. Ken had to direct at the Wednesday night . Ken and I won easily.
On the very next day Sally came to the ACBL’s walk-through in Providence. I very much enjoyed talking with old friends like Paula Najarian.
On June 13 I received two bottles of Roundup that I had ordered from Amazon. I immediately went outside and sprayed the poison ivy that was growing along the fence on the north side of the yard. Two days later I sprayed the poison ivy again. I wore a mask during both sprayings, and I was careful not to get any on my skin or clothes.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to combat the serious inflation that began after the country reopened. Any moron could see that the main culprit had been pent-up demand from the shutdown, and the secondary cause was shipping holdups. Nevertheless, I had to peel a sticker off of a gas pump at Costco that claimed that “Biden caused this.”
I met Mike Barke, a geography professor at the Northumbria University, and his wife Vivienne on the cruise. Mike had recently published a book entitled Newcastle upon Tyne: Mapping the City. As soon as I got back to the U.S. I ordered a copy. It finally arrived on June 17. It was both beautiful and interesting. It made me want to visit the Tyneside area.
The Longest Day game on June 21 at HBC very annoying. There was much too much noise. Donna Feir pressed everyone to play faster and then canceled the last round because the pizza had arrived. This turned out to be a super-spreader event for Covid-19.
From an email from Cindy Lyall, the treasurer of the CBA, I earned that U126 lost $4,000 on the tournament in Orange. Ouch!
On June 23 Mary Whittemore reported that her name was missing from the “Top 200 List” on the CTBridge.org website. I asked the CBA board members if anyone knew why. Don Stiegler sent me a correct list. It showed that many names were missing from the one on the website. Evidently no one knew how that page got updated on the website. Bob Bertoni, who died in 2021, set up the website and, because the unit had no webmaster at the time, did all of the updating.
Graham Van Keuren.
On June 29 Sue and I attended a potluck supper at Sue’s church, the Somersville Congregational Church. I always feel very uncomfortable at these religious gatherings, but this one was tolerable. After supper we listened to Graham Van Keuren’s presentation on his vacation with his spouse Eric in Israel. I recorded it on my audio recorder. It was a good presentation, but it certainly did not make me want to visit what I considered to be an apartheid country.
On June 30 Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he had Covid-19 for the second time. This news astounded me. Did he take no precautions? The Pandemic was finally running rampant at the HBC. Only five tables were occupied on Tuesday morning, and the evening game was canceled. Only three tables appeared on Wednesday, and the Simsbury game was canceled. Both of the games at the HBC on Thursday were canceled.
July: The big event of the month was the Providence NABC. I attended most of the event, but Sue decided not to go. I kept notes on my laptop and wrote them up a little later. They have been posted here and here. It was good to see some familiar faces, but the bridge games were not much fun.
The tournament was another super-spreader of Covid-19. Almost everyone with whom I played or associated caught the virus. I almost ripped the driver’s side mirror off of my car, and the hotel rooms were never cleaned. However, I avoided getting the disease. So, in a period of about two and a half months I had survived three super-spreader events—the cruise, bridge at the HBC, and the NABC. I credited my collection of free N95 masks that I had amassed from giveaways at various retailers.
August: I was hoping to have a party at the SBC to celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday. Not enough people were able to attend on the 17th. Instead, I decided that the SBC would have a Christmas party on August 24. Twenty people attended, and so we had five tables and lots of food. The players gave me a $100 Amazon card and $20 in cash. I was a little upset that Sue and I arrived so late because she, as usual, was not ready on time. I had made beef Stroganoff that needed to be heated up in the slow cooker. I crawled under the table and plugged in the pot, but I neglected to turn it on.
On August 26 the refrigerator stopped working. Panic set in. Sue and I resolved to deal with it the next morning. By then it had resumed functioning. If we ever figured out the cause of the outage, I made no note of it.
Throughout the period from my arrival back in Enfield after the cruise up to the end of August the weather had been hot, and I had spent every spare minute working on the journal for the Grand European Tour. On August 28 I finally finished it and sent an email to quite a few people announcing that the journal had been posted on Wavada.org. I was quite pleased to hear back from both the Barkes and the family from Saskatchewan.
A Big Y Express replaced the Shell station.
I noticed that the Shell station on Hazard Ave., which had been operational since we moved to Enfield in the late eighties, was closed.
On August 29 I received a long email from Tom Caputo, whom I had worked with at both Lord & Taylor (described here) and Saks Fifth Avenue (here). He was looking for a job at the age of 60. He asked me if I knew about anything being available. Since he knew very well that I had had nothing to do with retail for at least eight years, he must have been desperate. Maybe he thought that I had kept in touch with people more than I had.
I also received an email from Mike and Vivienne Barke.
August closed with an incredibly disappointing Ocean State Regional tournament in Warwick, RI. I had a rotten time, the attendance was abysmal, and the district lost money. The details have been posted here.
September: On September 13 Bob decided to take over Giacomo’s old position atop the back of the couch in the living room. On the next evening he lost his balance (something that Giacomo had never done in eighteen years) and tumbled off the back. He was in a panic and tried unsuccessfully to climb up the drapes to regain his perch.
On the following evening Bob had clambered back into Giacomo’s old spot. When I seated myself in my chair a few feet away, he obviously wanted to come join me, but he was evidently afraid to land on the pillows that were arrayed on the couch’s cushions. I moved them out of his way. He then descended to the sitting level and, after executing calculations in his walnut-sized brain, made the “mighty leap” to the armrest of my chair. He sat peacefully on my lap for a few minutes. Then he got nervous, peed on me, descended frantically to the floor, and did his “breakdance.” Much more has been written here about the misadventures of this very strange feline.
After sleeping comfortably for a month or more on beds in hotels and cruise ships, I judged that I needed a new mattress. The one that I had been sleeping on was more than thirty years old and was a little too short for me. Sue selected one for me as a late birthday present. It arrived on September 14. The delivery people set it up and took away the old one. Sue, of course, kept the obsolete pieces that held it off the floor. I found them leaning against the bookcase in the hallway. The new mattress was considerably better than the old one, but I still woke up with a backache more often than not.
On September 16 I talked with someone from the town of Enfield about the tax bill that I had received that day. It contained a significant interest charge because I did not pay the July installment. The simple reason for my delinquency was that I had never received a bill. It turned out that the mortgage holder, Peoples United Bank, had payed the portion due in January. The mortgage schedule indicated that five payments were remaining when the bank declared that it was fully paid. I was sent a notice of this, but I was never apprised of the bill from the town that the bank must have received. The lady with whom I talked refused to waive the interest charge. Since the bank that held the mortgage at the time that the bill was sent no longer existed, I did not have any recourse except to pay.
On the same day using my free MailChimp account, I sent an email that I had previously composed to try to improve the attendance of the players with less than 500 masterpoints at the upcoming sectional tournament in Orange.
The bookshelf fell onto the bed in 2023. The light is now attached to a screw in the wall.
On September 17 two items that I had ordered from Amazon were delivered. The first was a reading light that I would be able to clamp to the bookshelf above the new bed. The second was a book by Daryl Gregory entitled We are All Completely Fine. I liked this book much less than the one by Gregory that I had read on the cruise, The Spoonbenders.
Bob had mysteriously disappeared on September 16. He returned two days later and spent all day and night by the stove. Something was apparently wrong with him, but we were not too concerned. His behavior had always been eccentric.
Eric, Motoko Oinaga, John Debaggis, and I finish second out of ten in the Swiss event held at the HBC on September 18. We were the #8 seed. Eric and I bid and made slams on two of the last three hands to win the round by 24. We lost only to the winners—Lesley Meyers, Laurie Robbins, Felix, and Trevor.
Sue made an appointment at the vet for Bob on September 20. I heard him at some point after 4 a.m. on the 19th. At 5:45 I brought the litter box upstairs and shut the door to the basement, but when Sue woke up Bob was nowhere to be found. I opened the door to the basement. He came in about 9:30, and I shut the door to the basement again.
Before my bridge game on September 20 I placed Bob in the cat carrier, but at some point he somehow escaped. Sue was able to get him back in and took him to his 12:30 appointment. We found out that he had a tumor in his mouth or throat. There was not much hope for him, but the doctor gave Sue some medicine for him. Sue gave him the drops when I got back from bridge and could hold him. He needed them twice a day. I was so involved that I forgot about my Zoom meeting of the HBC Planning Committee.
We probably should have put Bob down when we heard about the tumor. He had always been Sue’s pet. She had to make the decision, and she could not do it.
On the last day of the month I sent a second email for the CBA.
October: On October 3 Sue started giving Bob antibiotics and steroids. He started eating a little better. Sue took him to the vet again on the 18th. He was still not eating much even though Sue was diligent about preparing meals that were both nutritious and easy to swallow.
Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.
The October 19 Simsbury game was canceled. I drove Sally to Southbridge to check out the hotel that we would be using for the tournament in October, which was named the Spectacle Regional because the hotel was the administration building of the defunct American Optical Company. The ground floor was very modern, but the the playing area not very large. The restaurant, which was called Visions, was not open except for groups.
On the same day Sue’s cousin Robby Davis was found dead in his apartment.
On October 21 I had breakfast with Sue and Mark Davis. Mark was very involved in a gigantic project involving his ancestry. For some reason I have almost no interest in exploring mine. Someone from the Spokane branch of the Wavada sent my dad a lot of research that she had done. Sue got it from him and put it somewhere. I have never seen it.
On October 22 there was no game at the HBC. I went by myself to see Cherubini’s Medea at Cinemark at the Enfield Square. Sondra Radvanovsky gave an outstanding performance in an opera that had not been performed since Maria Callas played the title character. A carnival was set up in the mall parking lot.
On October 24 I drove to the mall for a walk. I forgot my little blue mp3 player, and I wore the wrong shoes. I had to drive back home and start over.. A girl in a red suit made of balloons and a small backpack was walking stiff-legged around the mall. I think that she was supposed to look like an astronaut.
November: The first week of the month was unseasonably warm. On the 7th it was 67 degrees at 5 a.m. and 80 as I drove through Hartford at 1 p.m. after playing with Nancy Calderbank for the first time in the mentorship program. She had asked me to teach her 2/1.
On November 8 I finished writing the Bulletin for Southbridge and sent it to Sally for printing.
In the mid-term elections the Republicans, as expected, won the House of Representatives, but the Democrats held onto the Senate after Senator Warnock won another runoff.
I received a bill from Somers Oil for $798.86!
The hilarious postscript to the Grand European Tour occurred on November 8, almost six months after I departed. Sue and I were in the living room when we heard the unmistakable sound of claws shredding paper. Sue rose from her chain, hurried into the kitchen, and yelled, “Bob, what have you gotten into now?” She snatched a paper bag from beneath his claws. When she looked inside she found the passport for which she had searched for several days back in early May. She should have just asked Bob where it was.
11/23 Sue and I spent Thanksgiving alone. I sent the following email to the Barkes and Steve Flamman:
I hope that you are all doing well.
I thought that you might be interested in this. Two weeks ago my wife Sue and I were watching TV in our living room in the evening when we heard the unmistakable sound of our cat Bob shredding something made of paper in the kitchen. Sue sprang from her chair to prevent further damage. She found that Bob had somehow discovered a small paper sack and had pulled it out onto the floor. Sue retrieved it from him and discovered her current and expired passports as well as a few other items that had been missing for over two years.
Incidentally, I included two photos of Sue unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a deal with Viking on the Day 0 page of my journal and one that she took of Bob on Day 12.
Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is hard to find things to be thankful for lately, but I am definitely thankful for the friends that I made on the cruise in May.
I had more to be thankful for three days later. Michigan defeated Ohio State 45-23 at the Horseshoe in Columbus to win the eastern division of the Big 10 for the second year in a row. They did it without the Big 10’s best running back, Blake Corum. Donovan Edwards filled in for Corum very well. The Wolverines finished the regular season 12-0.
December: A week later the Wolverines beat Purdue in the Big 10 title game 43-21. They have qualified for the four-team College Football Playoff for the second year in a row.
December 8 was the tenth anniversary of our wedding ceremony. Sue and I are about as unhappy as we have ever been. Sue blames her health and various inanimate objects. I blame the house.
Curtis Barton, the president of D25, sent an email to members of the Executive Committee indicating that all senior employees of the ACBL had been fired. He then sent a correction that said that, according to Mark Aquino, who as Regional Director should know, “fired” is not the right word.
On December 9 Sue suddenly screamed, “I hate my life!” I was thinking that I hated our house, which was a pigsty. I also resented that almost whenever I needed something I must ask her where it was. Usually she did not know and said that she would look for it. In addition, we had so much junk everywhere that every time I that I went to get something I must remove four or five other items and then replace them in the right order. The refrigerator, for example, was always full to overflowing. THERE ARE ONLY TWO OF US!
However, as always, I said nothing because I did not want to trigger a tearful reaction or a panic attack.
December 12 brought the first snow of the season.
At 5 a.m. on the next day the weatherman on WTIC AM reported that it was 8 degrees in Granby and 19 in neighboring East Granby.
On December 17 I bought a rib roast. Sue forgot about Tyesha’s confirmation. Then she also bought a rib roast because she forgot her shopping list, and my phone was off because I forgot to turn it back on after bridge.5 I discovered that for weeks she had been leaving me voicemail messages that I did not know about. We have become two incompetent old farts.
On December 21 we had five tables at the SBC game. Sue and I arrived too late for the holiday party because Sue went to the store at 4:30 p.m. to buy the fruit that she had promised to bring. The players gave me $130.
On December 23 very strong winds uprooted the pine tree in the front yard. I heard a loud crashing sound at about 5 a.m. The tree fell straight towards our house, but there was no damage at all because the top section landed harmlessly on the patio between the old section of the house and Sue’s garage.
The high temperature the next day was only 19. I got a letter from ConnectiCare. The premium for my dental policy went down from $79 to $56.
We did nothing special on Christmas day. Sue may have watched It’s a Wonderful Life,6 but I didn’t.
Crystal Lake Construction, the company that cleared the snow from our driveway and sidewalks chopped up and removed most of the fallen tree. They came back later for the stump.
On the same day I received an email from Mark Aquino about the new training required for directors at sectionals, On the 27th I met with the HBC directors after the bridge game. Peter Marcus, who generally knew these things, had reported that the new rules applied only to events with masterpoint limits in excess of 500.
On the last day of the year Michigan lost to TCU 51-45. Early in the game J. J. McCarthy threw two interceptions that were returned for touchdowns. It was a wretched end to an awful year.
A week later TCU got clobbered by Georgia in the championship game. U-M would have done better, but they probably would have lost.
1. By the fall of 2023 a small spot had appeared on the front of the sweatshirt. It looked like a grease stain, but on closer inspection it was obvious that the exterior had worn thin. I could hide the blemish with ink from a Sharpie pen, but that was not a good permanent solution.
2. STaC stands for “sectional tournament at clubs”. These were games held at clubs that awarded more points, and the overalls included all of the participating clubs. Regular STaCs paid silver points. The points in Royal STaCs were evenly split between black, red, gold, and silver points.
3. “Resident Alien” was originally shown on the Syfy channel. Sue and I watched season 1 and season 2 on the streaming service called Peacock. At the time it was free on Cox cable. Eventually they wanted people to buy monthly subscriptions and restricted the free option so much as to make it worthless.
4. Apparently Peoples United Bank wanted our mortgage off of its books when it was taken over by M&T bank. The five mortgage payments that I saved by this action more than covered the cost of the July tax bill, but someone should have told me that that amount would be due.
5. I did not learn how to put the Samsung cellphone on “vibrate” until much later. It was easy to do but not a bit intuitive.
6. All year long Sue watched TCM during every waking (and many sleeping) moment.
As of December of 2023 I had played with a gross of partners in at least one complete session of a sanctioned game. After thee reopening in 2021 all of the games that involved new partners were held either at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) or at a tournament.
HBC partners: Linda Starr (introduced here) was a director at the HBC. Before the Pandemic, she undertook a program of reserving the Sunday afternoon game as a high-low game, in which at least one of the participants must have less than 750 masterpoints. This was an especially good way for someone with a lot of points to play with the person whom they were mentoring. At some point in the winter of 2022-2023 my wife Sue decided that she wanted to play in the high-low game.
I enjoyed playing with Joanne Amenta, but I don’t remember the result or any of the details of the hands that we played together.
I definitely remember one hand in which she was playing in a team game at the HBC. Her partner was John Calderbank. I don’t remember who my partner was.
On the very first hand of the match I made a terrible bid that kept us from reaching a makeable slam. I immediately started whipping myself with a wet noodle.
Joanne had never played against me before. She expressed surprise that I became upset about one lousy hand. John explained that in team play some hands are much more important than others. Missing a slam would probably cause us to lose the whole match because of the difficulty in making up the difference in the other four hands.
Joanne is still an active player. She has attended both regionals and sectionals since the reopening.
I also played with David Brandwein one Sunday in the high-low game. He was a pretty good player, but the bidding system that was used by him and his regular partner, Bernie Selig, was archaic. I suggested a few things that he could add to modernize it and allow him to play more comfortably with more players.
David was elected vice-president of the HBC in 2023. That meant that he was also the chairman of the club’s long-range planning committee, of which I was a long-time member. The first meeting was scheduled for early in 2024.
For a few weeks in the fall of 2021 the Simsbury Bridge Club. (SBC) was not able to run games on Wednesday evenings at Eno Hall. I signed up to play one Tuesday evening at the HBC. Doug Deacon, who had been a regular on Tuesday evenings when I started playing in 2008, needed a partner. So, we worked on a card and played rather successfully (around 55 percent) for two or three weeks.
Paul formerly played with a man from Ukraine named Igor and then with Paul Tungatt.
At the end of 2023 Doug still was still working and playing regularly on Tuesday evenings at the HBC.
One Sunday afternoon Fred Gagnon (GAN yun, rhymes with canyon) drove down from his house in Springfield to mine in Enfield. He had asked me to play with him in the High-Low game and volunteered to drive both of us to the HBC. I had previously referred to him “Boom Boom”, but he said that he had never heard of Freddy (Boom Boom) Cannon or his biggest hit, “Palisades Park”. So, I had downloaded it to my MP3 player and let him listen to it in his car before we left. He said that the song sounded familiar, but he might have just been placating me.
Fred did not play very well that day. He might have been having health issues. He is still quite active in the bridge community.
Barb Gallagher was from Denver. She was in the Hartford area during the summer of 2023 to visit her daughter. I was lucky enough to hook up with her for a few games at the HBC and SBC. Our lists of conventions had a lot of overlap, and so we were able to piece together a rather sophisticated convention card.
I remember that we had one pretty good round, around 50 percent. I had a really good time playing opposite her. I wish that we could have worked in a few more games.
Barb left at the end of September to return to Denver.
Y.C. Hsu has played with various partners both at the HBC and, occasionally, at the SBC. I played with him once in the open game on Thursday morning. Since he sometimes played with one of my regular partners, John Calderbank, it was easy to agree on a convention card.
We had a pretty good game together, and I felt sure that I would play with him again.
Y.C. is from Taiwan. I have seen him many times at the bridge table, but I do not know much about his background.
I played with Diane Tracy in one Sunday afternoon High-Low game at the HBC. She must have enjoyed it; I overheard her singing my praises one day.
Diane is relatively new to the club, but she became a member of the board in 2022. So I have seen her at board meetings once a month. She has offered a valuable perspective because she spent a lot of time in Naples, FL. She has provided us with insights about how the other half lived.
I only played once with Andrea Yalof in the High-Low game, but I was quite impressed with her approach to the game. She and her husband David, who is also a bridge player, moved to Williamsburg, VA, in 2023. David worked at William & Mary. I have it on good authority that Andrea was still active in bridge in late 2023.
The “good authority” is Fran Gurtman (introduced here), who was Andrea’s regular partner when she lived in the Hartford area. Fran and Andrea still play together online.
Tournaments: For quite a few years John Farwell had served as the one-man partnership program for sectional tournaments in Connecticut. In that capacity I had interacted with him several times when I was in need of a partner or teammates.
The first sectional in Connecticut after the reopening was held in Orange, CT, in June of 2022. I was unable to find a partner for the Swiss event on Sunday, June 5, but I needed to attend the tournament anyway because of the board meeting before the game. I ended up being paired up with John and a pair of people I had never met before and have never seen since. Somehow we clicked together and we ended up fifth out of seventeen overall and first in the B strat. The details of the tournament have been chronicled here.
In 2023 John was still acting as partnership person at every sectional.
When he was a novice Abhi Dutta played with my wife Sue at least once. Ken Leopold and I had also teamed up with Abhi and a partner at one of the qualifying tournaments for Flight B of the Grand National Teams (GNT). Although that was not a pleasant experience I responded positively when Abhi asked me to play with him at the NABC in Providence in July of 2022. The details of that adventure have been described here.
Our next outing together was our most successful. Playing with Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider we won the Sunday Swiss at the sectional tournament in Great Barrington, MA, in August of 2022. You can read about it here.
I have played with Abhi in several other pairs and team events in both regionals and sectionals. I also played against him in a memorable knockout that was described here.
I was paired up with Phyllis Bloom for the Flight B Swiss event on Sunday, July 17, at the NABC in Providence. Our teammates were Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider, who both came down with Covid-19 a few days later. We finished slightly below average. Phyllis made a couple of very costly mistakes, but I still enjoyed playing with her.
Phyllis was married to Ken Bloom, an expert player. They lived in Sudbury, MA. Ken’s father, Irv, was an expert player. He and his partner, Bob Hoffman, invented the Blooman convention as a defense against 1NT.
I had committed to play with Jim and Mike in the Sunday Swiss event at the sectional tournament in Orange, CT, in April of 2023. I had a very difficult time finding a partner. Eventually Mike suggested that I contact Ros Abel, whom he knew from the Newtown Bridge Club. Rob agreed to play with me in that event and also the pairs event on Friday. We also arranged to play once at the HBC, which was actually closer to her house in Southington than the Newtown club was.
For a new pair we did quite well in both sessions on Friday, well over 50 percent. We also were doing well in the Swiss until the last round, which was against two players from the HBC whom I knew very well, Peter Katz and Tom Joyce. We had bid to 4♠. Ros then bid 5♥. We had not discussed what kind of control bidding we were using. In the one that almost all good players used that bid would show a first-or-second-round control in hearts, but it would deny controls in the two suits that she had skipped. So, I signed off in 5♠ and made 6, which they bid an made at the other table.
I asked Ros later what her bid meant. She said that she was showing a heart suit. So, I guess that she did not use control-showing cue bids at all.
At the end of 2023 Ros was still playing regularly at the HBC.
I have played against Jim Osofsky a large number of times, especially if you count the team events in which we were both sitting East-West at different tables. Jim and Mike usually teamed up with Ausra Geaski (introduced here) and Bunny Kliman, both regulars at the HBC.
For the 2023 Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, Jim’s usual partner, Mike Heider, was visiting the Fatherland with one of his sons. I also needed a partner for the four days that I intended to play. So, Jim and I paired up, intending to play in the Tuesday-Wednesday knockout and the Thursday-Friday knockout.
Abhi Dutta asked if he could team up with us for the event that started on Thursday. Later I learned that his partner would be Paul Johnson, the guy whose behavior upset me so much earlier in the year at Southbridge (documented here).
We used the partnership software to pick up partners from Florida for the first knockout. We had a very successful two days with them. The other two days were less so. The details have been posted here.
The last sectional of 2023 in Connecticut was in late October. Jim and Mike asked me to find a partner and play with them in the Sunday Swiss. I had a difficult time finding someone to play with. Eventually a fellow member of the CBA board, Linda Green, lined me up with Terry Lubman, a veteran player with more points than I had.
Terry Lubman.
Terry and I had a little trouble agreeing on a convention card. She wanted to keep it simple, but I was nervous about not having enough weapons. We got off to a disastrous start, picked up a little in the middle, and lost the last match. We finished a little below average. Terry was very frustrated because it seemed that every decision that she made turned out wrong. Also, we had a rather fundamental and embarrassing miscommunication on one bidding sequence that severely impacted our morale. The details are provided here.
I learned that Terry went to Catholic schools (but never learned about indulgences!),never throws anything away (aaaargh!), and is a bigwig in the gardening club circuit in southwest Connecticut and Westchester County, NY.
1. Jim and Mike were at least as odd a couple as Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. Jim was easily the most talkative person whom I have ever met. One of the bridge players called him Chatty Cathy. Mike, in contrast, had a good sense of humor, but hardly ever talked. While Jim was chatting up Donna Lyons, my partner at the NABC in Providence, Jim confided to me that “Jim seems to be coming out of his shell a little bit.”
After the Covid-19 vaccinations became readily available in the late spring of 2021 competitive bridge1 started a very slow return in New England. The Hartford Bridge Club reopened in August of 2021, but attendance was disappointing. The Simsbury Bridge Club’s first game was a five-table gathering on September 18. The only sectional held in New England in the entire year was an EMBA event in Watertown on December 10-12. It drew 133 tables, exactly half of the attendance at the equivalent tournament in 2019.
The Executive Committee (EC) of District 25 planned to hold a tournament in Warwick, RI, at the end of August. I had publicized it rather heavily.2 However, it—and every other regional event scheduled for August—was canceled by the ACBL. A regional tournament that was also planned for November in Mansfield, MA, was canceled by a vote at a Zoom meeting of the EC.
District 25’s Tournament Scheduling Committee (TSC) held a couple of Zoom meetings in late 2021 in which it decided to change the 2022 schedule drastically. Peter Marcus, the district’s Director-in-Chief, had been arguing—with some degree of seriousness—that the district should schedule no tournaments at all for 2022 rather than play by the ACBL’s rules. Instead the TSC decided to shelve the plans for three events:
The Presidential Regional that had traditionally been held in February in Connecticut.
The intermediate/novice event scheduled for April that had been called the Rainbow Weekend or Gold Mine.
The Senior Regional/Cape Cod Sectional that was also planned for April.
Although I was a voting member of both committees, I was unable to attend either Zoom meeting and was shocked when the TSC proposed this at the Zoom meeting of the EC in early 2022. I voted loudly against the recommendations, but no one else did.
Instead, a four-day tournament called the Gala Regional was scheduled for May 19-22 in Marlborough3, MA, in a hotel that had never before been used for a tournament. The flyer for the event has been posted here. I had a long streak of attendance at regional events, but I could not attend this one because of a European cruise that had been scheduled many months earlier (for a period in which D25 had never run a tournament) and had already been postponed twice. That adventure has been described here.
On April 14 I sent out the first promotional email for the Gala to over 2,000 players in Districts 3, 24, and 25 who had less than 300 master points. A copy is posted here. 61% of the recipients opened the email, but only 51 of them clicked on the link to the flyer.
On the same day I sent a slightly different version to the players in the same districts with between 300 and 750 masterpoints. A copy is posted here. This group was about half the size of the previous one. Again, about 61 percent opened the email; 48 clicked on the link to the flyer.
The third version was sent to “Gold Rush Grads”, those with 750-2000 masterpoints, about 1,000 players. A copy was posted here. 58.2 percent opened it, and 46 clicked on the link.
The fourth version went to players with over 2,000 masterpoints. A copy was posted here. 56+ percent opened it, but only 20 clicked on the link.
So, only a total of 165 players clicked on the link to the flyer. I haven’t checked every email, but I suspect that this was the worst rate of any set of emails promoting tournaments that I had ever sent. People were either still scared of Covid-19, or they were upset about the vaccination requirement. Or maybe my emails were less effective because it was difficult for me to be enthusiastic and creative about the promotion of an event that I could not attend.
I sent a second email a week later to emphasize the convenience and quality of the hotel, which I had never seen. Only people with less than 50 masterpoints were excluded from this email (copy posted here). Nearly 59 percent opened it, and 127 clicked on the link to the flyer. There was no link to the hotel; reservations needed to be made by telephone.
On April 29 I sent a set of three emails that Sue Miguel composed. Her style was much different from mine. A sample of one is posted here. A total of 120 people clicked on the link to the flyer. No further marketing was done.
The schedule placed a lot more emphasis on the party element than the bridge.
Sue Wavada attended the Gala, and when she picked me up at Logan Airport after the tournament was over, she reported that she enjoyed it. She also was allowed to take home some balloons.
The Grand National Teams (GNT) was one of the events scheduled to be held at the eleven-day Summer NABC to be held in Providence in July. Both the qualifying tournament in District 25 and the finals of the event had been held online in 2021. Although I hated playing online I played with my partner, Ken Leopold, on Bridge Base Online (BBO) as often as I could. We teamed up with our long-time teammates, Trevor Reeves and Felix Springer.
On October 25 of 2021 I sent an email to all three about the 2022 qualifying tournament for D25:
My total masterpoints went over 2500 yesterday. However, I just checked the ACBL’s Conditions of Contest for the GNT for 2021-2022 (http://web2.acbl.org/documentLibrary/play/coc/gnt/GNT2021-22.pdf). The cutoff date for the GNT is the roster of August 6, 2021. So, I will still be eligible for one more GNT. The finals will be at the summer NABC, which is scheduled for Providence. The date for the qualifying tournament has not been finalized, but it will probably be in April or May.
I hope that you guys will be willing to play with me again in my final opportunity for this tournament.
All three responded positively to this request. On April 28, 2022, I wrote the following email to all three in order to confirm our plans.
The GNT qualifier for Flight B is on April 30 and May 1. I have read the Conditions of Contest. It will be held online under approximately the same conditions as last year. Two teams will qualify if more than eight participate. The cost is $15 per session
The finals in Providence start on Wednesday, July 13.
Is everyone still up for this? If so, I will register us.
Felix responded within an hour or so with this disheartening message: “Dan Morgenstern asked Trevor and me a while back to play in the GNTs with him and his partner and we accepted. Another time.”
This was soul-crushing news. I really wanted to compete in this event with a team that I trusted and could plan strategy with. I forwarded to them a copy six months earlier of their positive responses to my invitation, but neither of them responded to that email.
Ken suggested that we should look for other teammates, but I told him that I did not want to do so. We had played with inferior teammates in this event in 2019, and I had not enjoyed it at all. In that case the event was face-to-face. This would be online, which I could scarcely tolerate even with good teammates.
Felix and Trevor’s team qualified in the second team from D25 and got to play in Providence.
I was heavily involved in the promotion of the Providence NABC, helped with the partnership desk a couple of times, and played bridge almost every day. The beginning of the description of my involvement has been posted here. Felix and Trevor’s team made it to the semifinals, where they lost to the eventual champions.
The first regional tournament that I was able to attend was the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, which ran from August 30-September 5. The flyer has been posted here.
The first promotional email was what I would call a postcard. Sue Miguel designed it. I sent it on July 27, about five weeks before the tournament began, to everyone in D3, D24, and D25, as well as the people who attended in Providence. 41.3 percent of the 15,000 recipients opened the email. 340 clicked on the link to the “schedule”. There was a mistake on it. I sent out a correction the same day. The correction, which has been posted here, had an additional 500 clicks.
I wrote and sent out the second email on August 18 to everyone in D3, D24, and D25. 184 people clicked on the link to the flyer. It has been posted here.
Sue designed an email for 3,000 players in D25 with less than 750 masterpoints. It was sent on August 22. The email, which was posted here, did not contain any links. She also had me send one for the 824 “Gold Rush Graduates” (750-2000).
The less said about the actual tournament the better. On Tuesday Sohail Hassan4, whom I had met at the partnership desk at a tournament before the pandemic, and I did poorly in the Open Pairs. Sohail showed up at the last minute for both sessions. Since there were a few things on our convention card that I was shaky about, this distressed me.
We intended to play in the Wednesday-Thursday knockout, but we were unable to find teammates. Since the schedule had been pared back to save on director’s fees, our only other choice was to play in Wednesday morning’s Side Game5. It was a horrendous experience. Sohail again appeared at the last minute for both sessions, and in the morning he got into a boisterous argument with one of our opponents. The director had to be called to calm them down. I made several mistakes; our scored was miserable. Nevertheless, we had a 58.71 percent game in the afternoon Side Game.
Bob Potvin.
On Thursday we played in the Open Swiss. We teamed up with two guys from Rhode Island, Don Rankin and Bob Potvin. I had played against both of them before. We somehow finished third in B and sixth overall. This was not that great an accomplishment. Most of the participants were teams that had been eliminated from the knockout on the previous day.
I confided to Don that playing with Sohail had been a miserable experience. He replied, “Maybe we should play together.”
Abhi Dutta.
On Friday I had scheduled a new partner, Abhi Dutta6, for the knockout. Our teammates were Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider. Although the four of us were fresh from a victory in the sectional in Great Barrington, MA (described here), we could not get any traction in our five-team group. We were eliminated and forced to play in the Open Swiss on Saturday. I remember a general feeling of great frustration, but no details.
The Executive Committee met on Friday. I was in no mood to participate. This version of the Warwick tournament, which had always been the jewel in the district’s crown, seemed pitiful to me. Even though we did not even rent the other ballroom, the main room was not nearly full. The rotunda was used for both the side games and the 299ers, and there was still room to spare. The attendance, by historical standards, was alarmingly low.
We learned that we had taken a financial bath at the Gala, and Warwick was probably worse. The only good news was that, as I for one had come to expect, Joe Brouillard, the treasurer, had turned water into wine with the district’s finances. We still had a lot of money in the bank.
I could hardly believe that the roles of tournament chairman and partnership chairman were no longer going to be handled locally. Sue Miguel was going to do the former, and Denise Bahosh had volunteered for the latter. The problem was that the two new sites, Southbridge and Marlborough, had no natural constituencies. Who would take the responsibilities for them? Nevertheless, I considered it a mistake not to use local people in future tournaments in Warwick.
The decision was made to raise the table fees to $20 and to use the projected revenue to turn the Spectacle Regional into a very enjoyable event. I voted for it and even spoke in favor of the move, but I would have liked to see more details about how Sue Miguel intended to spend all of that extra money.
Mark Aquino, the Regional Director, made a depressing presentation that included the statement, “The ACBL is broken.” I left the meeting with the strong feeling that our best efforts might not be enough to save bridge as we knew it.
The Saturday Open Swiss once again was dominated by teams that had been eliminated in the knockout. We finished fourth in B and won a few gold points for a performance that was not worthy of any recognition.
The Ocean State Regional was the most disappointing tournament that I had ever attended. I had no fun in any event in which I played, and I found the EC meeting depressing in the extreme. The Crowne Plaza was not a disappointment, but only because I had also stayed there during the NABC event in July (description begins here) and no longer expected my room to be cleaned after I used it.
The last D25 tournament of 2022 was the Spectacle Regional, held in Southbridge, MA. It began on Tuesday, November 15, and ended on Saturday, November 19. I had been asked to prepare a Bulletin for this event. I therefore joined Curtis Barton (president), Carolyn Weiser (secretary), Sally Kirtley (tournament manager), and Denise Bahosh (partnership) in a “walk-around” inspection of the facility. Sue Miguel was also expected, but for some reason she was unable to attend.
The hotel/conference center was a nice modern place, but the rooms in which we would be playing were much smaller than the ballrooms in which we usually held regional events. The plan for this event was to provide exceptional hospitality, which meant free food and something new (and free) for newer players. Sue Miguel devised that approach, which she called Fest.
I sent out the first promotional piece on September 9. It was composed by Sue Miguel in the postcard format that she preferred. The message was that a lot of gold would be dispensed in Southbridge. I have posted it here.
Sue designed the piece sent on September 12 as well. It was directed to 2,000 players with less than 150 masterpoints. It provided an introduction to the concept of Fest. It has been posted here
On September 15 I sent a different email that Sue created. It was also in postcard format, but it also contained a link to the schedule that had by then been posted on NEBridge.org. The target audience was everyone in District 3, 24, or 25. It can be viewed here.
On October 19 I sent an email to the same audience. This one was in the format that I ordinarily used, but I emphasized the convenience and uniqueness of the site, not the bridge schedule. I considered the latter very meager. I have posted it here.
On October 25 I sent out another solicitation to those with less than 150 points. This one included the 9/15 postcard, but it also had text that Sue had written to explain the Fest concept. It has been posted here.
The next day I emailed to the rest of the players a message that I had written. This one has been posted here. This was the last email that was sent to promote this event, and it was also the last email that I composed for the district. Sue Miguel took over the creation of the emails more or less by default. I don’t think that they tried to find anyone else to do it.
I intended to promote the “Knock-in Knockout” event because it was the only imaginative offering on the schedule for players with more than 2,250 points. The district had also enjoyed great success at attracting players at all levels to bracketed events like this. However, I had been warned by Sue Miguel and Peter Marcus to avoid any explanation of the event or to use the Kiko abbreviation. Apparently they feared that the ACBL might come down on us. I don’t know why.
I decided to commute from my house in Enfield to the hotel. The drive was less than forty-five minutes each way. Sue planned to drive up on Friday morning, play on Friday, attend the Board of Delegates (BoD) meeting on Saturday, and see what she felt like doing on Saturday.
On Tuesday I played with Sally Kirtley in the Open Pairs. Attendance at all events was meager. Sally and I had not played together often, and we were definitely out of our depth in the open event. Playing with Sally at regional tournaments is always challenging. She was interrupted to deal with some sort of problem fairly often in her role as tournament manager.
On Wednesday Eric Vogel and I teamed up with Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider in the Kiko. There were only three brackets! My recollection is that there were only five teams in our bracket. At any rate, we were eliminated on Wednesday. On Thursday, however, the same foursome finished first in the Y strat of the Open Swiss. It did not seem like much of an accomplishment.
On Friday I played with Abhi Dutta, at least that is what my calendar said. The only game that I was eligible for was the Open Pairs. Abhi should have found a partner with fewer points so that he could play in the Gold Rush Graduate event.
On Friday there was a free lunch consisting of a couple of a couple of pieces of pizza. The hotel was poorly prepared for this. Although the total attendance was not very good, the lines for pizza were very long. I had to rush back for the second session.
Robin Hillyard.
While I was in line Pete Matthews and Gary Schwartz complained to me about the fact that the only pairs games available on Wednesday and Thursday were side games. They asked me why no Open Pairs games were scheduled. I said that I did not know. I was not on the Tournament Scheduling Committee any more, but I would bring up up at the EC meeting that night. Previously Robin Hillyard had sent me an email asking why the Sunday games had been eliminated. This was hard on the players who were still gainfully employed. I told him that I would bring that up as well.
I found the attitudes displayed at the EC meeting rather shocking. People were raving about how successful the Fest—a combination of education, free lunch and other goodies, and a short bridge session (also free)—had been. The yardstick for this was that a good number of the forty-four participants had approached the organizers and presenters to offer thanks and praise. Sue Miguel said that it was the best thing that the district had done in twenty-five years. Give me a break.
I, frankly, was much more concerned about the turnout of the people who were willing to pay to play. The attendance in the Gold Rush (0-750 masterpoints) events was shockingly low. My wife Sue had driven up on Friday to play in the Gold Rush pairs. When it did not make, she had to play in an event in which she had little chance of success.
Another surprise at the meeting the report by Mark Oettinger (vice-president). It brought up the possibility of getting more pro teams to come to our tournaments. Evidently Adam Grossack agreed to help with this effort. I wondered if anything would come from this. How would they find them to offer enticements to attend?
My wife Sue and I attended the BoD meeting on Saturday morning. There was no coffee, and the hotel served only breakfast sandwiches that were improperly marked. The only attendees from CT were Paul Burnham, Peter Marcus, Sue and me. That meant that nine delegates from Unit 108 were absent. Curtis announced that the Fest was the greatest thing ever. He insisted that the people attending the meeting were responsible for doing whatever it would take to increase attendance at future tournaments. It was not inspiring.
Sue surprised me by making a little speech complaining about the lack of events for people like her. She got tearful when describing her frustration about the fact that the Gold Rush event on Friday had been canceled. Mark Aquino offered to play with her one day in the Presidential Regional in the same facility in February of 2023. She was happy (and a little nervous) about that.
1. When I write “bridge” I usually mean face-to-face bridge. The online game is, in my opinion, not worthy of the appellation of “bridge”.
2. As soon as I heard that the tournament was canceled, I sent emails to that effect to the same email addresses that I had sent promotional mailings. I also posted a notice on the website. However, one couple from New Jersey read the initial email, but for some reason they did not receive the second one. They drove all the way to Warwick and were shocked to discover that no tournament was in process. I sent them a personal email apologizing for this.
3. Sometimes it is spelled without the final “ugh”.
4. Sohail was retired from a job on Wall Street. He had a house in the NYC area and another on Cape Cod. I could not find his LinkedIn page on the Internet. His name was much more common than I imagined.
5. This was the first time that the district scheduled side games during the daylight hours. I do not know what the TSC was thinking of when it drew up this schedule. I was not a party to it. I had resigned after I had to miss the first three meetings because of scheduling conflicts.
6. Abhi lived in Walpole, MA. I met him when he played with my wife several years earlier. I had teamed up with him once in the Grand National Teams qualifying tournament in 2019. His LinkedIn page has been posted here.
This entry, like the process that it describes, is absurdly long. In fact, it is much longer than it looks because it has links to a large number of documents that have more details. I don’t expect anyone to read this entry. I did it out of a combination of determination to leave nothing out and a sense of catharsis.
I really loved my job as webmaster for District 25 and all of the other functions that I had added (as described here). The only aspect of it that I found tiresome was the assembling of photos for the Winners Boards. I had decided unilaterally that I would no longer do that in 2020, but I was still enthusiastic about everything else that I did.
The pandemic struck New England in March of 2020. The game that I loved that involved card tables, chairs, playing cards, bidding boxes, human beings, and conversation vanished almost overnight. Some people enjoyed, or at least tolerated, playing on the Internet, but I did not like it at all. It did not seem like bridge to me.
At first I enjoyed my new life of leisure. As I described here, I started walking a lot, occasionally traversing as much as ten miles per day. I also read books much more frequently than I had previously, and I invented a method for the people who had played together in Simsbury to describe what they were doing in the new world of isolation. I discovered that a very large number of operas were available free on YouTube. I downloaded a free program, MP3Studio, to make mp3 files that I could download to my mp3 player. So, I could carry forty or fifty operas in my pocket.
In June of 2020 my schedule changed dramatically. I undertook the gargantuan 1948 Project that is described here. From that point on I sat in front of the computer for several hours per day writing and researching, and the more time that I spent on the project the larger that it grew.
Bob Bertoni.
In the summer of 2021 my friend and boss in District 25, Bob Bertoni, died after a long and debilitating illness. At that point almost all of the people with whom I had enjoyed working for so many years were no longer involved in the district’s leadership. Moreover, the ACBL had taken strong measures to promote online play as an alternative to real bridge. It seemed almost certain to me that the game that I knew was doomed.
The Hartford Bridge Club tentatively reopened in the summer of 2021, and Sally Kirtley and I figured out a way to schedule games of the Simsbury Bridge Club. However, no tournaments were held in New England except the poorly attended sectional in December sponsored by the Eastern Mass Bridge Association (EMBA). At the time I was a member of both the district’s Executive Committee and the Tournament Scheduling Committee. Both held occasional Zoom meetings. I wrote this about the decision-making:
I have been on the scheduling committee for a few years, but two crucial online meetings were held in the winter on Wednesday evening, the one time that I am committed to play at a very small club. Evidently a lot of decisions about the three tournaments in 2022 were made at those meetings or at the one in May, during which I was in Europe.
Sally and Helen
In the last quarter of 2021 I notified the Executive Committee that I intended to resign my positions tied to the webmaster job at the end of 2022. I modeled my decision on this with how Helen Pawlowski handled the termination of her long tenure as the district’s tournament manager. She had given a year’s notice that she was leaving. A committee was promptly formed, people applied for the job, Sally Kirtley was chosen, and Helen showed her the ropes at several tournaments.
After I resigned not much happened for several months. When I had started in 2013, absolutely nothing was documented in writing. By contrast, I had already produced on NEBridge.org about forty web pages that documented everything that I did in every area. Thereafter, I spent an enormous amount of time making sure that each of these pages was up to date. They can all be reached from here.
The oldest email that I could find about the subject of the transition was dated November 30, 2021. In It Curtis Barton, the president, asked me, “Do you have a candidate to replace you?”
The one thing that I did not want to do was to become an active participant in the search for my replacement(s). I thought that it was incumbent upon the people who would be running the district going forward to determine which of those functions was still important and to find people who were willing and able to perform them. I did not want to prejudice this effort with my own ideas.
I felt that I had done everything that I could to smooth the process. When I was chosen to be the webmaster, Bob Bertoni had assumed the responsibility of finding someone for the job, mostly because he was the only person who knew how the site worked, and there was no documentation whatsoever. In the intervening years had thoroughly documented how my various functions were performed.
So, on December 31 I sent the following reply with four attachments.
As promised, I have produced and attached documents that outline the duties of four functions that I currently perform: • Webmaster • Database Manager • Email Manager (MailChimp) • Bulletin Editor (printed, online, and Day 1).
Someone needs to decide on who, if anyone, should perform these functions in 2023 and following. The Database Manager and Email Manager are not official positions.
I am not sure if the Communications Committee still officially exists, but I formerly set the agenda for and presided over its meetings.
I also have been composing a high percentage of the emails used to promote tournaments. Whoever assumes that function in 2023 and following will need to work with the Database Manager on the selection criteria to be used and the Email Manager on the format to be used for text and images.
At some point Gary Peterson, who was a Tournament Director for the ACBL, expressed an interest in becoming the webmaster. He negotiated with Curtis about how he would be compensated for his efforts. I was not privy to those exchanges. My assumption was that he would be responsible only for maintaining the website. I suspect that Curtis expected him to do much more than that. It is also possible that Curtis only glanced at my write-up.
In April of 2022 I sent all the members of the Executive Committee an email that detailed open issues in areas that I was involved. I attached to this email a spreadsheet that served as the index to the documentation pages.
It has been a long time since I made a report, but I have been keeping a list of developments and issues.
Website: 1) I removed four items from the main menu in the left column that appears on every page of the site. Three of them I moved to the “Archive” tab: District Director Info, District Director Report, and Learn from the Experts. The other one was a link to the ACBL’s Partnership Desk, which the ACBL’s webmaster told me is no longer supported.
2) There are three issues. The Tournament Location option is a custom program that uses a list of the district’s tournaments to create a map. For a while it was broken, but Megahertz fixed it. I removed Cromwell and Sturbridge. I added Providence and Marlborough. I left Mansfield and Hyannis on, but added notes that they were canceled for 2022. This will need to be maintained (using the “Clubs” option in the admin section) when the 2023 schedule is set.
The second issue is the banner, which currently says “Exciting New Event Schedules for 0-2500 –Click Here for Tournaments”. It links the NEBridge.org calendar. I don’t know how to change it. Bob always did this. We should probably be highlighting Providence. After that, I don’t know.
The third issue involves reports from the Regional Director. The DD reports had their own custom option. Should I add the RD reports to this program (and bring it back from the Archive)? Should I create a new tab for RD reports? They are now emailed to members; posting them on the website is less critical than it was ten years ago.
3) The list of winners of NABC and NABC+ events has not been updated since 2019. The source of data was lists provided by the DD. I have not received any such lists since December 2019. What should the policy be for the future?
4) I have decided not to post Winners Boards (photos) for the 2022 tournaments. It is a lot of work, and I won’t be attending one of the three events. If someone else wants to take the photos of winners and solicit photos from the ones that were missed, I will post them. However, I don’t want to do this if the percentage of missing photos is high.
I also decided not to award the Best in Class prizes in 2022. With only three events, all in the eastern half of the district, it did not seem worthwhile to me.
5) Someone should check the conditions of contest on the website. I don’t think that the first five documents on the Conditions of Contest tab have been checked in a long time.
Database: 1) A decision should be made about whether the MySQL database, which I maintain on both my iPower account and my local server, will be used in 2023. If not, a suitable substitute to be used as the basis for emails should be found. The current database includes all ACBL members–active and inactive, living and dead–since 2014. It also contains pretty good records of who attended D25 and NABC tournaments since then. It also has a history of achievement of ranks of D25 members and points by month of everyone.
2) In the past I have received .LZH files from Keith Wells at the ACBL to use as the basis for the attendance (at tournaments) table. He did not respond to my last request. Does anyone know if he still works for the ACBL? If not, from whom could I get these files. I used the attendance tables both for targeted emails and for the attendance breakdowns after tournaments.
Email: I currently create the emails by using a text editor on my PC to write HTML statements. I then use the “Code your own” method to paste the code into MailChimp. As I was writing up the documentation for this process it occurred to me that it will probably be very difficult to find someone is who is both willing and able to do this. MailChimp has a lot of templates for emailing that would presumably be much easier to use, but I have never investigated them because I already knew how to make the emails look exactly as I wanted them to.
If templates are used exclusively, it will affect Sue Miguel’s emails. She sends me an email that looks the way she wants it. I extract the HTML from it and then post it using the “Code your own” method.
Bulletins: I was told that there will be neither a printed nor an online bulletin for the Gala. Eventually decisions should be made about the other two tournaments in 2022.
Documentation: I have documented almost everything that I do in “pages” on NEBridge.org. I have created a spreadsheet that serves as an index to these pages. I have attached a pdf of it to this document. I am confident that by later in the year it will be complete and as accurate as I can make it. I suspect that the person or persons who do these tasks will want to simplify the processes, but whatever process is used, it should be documented, and I think that the format that I chose is optimal, since anyone can see the most current version.
The starting page is 342. It can be accessed with the URL NEBridge.org/pages/342. All pages can be reached from there, but if you want to look at a particular page, the easiest way is to key in NEBridge.org/pages/ppp in your browser, where ppp is the three-digit page number on the spreadsheet for the index.
Communications Committee: I think that consideration should be given to restarting the CommComm in 2023 or maybe sooner. I am willing to serve on it, but I don’t want to be chairman in 2023.
Two regional bridge tournaments in New England in 2021 had been canceled because of the pandemic. The Presidential Regional that was scheduled for February 2022 was also canceled because no suitable site in the southwestern part of the district was available. A new event, which was called the Gala, was scheduled for late May, which was the time that my wife Sue and I had planned to take a cruise in Europe1. We had deliberately chosen the second half of May because, in all the years that I had been going to tournaments, the district had never held an event then.
Curtis Barton.
Meanwhile Curtis was trying to figure out if, as an ACBL Employee, Gary would be allowed to be both webmaster for the district. Curtis finally determined that he could. In early July he asked me to set up a Zoom meeting with Gary, Peter Marcus2, and himself. I told him that I had no idea how to set up a Zoom meeting, and that I was very busy at the time.
The second half of July was dominated by the Summer NABC that was held in Providence. Curtis decided that he needed two people to replace me. He offered one of the jobs to Gary in this email sent on August 10.
The other candidate wasn’t interested. That puts you (Gary) back where you’ve been – my choice for NEBC Database and NEBridge.org Webmaster. If you accept the position we will discuss compensation (Mike gets free plays and some other stuff – not too valuable for you) on a per tournament basis.
I suggest you contact Mike for his write-ups on the efforts. If you accept I will also begin the search for a Communications lead to supplement (not replace) existing efforts.
Communications Lead:
• Voting member of the TSC • Cannot be an ACBL employee • Essentially a volunteer position; may, in the future be compensated with free plays or similar consideration. • This primarily a marketing function with technical considerations as agreed with the NEBC Database/NEBridge.org Webmaster • Coordinates the electronic aspects of tournament advertising and execution • Works with the Database/Webmaster • Edits the Tournament Bulletin as required • May use MailChimp email system to create messages as required.
NEBC Database/NEBridge.org Webmaster • Does not and cannot be a voting member of any NEBC Committee • Can be an ACBL employee • This is a compensated position on a “per tournament” basis • Maintains the NEBC website • Maintains the NEBridge.org database • Works with the Communications Lead and Tournament Coordinator to maintain Calendar
This was by far the longest communication that I had ever received from Curtis. It appeared that some progress was being made. The fact that he was conflating the webmaster and database jobs was, of course, disconcerting. The webmaster job had gotten easier over the years. The database job was quite another matter.
This missive pretty much confirmed my notion that no one wanted to revive the Communication Committee. The “as required” appellation applied to the bulletin position was also ominous.
Peter Marcus.
An email from Peter asserted about the database that “It might be work, it might cost money, but I think we really don’t want to abandon it.” Nobody ventured a different opinion. The question then became where the database would be kept. I did not want other people with administrative authority to sign on to Wavada.org.
I am not sure that my next contribution was helpful, but I did not want anyone to claim that I was not forthcoming about the difficulties.
Now that I think about it, iPower is not a critical element. Assuming that two copies of the database (one live and one for testing/backup/disaster recovery) are used, what are needed are two installations of WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, php) or the equivalent. I used iPower for the live version because I already was using its server for other projects on my personal website, and there was a lot of capacity. WAMP is available as a free download for windows-based computers. iPower uses a UNIX version of the three products, but they do not charge extra for MySQL and php.
Mark Oettinger.
Mark Oettinger, the newly elected (sort of) vice-president of the district, suggested that Sue Miguel could do some of the work of the Communications Lead. No one objected.
Gary officially accepted the job of webmaster and indicated that he and I might be able to meet together at the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, (documented here) scheduled for the end of the month. I responded with the following:
I have created a user profile for you for the admin section of NEBridge.org. The user ID is GaryP. After I send this email, I will send the password in a separate email.
I will be in Warwick for all five days. I will be attending the meetings of the Tournament Scheduling Committee and the Executive Committee. I will have the other evenings free. I will be pretty busy until then.
I have documented almost everything that I do on numbered pages (the ones that have the green menu on the left) within the NEBridge.org website. The starting page for all communications functions is #342. The starting page for webmaster functions is #85. The full URL’s are https://nebridge.org/pages/342/ and https://nebridge.org/pages/85/, respectively. The easiest way to get to them is to go to NEBridge.org, click on “Tournament Results” and change the /3/ to the page that you want. I have attached a spreadsheet that has all the page numbers.
There are wysiwyg tools for editing the numbered web page. It is also possible to enter HTML code. I resort to the latter when the former doesn’t provide what I want. The concepts are pretty straightforward. When I started in 2013 there was no documentation, and Bob Bertoni’s training session only lasted thirty minutes.
I am looking forward to meeting you in Warwick.
I introduced myself to Gary when I played in the side game, but I never met with him in the evening. I did meet Steve Ackerman, a player from Vermont. Mark Oettinger had recommended that I get him involved in the transition. I sent him essentially the same email.
In September Curtis sent Gary and me a short email asking whether I could teach them to use MailChimp. I did not envision either of them using it much, but here is what I responded.
MailChimp is not hard. I will set up a user ID for NEBPres and for NEBWeb. I will send the passwords in a separate email. The steps for using MailChimp are documented on NEBridge.org. I will provide training if necessary. I know nothing about using Zoom for training.
The big issue is what is going to happen to the MySQL database that is used for, among other things, populating the lists on MailChimp. The database currently resides on an iPower server on which I have leased space for about ten years. I am willing to give the php scripts that I have written to maintain the files to the district, but the database and the scripts somehow need to be copied to a server owned or leased by the district. That is unlikely to be an easy task. However, there is a great deal of other stuff on my website on iPower, and I don’t really want anyone else to have read/write access to it.
The other big issue is that Keith Wells, who is now a contractor for not an employee of the ACBL, has not answered any of my emails in five months. His last one said that he was still the person that I should contact in order to obtain the .LZH files used by the scripts that update the attendance table. On the advice of Tim Hill I sent an email in September to tournaments@acbl.org. The unsigned response, with a cc to Keith, said that Keith was still “at the ACBL”.
So, I have been unable to maintain the attendance table by my usual methods. Someone needs to decide whether it is still necessary for the district to maintain the attendance table, on which I formerly recorded who attended each regional and sectional in New England and each NABC. If not, it might not be worth the effort to continue using the MySQL database to keep a comprehensive roster of players, their advancement, their attendance, and a few other things. In that case the whole emailing strategy may need to be rethought. Maybe it could be done with spreadsheets or some other method. To my knowledge no other district goes to so much trouble to target emails.
It is possible to update the attendance table without the LZH files. The alternative method uses the “Master Point Winners” report in the posted results on the ACBL tournament schedule. However, 1) It is both kludgy and very time-consuming because there are no ACBL numbers, and 2) there is no way that I know of to account for people who earned no points at the tournament. So, I have been reluctant to resort to that method.
I am doing what I can to help the transition, but I don’t want to be the one who makes important decisions that affect how the mailings are done in 2023 and following.
The first sentence was a mistake. The way that new user profiles are created in MailChimp is to “invite” other people through an option in MailChimp. They then are sent an email from MailChimp that explains how new users can create their own profiles.
As of this writing in June of 2023, I have still not been able to gain access to the LZH files.
Shortly thereafter someone brought up the possibility of using the Pianola software that a third party had customized for the ACBL When the product was introduced several years earlier, I had looked into this and shared my low opinion of it with the members of the Executive Committee. I repeated those points for Curtis and Gary.
Addendum: The ACBL allows direct but very limited access to its active player database for emails, but there are several limitations that render this approach less effective in targeting. I have not investigated this approach recently, but the limitations that I remember are:
1) You must use Pianola. My understanding is that it does not support images, tables, font changes, and other tricks that I sometimes have used within messages. Both Sue and I use a lot of embedded images.
2) You can only access the records for a limited number of districts/units.
3) The format is, to say the least, unimaginative. It is black on grey.
4) I am uncertain of how much targeting can be done. I seriously doubt that one can target (as I did for NAP) based on the May 6 ACBL roster. I also feel certain that targeting based on attendance or zip code (Cape, for instance) is not possible.
5) The rate charged U126 is four times what we paid, and the last time I looked that rate is still available.
6) Access to the database can only be for the purpose of emailing. If you want to use it for some other purpose, you must keep your own files somehow.
7) I am not sure that Pianola has all the reporting tools that MailChimp offers. People who have complained to me about not receiving an email are sometimes surprised that MailChimp knows whether each email was delivered, whether it was opened, and whether any links were clicked on.
8) A small number of people have provided me, but not the ACBL with their email addresses.
9) I think that if someone unsubscribes on Pianola, they can no longer be reached. MailChimp has the same rule, but because we have lots of lists, we can control the effect. For example, if a club manager unsubscribed to the recent club mailing, he/she would still receive emails about tournaments, letters from the president, surveys, and other types of emails. On the other hand Pianola does support attachments, and MailChimp doesn’t. I have not found this to be much of a limitation, but if we did not have a website on which to post the attachment so that we could link to it, it would be.
Nobody mentioned Pianola for quite a while after that. Somehow someone got the idea that I would host the database for the district. On October 28 I wrote the following to Curtis:
I don’t host the database now. I pay $200 per year to iPower to host it. I know very little about hosting databases. The district could get an account with iPower or some other hosting service that supports MySQL and php and has a way to import databases and programming files. I contracted with iPower a long time ago. I don’t remember why I picked them.
I will help with migrating the database and the scripts over. I don’t really want to support the php scripts, but if you cannot find anyone who knows php, well … I would have to think about it.
If you are really asking me if I would agree to set up user ID’s for others on my iPower account, the answer is no. I have a great deal of other stuff on my account, and I have spent hundreds of hours on it.
So, the first decision is whether it is worth the effort to maintain a relational database. If the district cannot find a reliable source for getting the lzh files, I would be inclined to doubt it. The roster files, which are the source for most of my selections, can easily be downloaded from ACBL.org and then opened in Excel. Someone who is a wiz at spreadsheets could probably do the selections from the spreadsheets. The uploads to MailChimp require csv files, and spreadsheets could–after some slicing and dicing–be saved as csv files for that purpose.
When the above issue has been addressed, one other remains: How many lists on MailChimp will be used and reused? I suggest at least one for presidential communications, one for regional tournaments, one for NAP/GNT, one for clubs, and one for I/N. We now have a very large number of lists–one for every email (as Bob recommended). This has been feasible because the database has a field to flag players who have unsubscribed. I never select these people for any mailing promoting a tournament. Without that field I would need to reuse lists, as I sometimes do now for other types of emails.
If you decide to reuse the lists, you should add fields for masterpoints and rank description so that you can “segment” the lists as required for the email. This is the way that I handled the five emails promoting the 2022 NAP. The only problem is that someone would need to decide whether people who unsubscribed in response to those emails should also be unsubscribed from one of the other lists.
Curtis put the burden on Gary and Steve with a short reply: “We need someone to host our data base, and we need that someone now. You guys are the experts. Figure out what we need to do, and let’s get it done. “
Gary said that he was not a database engineer, but he was an “Excel weenie.” Steve set up a Dropbox for me and asked me to put the database and the php scripts in it. It took me most of a day to do this because a great deal of what is on Wavada.org is related to my blogs, journals, and other projects. Even after I culled those out, the remainder barely fit in the Dropbox, and the company that sponsored it kept sending me emails that I should upgrade my subscription.
Not much else happened until I wrote up the following summary on November 28:
General: All of the tasks have been documented on pages of NEBridge.org. The appearance of a few MailChimp screens has changed, but the work flow has not. All the documentation pages can be reached from https://nebridge.org/pages/342/.
Webmaster: I have given the credentials for the email redirecting to Gary Peterson. I have also set the emails for webmaster to redirect to his email account.
Action item: The ad on NEBridge.org for the ACBL online regional was still there today.
Database: Peter said that LZH files should now be available from ACBL somehow. If so, it is still probably a good idea to keep up the database if someone can learn how to maintain it. Those files can help with both targeted mailings and analysis of attendance at tournaments.
Action item: I will communicate with Peter about how to get the LZH files from the ACBL. When I do, I plan to upload all of the files for D25 sectionals and regionals in 2022 as well as the Providence NABC. I will then submit attendance reports for the Providence and Southbridge regionals and the Providence NABC to the Executive Committee members via email.
The current database is MySQL. The scripting language php is used for maintenance and reporting. I will create a copy of the database, the php scripts (including the Javascript and CSS), and a file of the SQL statements that I have used for lists and other purposes. I will then send them to wherever the new home is. I will also help with the migration as much as I can.
Action items: If the database is to be continued, 1) Who will maintain it and use SQL to select lists for mailings? 2) Where will the data and programs be stored? The system can actually be run on any Windows or Unix computer that has the free download WAMP or XAMP, but I chose to run it somewhere that provided support, which I have used four or five times per year. 3) Will the person who manages the database also manage MailChimp?
MailChimp: Policy decisions need to be made about how many lists will be used. The issue is how to handle “unsubscribes”. If a person unsubscribes from one list, should they simultaneously be unsubscribed from all? This will not happen automatically on MailChimp, but there is an “OK to email?” field on the database. The “actives” view of the players table, which I often used for selections for email lists, eliminates players with an N in this field or any other disqualifying information.
Action items: Who will manage the site? What will the workflow for new emails be? Will there be any reporting?
Email composition: Sue Miguel.
Bulletin Editor: I have copies of all the ones that I have done. I can send in odt or word format.
Action items: Is this worth doing? Who will do it? Will we resume using online bulletins?
This email generated a lengthy thread of responses. Curtis established the parameters:
Mike has done his usual great job in laying out the tasks ahead. I will take the Bulletin Editor3 task for Southbridge 2 (Mike: please send me the last Bulletin in Word format, please.)
Who will take on the rest of the effort? Please advise soonest.
I sent a copy of the Bulletin that I had created for the Optical Regional in 2022 to Curtis.
Curtis sent the following to Steve Ackerman and Neil Montague, who had expressed some interest in handling the emails:
We need a Mailchimp email expert (or maybe two!) to do the email parts of Mike’s current job. You both are great candidates for this. Any interest? Note: this will, in effect, make you a part of Sue’s marketing campaigns. It’s fun.4
Neil told Curtis that someone would need to show him how MailChimp worked. I invited him to create his own account and wrote:
MailChimp is not difficult. I have documented everything that I do in it on the NEBridge.org website, and the MailChimp site has very good FAQ’s and support when one needs it. I figured it out with no training whatever.
The bigger issue is whether to continue using the MySQL database as the source for creation of lists, and, if so, where it will reside.
Curtis wrote that Neil would officially become the MailChimp person and that Sue Miguel would compose the emails. Steve attempted to address the database issue.
As far as the database goes, I’ve taken a look at the LZH files that ACBLScor uses to update its database. Unfortunately, it only ACBL numbers and Points, not names and addresses. We would need more information than that to maintain the database. Another option is Pianola. I understand they are pricey, but it might be possible to work out a deal with them. https://www.pianola.net
I could not let that go unanswered.
I use four sources of information for the database: 1) Once a month (on about the 7th) I download the entire ACBL roster, which has almost all the census information on all active ACBL members; 2) The ACBL sends Webmaster@NEBridge.org a list of the players who advanced in rank during the previous month; 3) The LZH files for attendance at tournaments; 4) Individual maintenance when I learn something such as a nickname, a new email address, or an unsubscribe. Here is what I have for each player:
I described the problems with using the ACBL’s program that uses Pianola on a previous email. I will look for it and resend it if necessary.
This exchange generated an overly optimistic assessment by Mark Oettinger that showed praise on all the participants. No emails were exchanged in December except one from Curtis that asked me how much I would charge to continue to send out the emails “for one more month”. I said that I would certainly continue to do it if it was necessary. In actuality I sent out all of the emails in the first five months of 2023.
In January Neil wrote this to me: “I think I am supposed to send out the e-mails to the district via MailChimp. I have an account but since I’ve never really used it before, some quick help from you would be appreciated.” Neil was referring to the computer-generated emails sent by BridgeFinesse.com to players who had advanced in rank. I explained to him that he did not need to get involved in this process.
On February 11 Curtis notified me and the other participants that there would be a Zoom meeting to discuss the succession issues. He then wrote that Peter would send the invitation. At some point it was changed to an in-person meeting at the Presidential Regional in Southbridge. That gathering was never canceled, but it did not happen.
An email that I received from Sue Miguel got my goat. Here is what I sent to everyone on the Executive Committee.
In November of 2021 I gave notice that I did not want to be involved in precisely this type of thing–promotion of online gold point events, which I am convinced will be the death of regional tournaments. I have not seen one inch of progress in removing this responsibility.
I will send this out, but I AM PLEADING that the district relieve me of this responsibility. It makes me furious to be promoting this sort of thing.
Curtis sent me an email that said that Sue should have sent the email to Neil instead of me. I sent out this email and several more over the course of the next few months.
Neil sent me an email on March 8 concerning an email that he had received from Paul Harris, the president of EMBA. He wanted to know the details of the district’s contract with MailChimp. I answered the inquiry with the following.
MailChimp charges D25 by the number of emails sent. Back in 2015 or 2016 Bob Bertoni negotiated the purchase of 2 million email credits for $2500 in a “pay as you go” plan. We had to purchase that many to get that rate. At the time we had no limits on the number of lists or the total number of contacts. We have about ninety lists (but they won’t let us create any new ones) and a very large number of contacts. In the old days I built a new list for each version of each email, and I had roughly seven or eight versions for each tournament.
808,020 credits remain. I am not sure that MailChimp still allows pay-as-you-go plans. It appears to me that it now sells four or five tiers of plans that require a monthly fee based on the total number of contacts. Each has other limitations as well.
In my opinion MailChimp’s best feature is that it allows you to “code your own” emails in HTML. It is much more time-consuming to do it that way, but you can–with a few small exceptions–make the email look exactly the way that you want it to. Of course, you have to be familiar with HTML and how email clients (as opposed to browsers) interpret various tags. The only thing that I have never been able to do is to get Outlook to show correctly a caption for an image.
Without the “code your own’ feature I do not know how anyone will be able to create the kind of emails that Sue Miguel likes to send. She creates the emails using a program on her Mac and sends me the finished product. I extract the HTML and make a few changes to fit MailChimp’s requirements.
By the way, MailChimp is now owned by Intuit, the QuickBooks company.
I know nothing about Constant Contact.
I have been promised that I will not be required to send any more emails, but the meeting that was scheduled for Southbridge to determine who would do it and (more importantly) how was never held. Then there was supposed to be a Zoom meeting about it, but it never occurred either. At this point I do not know whose responsibility it is to find a way to continue. I am pretty sure that Curtis does not want to hear any more about it.
Another Zoom meeting was scheduled for March 30 at 8 p.m. Peter sent out the following email at 6:56 a.m. on that day to the people scheduled to attend the 8:00 meeting and a few people from the Connecticut Bridge Association (CBA).
I just attended a webinar (not sure if any of you did, but I did see Ken there) about their new marketing program, sending out emails, and using Pianola. I don’t know enough to know if this is any good, but, unlike a lot of what ACBL does, it actually looked at least presentable.
One obvious benefit is an immediate access to ACBL data (email addresses, masterpoint holdings, etc.) without having to update them ourselves. A downside, to the extent we do it, is that it doesn’t seem to include information about tournaments attended though they said that could be added.
The tools for developing emails did seem reasonable and it does have the ability to include attachments, like a flyer.
Obviously, one issue is cost. I know, when Bob Bertoni investigated this, we ran from Pianola because of cost. They addressed this and said they are cheaper than MailChimp (what they compared themselves to), though they talked about buying 10K or 25K Mailchimp credits. If I remember correctly, D25 bought something like 250K, which was an upfront cost (almost like a capital cost, buying new equipment) and then it lasts for years.
Anyway, I do not have the technical expertise to make comparisons. So, my questions are
1) They recorded the webinar and are offering a masterclass in developing emails/marketing next Tuesday (for about an hour). I will forward the link to the recording and the masterclass if anyone wants to hear it or sign up for the class. I will not sign up, I don’t have the background to make an informed decision.
2) Where are we with MailChimp credits, i.e., are they about to run out or do we have years to go?
3) They are setting up credits for each unit and district and accounts to send emails will be done individually, i.e., a unit or district says who should have access and they will get their own login, not done with everyone in one organization sharing the login. But, is there any rationale to considering setting up credits for the units and district to share, as a way of lowering costs, particularly for smaller units?
I am not looking for answers, since I wouldn’t know how to evaluate them, just asking questions. We can discuss more tomorrow on the ZOOM call.
Will send out the info from them when I get it.
I watched the webinar later, but I wanted to provide answers to Peter’s questions before the Zoom meeting.
I could not attend the webinar because of a medical appointment. Incidentally, the message announcing the webinar was composed using the new tools. The last word or two of every line on the message was cut off when I opened it in Outlook. I tried changing the width of the window, but it did not help.
D25 bought 2 million credits from MailChimp. Over 800,000 still remain. Attachments, especially ones with images, use up a lot of band width. Requiring links rather than attachments is the main reason that MailChimp delivery is so fast.
I have never used Pianola, but I know where I ran into problems with MailChimp. Some of my questions are:
1) How are unsubscribes handled? If someone unsubscribes to an email sent by one user will other users still be able to reach them?
2) To which districts would we be allowed to send email?
3) Can pre-formatted emails like Sue’s be sent or must they be redone in Pianola’s tools?
Curtis took notes at the 8:00 meeting and sent them to the participants. I have posted them here. It is worth discussing his three “Takeaways”.
“Peter will transfer Mike’s data to a new source.” In fact, I sent an up-to-date copy of the database to Steve. Peter had nothing to do with it.
“Henceforth we will use Mike’s data from Peter’s source for emails and the like.” It was not until May that Steve’s copy of the database was available. In actual fact, the audience that I had been using on MailChimp was still used through the end of June. However, Neil did successfully process a couple of Sue Miguel’s emails in May and June.
“Peter and Steve will attend the Pianola Master Class to determine whether we can easily port the current system and data to that (ACBL) system.” I don’t think that anyone involved in the transition process ever attended the Pianola Master Class.
Peter, with whom I had a bizarre contretemps (described here) earlier in the year, recognized the crux of the problem in a friendly email:
I understand that Mike, who has been so good to do all this for us since forever, and had announced his departure as of the beginning of 2023, is still involved and really, really “wants out.”
If we need help to actually move this to final migration, I think we should consider actually getting a professional in this kind of work to help/do it for us. Even if this group has the skill (and I don’t), finding the time can be a much bigger problem, and, if we have to pay for it, so be it. We could speak first to Megahertz5, to hire them, and, failing that, find someone who could get it done. I don’t think their geography matters though, unlike the ACBL, I would suggest we don’t save money by using IT contractors from Poland.
Curtis favored a different approach:
Here’s what we can do to get Mike OUT of the loop, at least formally.
1) Neil: if you can take Mike’s stuff for storage, please do so.
2) Gary/Steve/Neil: please discuss this among yourselves, and determine whether we should take Peter’s suggestion and hire Megahertz to set things up. Let me know what you decide, and I’ll get it approved.
Then let’s finish this.
Steve immediately reported that he had a copy of the database, and he would find a place to put it. His email on May 3 listed the progress that he had made.
I have uploaded Mike’s database to a server on google as I had some issues attempting to sign up at Oracle.
I’ve created user accounts for everyone on this list. To log in, use your username portion of your email, and the number you enter into the bridgemates (so no letters).
I have updated the masterpoints based on the April version of the MP file available to ACBLScor. I understand that in the past we were able to get a more complete database listing from ACBL, but I don’t know who to contact for that.
Neil & Gary, let me know if you need help generating the queries to populate your mailchimp lists.
A few thing that he wrote were not quite accurate. Here is what I replied:
On your MyACBL page do you have a tab called “Member Rosters”? It should be right below “Ribbon”. If not, I think that either Curtis or Mark Aquino can designate you to have access to that feature from the ACBL.
A new roster will come out on 5/7 or maybe 5/8 since 5/7 is a Sunday. I have a list of email addresses that have unsubscribed in the last year or so. The “OK to email” field for all of them should be set to N. Should I send this to you, or is there some way that I can do it?
After I sent another email for Sue, a player replied with a request to change her email address. I forwarded it to Steve. He replied with some good questions.
Does the normal procedure include asking the player to make sure they also update their email with ACBL? I suspect that when I update next week from the roster this email address may be incorrect if the player doesn’t also notify ACBL.
In addition, I updated the player database to flag not to email the addresses you sent me. However, I found about 20% of the addresses were not in our database. I’m assuming these addresses may not be active ACBL members, or they are for some other list than D25? I’m attaching them for your review.
I was happy to respond to this. It indicated that someone was finally getting into the nitty gritty of the database.
When they give me a new address I also change the “email source” to Player. I should have told you this. My program for processing the the new roster does not change the email address unless the email source is ACBL.
Either the addresses were changed, or the players were added to the database after I sent it to you, most likely the latter. So, after the database is next updated, the update of the “ok to email?” field should be run again. Should I change the email that receives messages about unsubscribes to some other account? I received notice of one more yesterday.
This is only important if a different audience is used for a future email. As long as the audience that I have been using is employed, the fact that they unsubscribed from that audience will prevent them from getting any more emails.
A few days later I sent the following to all of the people involved in the transition.
1. A new roster came out over the weekend. Is there a plan for updating Steve’s copy of the database?
2. One more player has unsubscribed, carl_palmer@yahoo.com. Should I change the owner of all of the audiences (Mailchimp word for mailing lists) so that someone else gets the emails that indicate such changes?
3. Neil, when Sue has another email to send out, do you want to try to do it? NAP qualifiers and Nashua will probably be promoted soon. Since we have not gotten access to the .LZH files, they can all be sent from the audience that I have been using (2209_Southbridge_D3_D24_D25) for the last year, but a new selection should be made from the database to update it. Then already defined “segments” of the audience can be used in the definition of the mailing. If necessary, it is easy to define new segments. That audience includes fields for rank description, masterpoints, and district.
4. I have a folder of files with SQL statements that I have used in the past. I would be happy to share it.
Neil Montague.
Neil said that he would try to send out Sue’s next email, which arrived in my Inbox that same day. Most of my subsequent conversations were with Neil, who had told me that he was very familiar with SQL and had extracted HTML from emails.
Sue has just sent me an email that she wants sent to potential players in Flight B of the NAP.
I will forward it to you. It contains formatted text and an image with a link on it. It does not have a width, but I always set the width to 600px. The link she provided should work, but the image must be uploaded to MailChimp. Sue does not like her emails to have the masthead, but this one is signed by Peter Marcus. So, I would add the masthead at the top. I have enclosed an HTML file that has the width and masthead set. You should be able to paste the text (after removing the instructions in red) into the HTML file. Then find the image (<img) tag and whatever divs or spans are around it. After the physical image (which I get by using Prt Scr and then cropping in an image editor) has been saved as a file and uploaded to MailChimp. The “src=” in the image tag must be changed to the URL on MalChimp. An alternative is to ask Sue to send you the image in a jpg and then upload it.
I almost forgot: the image tag has style=”float: right” in it. Since Microsoft Outlook does not recognize that, I always add align=”right”, which it does recognize. Incidentally, the width in the HTML is set in a table because that was the only way that I could get Outlook to recognize a fixed width.
This is all described in the instructions in detail with pictures on NEBridge.org. The instructions begin on https://nebridge.org/pages/345/. You may very well be able to do all of this using one of MailChimp’s many templates. I have never tried that.
This afternoon I updated the audience (2209_Southbridge_D3_D24_D25) with the data from the latest roster. The SQL statement that I used was:
select familiar_name, last_name, email, name_town_key, rank_desc, masterpoints, district from actives where district in(3,24,25) and ytdpoints >= 1 order by last_name, first_name
It will be necessary to define a segment of the audience that is limited to records in which the district is 25 and masterpoints are less than 2800 or 2900. The limit is 2500, but the check is made against the database as of last August. It would be tricky to get that because there might be people who were not on that roster (late with dues or other reason) but are now eligible. It seems better to annoy people like me who are not actually eligible than to miss some who are.
I should be in most of the day.
Neil, who was still gainfully employed, said that he would work on it over the weekend. He did. He wanted to do the project from scratch, which began by making sure the list (“audience” in MailChimp) was up to date. I was happy to explain MailChimp’s concepts of audiences and segments.
In olden days I created audiences for each email. That made sense when other people (president, I/N director, and district director) were also using MailChimp. If they unsubscribed because of one of their emails, I did not want them to have automatically unsubscribed from mine. In addition I was sometimes using MailChimp for other purposes than event promotion (emails to clubs and for the Best-in-class competition). Furthermore, I also sent to people who had attended New England or NABC events, and the selection was too complicated for segments.
In the last year all of the emails have been composed by Sue, I no longer have access to the tournament attendance data, I did not contact the clubs, and I stopped doing the Best in Class. So, I have been using the 2209 audience for every event. It includes all active players in D3. D24, and D25, and I have updated it every month with the SQL statement that I sent to you. I had previously added the masterpoints, rank description, and district fields so that I could use simple segments to select from this audience for emails for both regional tournaments and Grass Roots qualifiers.
Peter is still, at least in theory, working on getting access from the ACBL to the LZH files again. If we had them, we could update the attendance table as before. This would allow us both to send emails to more people with some likelihood of attending and to evaluate our tournaments better. It would, however, necessitate recycling some of our previous audiences, of which there are 89. MailChimp no longer allows us to create new audiences.
I sent the following to Steve and Neil:
All the “unsubscribes” that I sent to Steve had unsubscribed from the 2209 … audience that I have been using for the last year. When I updated the audience last Monday I selected from the actives view, which excludes anyone with N in the OK to email field. It would not matter for the current email project because they would all be excluded by MailChimp anyway. It is not possible (as far as I know) to send an email in MailChimp to someone who has unsubscribed from the audience used in the campaign.
I got the list of unsubscribes by taking the “export” function in the audience section of MailChimp. It sent to my download folder a zip file that contained three csv files: subscribers, unsubscribeds, and cleaned. The last had email addresses that had repeatedly bounced back. These files all have a large number of fields. I deleted all of the columns except the email address from the unsubscribed file and sent it to Steve. Since I have been using this audience for many emails, and I have previously run this procedure to change the ok to email fields, I am sure that a good number of those on the unsubscribed file already had the ok to email field set to N.
My phone number is 860 930 8784. I am scheduled to play bridge at the Hartford BC on Saturday. I will leave my house at noon and return a little before 5. I have no plans for Sunday, but I wake up early in the morning and then take naps during the day.
I was actually a little excited about Neil taking on this project. It would have been much better if I had been next to him when he did it, as I usually was when I installed a new AdDept system at a client’s. He wasted a lot of time trying to clean up the HTML that had been generated by the software product that Sue used, and some of the things that he did made it worse. He sent me a test copy and an email with the following questions.
I think I have completed the work necessary to send out Sue’s e-mail but I have a few questions:
(1) I thought I put the code into centering the image at the top but it’s not centered. My HTML experience is minimal and from a few years ago, although I did successfully embed the link that Sue wanted in the image. The instructions talk about having text appear when someone is using an e-mail client that doesn’t support images, but when I did it, the text always appeared which isn’t what we want. Do I need to worry about this? If so, let me know what to change.
(2) I followed your instructions of pasting your e-mail into Outlook and saving the source and pasting that into Mailchimp. There are a lot of tags that probably don’t need to be there but probably some of them do. Should I not worry about this or should I eliminate the ones that don’t really belong. As both you and the instructions mention, different e-mail clients require different tags so I can’t really go by how it looks on my machine.
(3) The next e-mail you receive is the test e-mail. I sent it to myself first and verified that I did the href tag correctly (I have experience doing that as we convert statutory references in the law to links to the legislature’s web pages when the Massachusetts budget gets signed so I actually have done this before.
(4) Finally, can you verify that I did this all correctly? The segment should be fine and you shouldn’t have any trouble finding this new campaign.
I looked it over and then sent Neil what I had discovered.
1) The image at the top should be the banner, which was in the HTML that I sent you. It should NOT link to the flyer. The Chicago image should be where Sue placed it. I separated it out on its own line in the HTML editing screen. There is already a link around it. I am not sure if it works. You must change the src= on that image to that of the one that you used at the top. Don’t change any of the other attributes, but add align=”right”.
Also take out lines 8 and 9.
2) The tool that Sue uses inserts a lot of extraneous tags, but I never worry about them. I am worried about the extra line feeds. We need to figure out where they came from.
3) Make the above changes and send me another test. When I say that it looks OK, send a test to Sue.
Neil made some changes and sent me another test along with the following email.
I think I made all of the changes and I eliminated the “excess” html code – at least I think it is excess. I put <br> tags in to force line breaks in the right place. I’m getting three errors (code turns red) but it doesn’t seem to be causing a problem. If I remove the body tag, then the text only goes half way across the page. Please take a look. I also am sending you the test e-mail now.
His remark that “the text only goes halfway across the page” was a reaction to the code that set the width of the email to 600. I looked at the entire campaign more thoroughly this time. Here was my reply.
I had not checked the segment before. I noticed this morning that the total number selected was roughly twice what I expected. D25 has about 6,000 members. The audience also includes D3 and D24. Here is how it currently is defined:
2. From section: As it is,the replies will go to Gary (webmaster@nebridge.org). That should probably be changed to inchair, but Sue may want the replies to go to Peter. It is her call.
3. Subject section: I always have copied the subject from Sue’s emails and pasted it directly into the subject line. That would put it in all upper case. I don’t know if it would increase or decrease the number of people who open the email, but she gets to make decisions like this now.
4. Content: I removed the <html, <meta and the second <body tag. I put “Folks,” inside a <p tag.
On the second <img tag:
I removed align=center and replaced it with align=right. I know that was what she wanted because her original source said style=”float: right;”. I also replaced width=500 with width=400. I also added a ) at the end that she forgot.
After this I expected the test email to look like what Sue sent me, but it doesn’t. This is because you removed all of her <font tags.
You did a lot more work than was necessary. I am sorry that I did not describe this to you very well. Basically, Sue’s email was fine. It was not necessary to remove all of the extra stuff that her program puts in, and, in fact, those font statements were necessary to make it look the way that she wanted.
The only changes that I usually make are:
1) Start with my frame.html
2) Add the banner if necessary
3) Find all of her <img tags: upload the physical image or find the URL if it is already uploaded, change the src= parameter to the location on MailChimp, and add align=”right” if she used <style=”float: right”. By the way, it would make things easier if she sent the image as a .jpg file in addition to the one that is embedded in the message.
In this case the image itself is no longer showing up in my copy of the email that she sent. We may need to have her send it again. I decided to replicate the campaign you made, and show how I would have done the content. The campaign I created is titled 2023 Flight B GNT (Mike’s content). I hope that this makes things a little clearer. I do not understand why Sue’s original image is no longer showing up in the email that she originally sent. I would like to see what her image looked like in Outlook.
Neil replied in detail:
1. Sorry about that with the segment. I have added the criteria that the players have to be from district 25 and now there will be 5466 recipients which is about what you expect.
2. I’ll ask Sue who she wants the from to be. I guess Gary is the default but obviously we can put whatever we want in that box.
3. I’ll ask Sue whether she wants the subject in all upper case. I was taught that all upper case is “yelling” although it probably doesn’t make a difference whether it is all caps or not. I agree with you to defer to Sue on this.
4. There still were some red tags (errors) when I opened my version of this which you edited for me. However, I added a few more tags and close tags at the top and that seem to fix the problem without changing anything.
5. I added back the font tag towards the top. The font appearing on my computer is Helvetica 11 when I put the tab back and when I look at the original e-mail you sent me which was Sue’s e-mail. Yesterday, my version was sending it in Helvetica 10. As you know, fonts are at the mercy of what is on the users computer so what you are seeing might not match what I am seeing. I am looking at these in Chrome.
6. Your version of the e-mail is doing what some of my previous versions did which is only going half way across the page for the image at the top and all of the text. My version has the image at the top the same as yours but the text goes across the page entirely. I think that’s what we want, right? Your change to the Chicago image pushed it to the right and has the text wrap to the left. That’s not what came across in the original from you but I think it looks good your way. I guess I’ll find out how much Sue wants these e-mails to reflect “exactly” what she sends. Not sure what you mean when you say the image from her e-mail disappeared? So we can proceed one of two ways. First, I am sending you my updated campaign test e-mail. If that looks good to you, I will send it to Sue with the question for her from above. If it is still problematic, I guess we can use your version but I will ask Sue about the width issue since it looks weird only going half way across. If it is easier to talk, my phone number is 617-771-2527 if that is how you would like to next proceed. Looks like we’ll get this done today which is what I told Sue.
Our conversation ended with my reply:
3. I am virtually certain that Sue wants the subject in uppercase. When you talk with her, I would not mention about “yelling”. I was taught the same as you. I avoided all-upper case when I wrote emails or anything else. You also should probably ask her about the banner. She did not like it on the ones that she composed, but this one was mostly written by and signed by Peter.
4. The width of the email that I composed was 600 pixels, the standard size of an email window and also the size of the banner. If your window is wider than that, it might have seemed strange that everything everything wrapped at that spot. The 600 px setting was set in both the body and the table. Some email clients respect the one in the body, but Outlook only respects the table. So, if you closed the <body or <table at the top, it would be wider than 600, as it was in Outlook on the test you sent me.
5. On Outlook the font is now Calibri 11. On my version it was Arial 16, which was what was specified in Sue’s. Maybe my eyes were deceiving me, but this morning Sue’s original email had the word image001 where the second image was before. The computer on which her image was stored must have been down; the image is back now. It is smaller and has slightly different writing on it than the one whose URL I gave to you. If I had this to do over, I would try to use it or at least set the width to around 320.
What you sent me is, in my opinion, perfectly fine. You should see if Sue agrees.
Going forward (if you are still game) I advise using the method that I proposed in the replica. I can do one of her emails in about a half hour, and it always maintains her fonts and positions her images where she wants them. Sometimes in the middle of an email she likes to change the font size, color or even the font itself. The only mistake that I have made is failing to find an image that was down at the bottom of an email. If the src= parameter is not changed, it does not appear in the MailChimp version.
You also might want to investigate using a template. When I started, I had several years experience at writing emails in HTML, and I hated the restrictions of the templates.
A few security issues still remained, but the email went out on time. In a few days the security issues were resolved. I had to change the owner of the audience. That will probably need to be redone every time that a new audience is used, but since Neil has been designated as the owner of the account, that should not be difficult.
At the end of the Executive Committee meeting on June 24 in Nashua Neil button-holed me to assure me that he would handle Sue’s emails the way that I recommended. He seemed to enjoy telling me about how he had dealt with the issues. I did not voice my primary thought, which was, “Better you than me.”
After the email went out Neil asked me about the fourteen bounce-backs that were reported. I explained how MailChimp handles them:
The ones that have bounced will have a status of “cleaned”. I generally do not worry about them. They will no longer be sent emails by any campaigns in this audience. If you recycle an old audience for new emails and select them, they will be set to subscribed unless they were already unsubscribed or cleaned on the audience that you archived or deleted. If the first mailing bounces, they will be set to cleaned forever.
Just a reminder: the audience has one record per email address. The database has one record per ACBL number. A lot of players share email addresses.
There is a field on the players table called email_rejected. I have not kept this up, but if you wanted to, you could export the audience. One of the csv files in the zip that it produces will contain all of the cleaned ones. That could be used to make the database more accurate. However, if they later provide the ACBL with a new valid address, that one will appear after the next monthly update. The email_rejected fields are NOT currently automatically reset by the monthly update program. So, the email_rejected field would not be accurate.
The last issue (so far) was that Sue wanted an NEBridge account for TheFairyGOLDMother. I turned this request over to Gary Peterson, to whom I had provided the credentials for the software that redirected the emails. He had lost the password. I sent it to him again.
1. This trip did not come off as planned. However, I did go on a cruise, as is thoroughly documented here.
2. I am not sure why Peter Marcus, who was the principal tournament director for the district was involved at all. Perhaps Curtis thought that because Peter had worked for DEC, he would understand what I did.
3. No Bulletin was produced for the Presidential Regional, the tournament to which Curtis referred. I had produced the Bulletin for the Optical Regional in November. Thereafter the Bulletin, which cost to district $100 per tournament, was considered too expensive to continue after an informal email poll of members of the Tournament Scheduling Committee.
4. Over the years I sent out perhaps twenty email messages for Sue Miguel. I do not remember that any of those experiences was what I would call fun.
5. Megahertz Computer was Bob Bertoni’s company. In theory they supported the district’s website, but it was difficult to get them to respond to problems and questions.
