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2025 Bridge: D25 Events

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Still under construction. The first event of 2025 was a five-day mishmash scheduled for Mansfield, MA, from Tuesday February 18 through Saturday February 22. It featured a limited regional for non-Life Masters and a contemporaneous open sectional. I was not … Continue reading →

Still under construction.

The first event of 2025 was a five-day mishmash scheduled for Mansfield, MA, from Tuesday February 18 through Saturday February 22. It featured a limited regional for non-Life Masters and a contemporaneous open sectional. I was not eligible for the former and was not interested in the latter because of the length of the drive, the cost and location of the hotel, had the lack of interesting events.

It also included qualifying tournaments for each of the four divisions of the Grand National Teams event. I definitely would have been interested in putting together a team for the GNT if I could play in Flight B, which had always been limited to players with less than 2,500 masterpoints. At the last Executive Committee meeting in the fall Mark Aquino, the Regional Director, had announced that the limit would be raised to 3,000, but he emphasized that it had not officially been changed yet, and there was some opposition. So, I used Google to find the official Conditions of Contest. That led me to this website1, which clearly stated on page 4 that the limit was still 2,500. A few weeks before the event I learned that the CofC was erroneous. Evidently whoever was responsible for posting it never bothered to fix it. When I mentioned this to Sally Kirtley, the tournament manager, she was concerned. She told me that whoever was managing the partnerships could probably find a partner for me. I said that it was too late to put a reasonably good team together. I had no intention of driving all the way to Manchester to play in a one-day Swiss2 in which I had no chance of doing well. The worst imaginable situation for me would have been to be part of a team that, even if it did well, the other members might have no interest in representing the district at the North American Bridge Championships in the summer.

So, since I was no longer on either the Executive Committee or the Board of Delegates, I had no reason to attend the event in Mansfield.

The district’s first real regional tournament was scheduled for the Wellsworth Hotel in Southbridge, MA, from Tuesday, April 22, through Sunday, April 27. The 35-mile drive was by far the easiest of all the tournaments for me, and the schedule included plenty of team games (except for on Saturday. I was therefore very interested in playing there.

I learned more than a month before the event that Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider wanted to team up with me on every day except Thursday. That sounded like an excellent plan. The endurance of the 76-year-old me was much less than it had been earlier. A day for napping in the middle would be greatly appreciated.

I quickly enlisted Eric Vogel as a partner. He committed to play on Tuesday and Wednesday, but he was not available on the weekend. He later needed to rescind his commitment. I was, fortunately, able to get Abhi Dutta to fill in. Mike Heider told me that Helen Benson3, with whom he sometimes played at the Newtown Bridge Club, might be available. I contacted her, and she agreed. She played a much simpler convention card than most that I was accustomed to, but after a fairly lengthy exchange of ideas by email, we agreed upon a very limited set of conventions.

On Monday evening I had purchased a Caesar salad and a chicken wrap at Big Y in Enfield. My recollection was that the hotel’s luncheon buffet was not that good, and I was not enthusiastic about standing in line. On Tuesday morning I left the house at about 8:10. I did not anticipate a lot of traffic, but I was ready to go, and so I left. I listened to Hector Berlioz’s epic opera, Les Troyens. As usual, I stopped at McDonald’s in West Stafford for a sausage biscuit with egg. It cost almost a dollar more than I paid in Hartford, but it was quick and tasty. I arrived at the Wellsworth a little after 9 o’clock. Jim, Mike, and Eric all arrived a few minutes later.

We were scheduled to play in the Open Swiss on both days. On Tuesday we had a very unfortunate draw in the morning. We began by playing against the wunderkinds, Eric and Jeff Xiao and their formidable partners, professional David Caprera4, and another fine player, Max Siline. We lost by 18 victory points, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Our schedule in the rest of the matches was relatively easy. We did not face any of the other top teams, and in the last two rounds we even faced teams from Flight C. In the end we as a B team finished in second place behind only the Xiao team. We were award 6.3 gold points. I was in a good mood for the drive home, but I had started well at regional tournaments before and too often had seen poor results later.

The drive to Southbridge on Wednesday was nearly identical to the drive on Tuesday. The only difference was that I listened to the part of the opera set in Carthage, and it featured Dido rather than Cassandra.

Abhi arrived only a few minutes before nine, but we had played together enough that we only had to review a few items.

Because there were two Swiss events on Wednesday (Open and under 2500), I expected the number of teams in the Open event to be smaller than on Tuesday. I was wrong. There were seventeen, three more than on the previous day. The format was seven rounds of seven-board matches. We were in the lowest strat, which was labeled Y. We won our first match against an A team, but we then lost to Sheila Gabay’s team, but only by four imps. In the third round we tied a team that we had defeated on Tuesday. We had a win, a loss, and a tie, but our total victory points was above average.

We won the next three rounds. In the last round we played against two old friends of mine, Chris Apitz and Ellen Dilbert. We lost the match by 18, but it would have been a lot closer if I had not made a defensive error.on the second-to-last hand. Ellen was playing a doubled 5♦ contract. She had one trump and ♣9 on the board as well as some hearts and spades. Clubs had never been led. She led low to the 9. I had the ace and a small one. Thinking that my partner could beat the 9, I ducked, and it held the trick. We set them 500, but if it had been 800, we would have only lost the match by 4.

As it was we finished with the very respectable score of 74 victory points, which placed us third in X and second in Y. If I had played that ace, we would have finished second in X and first in Y. Still, we earned another 5.94 gold points.

The most amazing match of the event occurred in the seventh round. The Xiao team had lapped the field with an incredible total of 105 victory points (out of a possible 120) in the first six matches. However, in the last round they faced Sheila Gabay’s team. Sheila’s team won the last match by an astounding 42 imps and vaulted into second place.

On the way home I stopped at the Big Y near the McDonald’s in West Stafford to pick up a salad and a wrap for lunches on Friday and Saturday. I was shocked to discover that all of the other stores in that strip mall were unoccupied.

I stayed home on Thursday and took a few naps. I also walked four miles.

The only differences between the journey on Friday morning and the first two trips were the fact that Dido had stepped onto the pyre and I narrowly avoided having the torture of trailing a NETTS truck before it turned onto Route 83 in Somers.

Helen and her husband, who works in ecology.

I finally got to meet Helen Benson in the hotel’s ballroom. We had only a few items left to discuss before we got the horrendous news that we were in the top bracket of the knockout. Worse yet was the news that we were the lowest seeded of the seven teams, which necessitated that we play in three consecutive three-ways. We never even got to change tables. We sat at table C5 for the entire day.

In the last round we were forced to play Mark Aquino and Bill Braucher. It was more enjoyable to talk with them than to get pounded at the bridge table.

It was not a total loss. We won one match. It was against the Luo team that we had defeated once and tied once.

I went home discouraged, but I was hopeful about our chances in the Bracketed Pairs event on Friday. Surely we would not be in the top bracket. There were no other events scheduled that day.

The difference between Friday and Saturday was striking. Helen and I were East-West during both sessions, and we started at table 1 in both sessions. Our opponents on both occasion were Judy McNutt and Eli Jolley. The most amazing hand for me was Board #2 in the afternoon session.

We were bidding clubs, and they were bidding spades. We bid them all the way up to the five level before we gave up. After the hand I mentioned that the LAW of total Tricks predicted that we should be able to take ten tricks in clubs. If so, we should have bid 6♣. We would have only gone down two, and even if they doubled us, that would be better for us than the 650 that we lost for their vulnerable game.

However, it is quite obvious that East-West cannot come close to taking ten tricks with clubs as trumps. There is no way to avoid losing one spade, two hearts, and three diamonds. The LAW is off by three tricks! Eli said that the law tends to break down at the six level, but that has never been my experience. Furthermore, the East-West holdings do not seem to be exceptionally “impure”. It is true that the two honors in spades could just as well have been spot cards. Neither of South’s singletons produce any tricks on defense. Maybe the abundance of worthless shortness is the answer.

Helen did not participate in the discussion. I think that she might not be familiar with the workings of the LAW. She said that she had not read Larry Cohen’s classic book, To Bid or Not to Bid.

We were the top East-West team in the morning and second in the afternoon. That was good, but it was not as good as the performance of Pete Matthews and his partner, who won the event while sitting North-South both sessions. Still, we won over 13 masterpoints.

Jim and Mike had a bad morning, but they improved in the afternoon. We were all in pretty good spirits about the last event of the tournament, the Bracketed Swiss on Sunday.

I was the captain of our team. We were in the second bracket, as I hoped, but I was quite surprised that six of the other seven teams had more points than we did. So, we could expect a lot of tough matches. The format was six rounds of eight-board matches. We would therefore not play one of the other teams.

We actually won four of our six matches. That would ordinarily be good enough to allow us to squeak into the overall awards, but these results were unusual. One team lost all its matches. Unfortunately we were beaten badly in the last match by a team that was well behind us. I was very tired at that point, and I struggled mightily to maintain my concentration. Jim and Mike said that six days of bridge—they did not take Thursday off—had taken the toll on them as well.

We ended up with 60 victory points—exactly average. I was surprised to discover that we had defeated both the first- and second-place teams. We were mired in the next group. It was small consolation that we won a slightly larger match award than any of them.

All in all, this was one of my most successful regional tournaments. I had a pretty good time. I would play with Helen again if I had the chance.

The Marriott Hotel in Newton.

I was not enthusiastic of playing in the regional in Newton, MA, that was scheduled for June 17-22 at the Marriott Hotel. The Individual Regional was formerly held there every January. I did not have many fond memories of that event.6 The drive there was sometimes difficult, especially in the vicinity of the hotel. I don’t think that I had ever stayed at the hotel, and I had no intention of paying Marriott prices this time.

Abhi asked me to play in the Bracketed Pairs scheduled for Saturday. Later Ann Hughes asked me if Eric and I would want to play with her and Bob in the Open Swiss on Wednesday. So, I sort of reluctantly agreed to commute twice.

Google Maps said that the drive to the hotel would take about ninety minutes. I planned to leave 7:45. However, My wife Sue heard something on the television about heavy fog. She advised me to leave earlier and expect visibility problems.

I left a little before 7:30. I had no problems at all with visibility. I saw remarkably little traffic on either 190 or I-84. The going was also pretty easy on the Mass Pike. I was on target for a 9:00 arrival when all of a sudden all three lanes were filled with cars as far as the eye could see, and they were all stationary. My Honda inched its way through a couple of miles of this.

I was not sure what the original cause of the bottleneck was. At one point a bevy of vehicles, most of which were displaying flashing red and blue lights, had made camp off the the right of the road. After that the driving was much easier, but there were still a few delays. I was near the hotel when I got a phone call from Eric. I returned his call after I parked my car in the huge lot at 9:45. It was a good thing that I left fifteen minutes early.

I eventually found all three teammates. By the time that I grabbed a cup of coffee and made my way to table A6 I was quite frazzled. I went over my cheat sheet for Eric for a minute or two. I felt fairly comfortable with what we were playing, but in no way did I feel ready to play bridge.

There were three boards on our table, an indication that we would be playing eight matches with six boards each. The director announced that there were fifteen teams, which meant that teams 13, 14, and 15 played three-way matches in the first two rounds.

Our first opponents were Paul Simon (really!) and a woman whom I did not know. On the first hand Eric opened 1♣. I had a really weak hand with four spades and six diamonds headed by the KQ. I bid a spade. I hoped that Eric bid 1NT. We had an easy way for me to sign off in 2♦. If he raised my spades, I would pass. Unfortunately, what he did bid was 2♥, a reverse that indicated that he had a strong hand with more clubs than hearts.

Our card said that we played lebensohl when a reverse is initiated. I wanted to sign of in diamonds at the lowest possible level. To accomplish this I first bid 2NT. Eric was required to bid 3♣, but he forgot about lebensohl. Instead he bid 3NT. I understood the situation, but I decided to pass for two reasons. In the first place there was no guarantee that Eric would pass if I bid 4♦. The second one involved the First Rule of Holes: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

I got to play this horrible 3NT contract. It was worse than I even imagined Eric’s points were concentrated in the red suits. We had no stopper in either clubs or spades. The opponents took the first nine tricks. We were down five for a 500-point penalty. What a terrible start!.

After that Paul, sitting in the East chair, declared the other five hands. That meant that I had to find the lead on five consecutive hands. During one of those less memorable hands a brouhaha ensued at table A2, which was quite close to ours. Elayne Kadis, who was playing with her husband, Ken, complained loudly about something. The director immediately came to the table and warned her about Zero Tolerance violations. She continued talking and the director assigned some sort of punishment.

I was severely distracted by this. I recognized Elayne, or rather her voice8. Despite the distraction, things seemed to go better for us after the first hand. Nevertheless, I did not think that we had a prayer of winning the match.

However, when Bob and Ann returned to our table to compare scores, we were shocked when they announced +500 for hand #13, our first hand. It turned out that North had opened 1NT, which Eric and I never do with a five-card major, and his partner had responded 2NT, which was intended as a transfer to diamonds. North, however, forgot the convention and bid 3NT. So, South had to play the same horrible contract that I did. We ended up winning the match by eleven points.

In the second match two amazing coincidences happened. East played the first two hand, which made seven hands in a row that I had to make the opening lead. The other was that on the following hand I played another horrendous 3NT contract. In hearts Eric held Kx; I had Ax. We had good clubs and diamonds, but we were missing three aces. I went down four. Once again, the opponents at the other table were in the same contract, but our teammates’ failure to lead a heart at trick one gave them enough tempo to take nine tricks.

So, after nine hands West and North (Eric) had played no hands, East had played seven with mixed results, and I had played two for a total of nine undertricks!

At the lunch break we were 2-2. I overheard someone say that it was necessary to pay for parking at the hotel’s front desk. I had left my ticket in the car, and so I retrieved it at lunch and paid it. On my way back to the playing area I passed the area where Elayne was entertaining some other people with the story about her (not their) financial adviser reporting that she and her husband had too much money.

I spent most of the break by myself eating my roast beef sandwich, grapes, and potato chips. Eric joined me for a few minutes. I am not sure what Ann and Bob did.

We won the first two matches after lunch by two points each. We then lost to the best team by ten, and I guess it was my fault. Eric preempted 3♣. The opponents bid to 4♣. No one was vulnerable. I held QTx of clubs and not much else. I figured that we had ten clubs and they had ten spades. If so, 5♣ was safe. Unfortunately, Eric preempted with a weak hand and only six trumps. He went down five, and we lost the match by 10 IMPs.

We won the last match by 10, but it was not enough. we won five matches, but we just missed making the overalls.

The drive back was very slow for the first ten or fifteen miles, but it picked up after that. I was thankful for the weather—cloudy but no rain. A thunderstorm had been predicted, but it never materialized. This was definitely a blessing. The lines for the lanes on the Mass Pike—where they existed at all—were best described as light grey on medium grey. I would have had a very difficult time discerning them if they were wet.9

The drive on Saturday was not nearly as bad. I arose from bed at 5:00, which was certainly too early. I left the house at about 7:15, fifteen minutes earlier than on Wednesday. The weather was fine, and the traffic was much lighter than on Wednesday. The only problem that I encountered was in obtaining my breakfast. When I stopped at McDonald’s in West Stafford, I was shocked to hear they they had no meat products. The employee tried to interest me in something without me, but I had a two-word answer: “No score!”

I considered stopping in Sturbridge or the Burger King. I rejected the former because I reckoned that it would add fifteen minutes to my trip, and I had not liked the BK breakfasts the one time that I tried them. Instead, I decided to stop at the first rest area on the Mass Pike in Charlton. I had a vague recollection that the drive-through entrance for McD’s was in the southwest corner of the parking lot. I therefore steered the Honda in that direction and into the long approach to the first window—there was nothing like the ordering stations that were prevalent in other McD’s locations.

However, when I got to the first window, no one was in attendance. Likewise, the second window was not populated. I therefore drove the car to the small parking lot on the east side of the gas station and walked into the building. There was only one couple in line at McD’s, but they had apparently never been to such a place. They spent several minutes discussing what they wanted. They then placed their orders one at a time. The man, who went second, had a difficult time deciding after his wife had placed her order. In short, they did not behave like typical fast-food devotees.

I finally got my sandwich and consumed it while I was driving on the Pike. It was very tasty, but it cost nearly $1 more than what was charged in West Stafford, which in turn was $1 higher than what I was accustomed to paying in Hartford.

I arrived at the hotel parking lot at the ridiculous time of 8:43. It was easy to find a “pull-through” parking space that I could exit by driving forward.

The hotel staff had just put out the free coffee and breakfast treats. I got a cup of the former and took a seat inside the huge ballroom. I was confused about the event that Abhi and I would be playing in. I thought that we were playing in the Bracketed Pairs, whereas his email clearly mentioned that a “good pair” had asked him to play with them. So, I spent more than an hour on the lookout for him in the wrong area.9 At 9:50 I called Abhi, but his phone must have been turned off. A minute or so later he located me and directed me to the back room—the same area in which the Open Swiss had been held on Wednesday.

I gave Abhi my credit card, and he bought our entry. We were team #13 out of 16, one more than on Wednesday. Abhi introduced me to our teammates Stan Tuhrim and Betty Mintz. They were from New York City, but apparently they also had a residence in Pittsfield, MA. They were not very talkative.

In the first round we had the misfortune of playing against the team of four Chinese guys who ended up winning the event. I did not know who they were, but one of them recognized my name. He thought that I had been president of the district. I told him that I only sent out the emails. We lost that match by 18 IMPs. We lost thee second match to Don Caplin’s team by 21 IMPs. Betty was upset at Don’s behavior during the round; I don’t know the specifics.

I expected easy competition in the third round, but we actually faced two good players, Paul Harris and Peter Clay. Their teammates were also pretty good, but we prevailed by 3 IMPs.

Our worst round was the fourth one. We lost to a team that included Charlotte Bailey by one lousy IMP. I was surprised by the results. I played both of the hands that generated our 18 IMPs in the + column..

As usual, all of my teammates disappeared during the lunch break. I spent most of my time with Charlotte Bailey and her husband, Alan Godes. They did not have much to say. They both had cans of Diet Coke. I knew that I would need a caffeine boost for the afternoon. I asked Alan where they got the drinks. He said that they got them from home. I asked him if he would mind going home to get me one. For some reason that notion did not appeal to him.

The friendliest round that we had was the first after lunch. We played against Shirley Wagner and another woman from Central Mass. I assured Shirley that she was Sue’s favorite person in the world. We won, but only by 3 imps. In the sixth round we played against Dottie Kelleher and Dan Morgenstern. I thought that we held our own except on one hand in which I went down in a 3NT contract sitting South. The contract is unbeatable if North plays it. I still could have made it if I had played dummy’s ♥K on the first trick. Even so we would have lost the match, but by 7 IMPs, not 18.

This hand merits a little more analysis. I opened 1♦. Abhi raised to 2, a strong bid. I bid 2♠, which shows a stopper in spade but nothing in hearts. Abhi, with a game-forcing hand, a good club stopper and Kx in hearts could have (and probably should have) bid 3NT. Instead he showed the club stopper. I could have (and probably should have) bid 3♦ , but I had a minimal hand, and I certainly did not want him to bid 5♦. So, I bid 3NT myself and hoped for the best.

We finally got our machine in gear by defeating the team that finished last by 26 IMPs. Before the match they were ahead of us.

Our reward for the victory was to play Geof Bord and Alan Watson in the last round. There were two swing hands. On the first one Abhi went down in a 3NT contract that was made at the other table. On the other one Geof and Alan bid and made a slam using part of the Wolff Signoff convention that I was not familiar with. Alan’s second bid was 2NT. Geof initiated the convention with a bid of 3♣. Alan was required to bid 3♦. Usually, the next bid is a pass or a signoff. In this case, however, Geof bid 3NT, which indicated slam interest and support for opener’s minor suit. They ended up in 6♣. I was impressed.

I was also impressed by my play in the one hand that I declared. I was extremely tired, but I kept myself together enough to take twelve tricks in a notrump contract. My counterpart at the other table only took ten. So, we earned 2 imps on that hand. Overall, however, we lost by 27 IMPs, just short of a blitz.

So we won only three matches out of eight. I did not particularly like playing with our teammates. Perhaps they thought that we were not holding up our end. There were a lot of really good teams. I thought that our result was commensurate with our play.

I did not enjoy the experience. I did not get to know our teammates at all. Abhi, who is a deliberate player, and I spent a lot of time waiting for them to finish the hands. We got to talk with our opponents a lot more than we did with the teammates.

I was pulled over by a Massachusetts state cop on my way home. He said that my car nearly ran into his when I changed lanes. He must have been in the blind spot of my left mirror, but I am at a loss to explain how he got there without my noticing him. On the Interstates I usually keep a close watch on what is going on behind me. He only gave me a warning.

Warwick

Norwich

1. The erroneous CofC was still available through Google as of April of 2025.

2. Prior to 2020 the GNT Flight B qualifier always was spread over two days. The second day was a four-team knockout. There was no GNT in 2020. In 2021 through 2024 it had been held online using a format that I tolerated in 2021. I planned to play in 2022, but the pair that had agreed to play with Ken Leopold and me reneged on the agreement. I was not eligible for Flight B in 2023 and 2024.

3. She went by Helen, but her real name was Elena DiBissi Benson. She was born in the Abruzzo region of Italy. I told her that I had been there. It was true, but on the South Italy bus tour that Sue and I took in 2011 we only drove through the southern part of the region on our way from Tivoli to Vieste.

4. I happened to overhear David, while he was talking with Eric and Jeff about the card that they would be playing, mention that he was born and raised in Southbridge, and his father was the town attorney.

5. The last Individual Regional was held January 6-8, 2016. At that time I think that the hotel was a Holiday Inn. The district was the only district in North America that was still holding such an event. It was discontinued because the attendance at the two-session individual events (in which each player plays with a large number of different partners) had not been good in the previous few years. The event, which I heavily publicized in emails, drew over forty tables, much better than in previous years. In the last individual on Saturday, January 7, I was in first place out of the 160+ participants. I had played OK in the morning, but I had made one mistake that was so horrible that I had to apologize to my partner. Nevertheless, I somehow record a game of over 68 percent. In the afternoon I played even better, and one of my partners was a World Champion, Pat McDevitt. Nevertheless my score plummeted into the low forties, and I did not even make the overalls.

7. At one time the behavior on the bridge circuit was apparently disruptive before I began playing seriously. A “zero-tolerance” policy was implemented by the ACBL and enforced rather strictly. Behavior since that time has been exemplary for the most part.

8. I had a previous run-in with Elayne Kadis before the pandemic. It was an Open Swiss in, I believe, Nashua, NH. She was playing with exactly the same team—her husband, Steve Gladyszak, and Barbara Murphy.

The district had for a few years enforced a policy designed to speed up play in Swiss events: a player could decide not to play the last hand in a round if there was a danger of not being able to finish the hand and turn in results before time expired.

In the match against the Kadises Elayne, sitting South, had played the first five hands. I was West. My counterpart at the other table was Steve Gladyszak, a very fine play who also played very fast. I did not want to declare a hand with only a few minutes remaining when he might have declared it with plenty of time to think.

When I exercised my option not to continue Elayne loudly protested and then called the director, Marilyn Wells from New Jersey. She evidently did not know the district’s policy and ruled that we had to play the hand, and she penalized our team!

David Metcalf.

I later reported this to the head director, David Metcalf. He was very surprised that this happened. He also asked me who the director was.

Incidentally Ken Kadis was silent or at least soft-spoken during both of these incidents.

9. This was a reference to my cataracts. I had surgery scheduled for August and September.

10. It was not a complete waste of time. I was able to go over in my mind the convention card that I would be playing with Abhi, and I also had a few minutes to talk with Joe Brouillard, a good friend whom I had hardly talked with in the last five years.

Board of Trustees of the Hartford Bridge Club: Part 1 (November 2021- October 2022)

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The first year. Continue reading →

Ann Lohrand.

In the composition of this entry I relied heavily on the minutes written by Ann Lohrand. I took my own notes at every meeting, but I did not save them.

The state of the club in 2021: Because of the pandemic the club had closed its doors in March of 2020 and did not reopen for face-to-face (F2F) play until the summer of 2021. In the interim the club had begun sponsoring online games on the website Bridge Base Online while it continued to pay rent on its headquarters near the border of Hartford and West Hartford. The revenue from the online games did not come close to covering the club’s overhead expenses.

It took several months for the attendance at the F2F games to reach a reasonable level. Only players who had been vaccinated were allowed to play, and they were also required to wear a mask. The quality of the masks was not enforced, but several players complained about being required to wear them. Some players were wary of being in close quarters with others even with the masks and vaccination requirements.

So, as of the autumn of 2021 the club was close to crisis mode. Although there was still quite a bit of money in the bank, the financial people warned that the club’s dues and game fees were bringing in about $2,000 per month less than it was paying in expenses.

John Willoughby.

During the summer of 2021 Trevor Reeves, who was the HBC’s treasurer and the most immediate past president, called me to ask if I would be willing to serve on the club’s Board of Trustees. I said that I would be happy to do so, and I did not mind committing for three years. At the club’s annual meeting, which was held via Zoom on October 24, 2021, I learned the complete list of the people on the board. The other officers besides Trevor were Felix Springer (president), John Willoughby (vice-president), and Ann Lohrand (secretary). There were three returning board members. Roger Pikor had one year remaining on his term. Carole Amaio and Bill Wininger had two years. There were only six board members at a time. Nevertheless, at the meeting Felix announced that four members had “departed” and three new ones elected, all for three-year terms.1 The other two newbies were Nancy Calderbank and Ben Bishop. I knew Felix, Trevor, John, and Nancy pretty well. I was much less familiar with the others.

Carole Amaio.

The board met once a month on a designated Tuesday afternoon. Since I played bridge at the club every Tuesday morning, this was quite convenient for me.

Bill Wininger.

Before the pandemic Felix had asked me to be on the Long-range Planning Committee. This group discussed how to prepare for the loss of any key people, especially Donna Feir, who had been the Club Manager for decades. We also discussed what could be done to improve the club in other ways. The necessity of educational programs was emphasized, and the nature of them was discussed. Use of special games available from the ACBL was a common topic, as well as the mentorship program that I had participated in every time it was offered. It no longer seemed to be flourishing.

Tom Joyce.

I have retained a few distinct memories from the first board meeting that I attended on November 9, 2021. The first concerned the report of the Policy Committee. I had not been aware of its existence. Apparently Tom Joyce and Pat Salve were the driving forces behind it. I had played against both of them countless times, but I had never worked with either one.

They proposed three motions. The first amended the by-laws to allow one board member to be a director. The second delegated authority to create the game schedule to the directors. The third reduced the number of past presidents on the nominating committee from three to two. All three items passed.

Pat Salve.

Evidently the primary focus of the committee was to negotiate a new lease for the existing property or a new one. Although many people supported the idea of finding an appropriate facility, Donna was clearly not in favor of considering the prospect of moving.

John Dinius.

The second thing that stands out in my recollection of that first meeting was the treasurer’s report. In previous years the treasurer’s report at the annual meeting basically just indicated how much cash the club had. Trevor and John Dinius had converted the club’s books to the accrual method. They had also taken the steps needed to be recognized as a 501(c)(3) exempt organization. What impressed me the most was that they had implemented a budgeting and planning system so that they could project the effect of changes in attendance and rates for both online and F2F games.

I also remember giving my own assessment of the state of bridge in general. I was convinced that Covid-19 had seriously wounded competitive bridge at all levels—club, unit, district, national, and even international. To me, however, the real enemy was online play for masterpoints. In my opinion this had broken the link carefully crafted to provide the incentives for advancement to sustain clubs, units, and districts. Trevor indicated that he agreed with me.

Roger Pikor.

I had never had any association with Roger Pikor. In this and subsequent meetings whenever any aspect of the pandemic was mentioned he made us aware of the fact that his wife had some kind of access to technical information about Covid-19 and how it spread. This only bothered me after the third or fourth time.

The Planning Committee, of which I was an original member, had not met since the pandemic closed the club. John Willoughby, as vice-president, inherited the committee and mentioned some topics that needed to be addressed. The focal one was to try to get prepared if we needed a new club manager.

A special meeting was held on December 30. The positivity rate for Covid-19 had risen to 20 percent. After a discussion that lasted for three hours and forty-five minutes. The only decision was to restore the mask mandate with an emphasis on N95 masks2.

2022 began with a Zoom meeting on January 4. Linda Starr, who had kept everyone informed of the club’s activities before, during, and after the pandemic, resigned from her post as composer and sender of emails through MailChimp. Lori Leopold took over that responsibility for a while. Eventually I sort of inherited it until Linda resumed doing it a few years later. In 2025 I was still acting as Linda’s backup.

Laurie Robbins.

Laurie Robbins had already enrolled thirty-six people for an introductory bridge class using an online service called Shark Bridge.

The water cooler leaked over the holidays. It was replaced. An effort to require Pure Health to reimburse the club was undertaken. A new photocopy machine was purchased.

At the next meeting on February 1 it was revealed that Pure Health paid the club $1,000, and Laurie’s lessons netted a total of $1900.

John Calderbank assumed control of the Gmail account that Linda Starr had previously managed.

John Willoughby took over as the club’s Partnership Coordinator, which basically meant that he agreed to play with people who had trouble finding partners. My wife Sue played with him a few times.

The property tax levied by West Hartford will be appealed.

2021 was the 90th anniversary of the club. A celebration that had been planned for the spring was postponed to the annual meeting.

I was unable to find the minutes for the meeting on March 15. Beware the Ides of March.

At the Zoom meeting on April 12 a lot of time was spent on Trevor’s successor as treasurer. Trevor had introduced accrual accounting, which provided the basis for reasonable budgeting. Some people expressed the opinion that it was overkill, but I could see the value.

The property tax appeal was denied, but another appeal was in the works.

Victor died his hair as a birthday tribute to his partner, Sheila Gabay.

Victor King, a Grand Life Master who had occasionally played at the club had been tragically murdered. The Board approved the idea of sponsoring an In Memoriam for him at the Nationals scheduled for Providence, RI, in the summer. . A donation jar was provided for member contributions.

One of my clearest memories of Victor was a 1NT contract that he played against Tom Gerchman and me. Tom had doubled for takeout and Victor redoubled. I passed and his partner, another very good player, also passed. I had eight hearts headed by the ace, king, and queen at the top. I took the first eight tricks, and Tom signaled to me what to lead next. We ended up writing the number 2200 in the PLUS column.

At the meeting on May 2 a good bit of time was dedicated to the subject of decreased attendance, both online and F2F. Some of the pain was offset by an anonymous donation of $5,000.

Donna announced that the membership number had reached 412 and that by table count the HBC was the 33rd largest club in the country. Two or three people had shown interest in the treasurer’s job. My Wednesday morning partner, Eric Vogel, ended up taking the job. The position of bookkeeper was maintained.

My idea of a Bracketed Swiss3 was endorsed by John Willoughby and the planning committee. Unfortunately, I later discovered that the ACBL did not authorize this event at the club level.

The meeting on June 14 was not terribly eventful. The success of Laurie’s lessons on defense was confirmed. There was no meeting in July because of the NABC in Providence4 that was attended by many members of the club.

Felix asked John Willoughby to run the meeting held on August 23. I don’t remember the precise reason for this. Perhaps Felix just wanted to give John some practice.

Even though July was, as expected because of the twelve-day NABC in Providence, a horrible month for attendance, the cash balance was still within sight of $100,000. The discrepancy between Donna’s figure and Trevor’s as to the number of members persisted.

A motion to raise membership dues to $40 for the coming fiscal year was passed. At the same time game fees would be raised from $7 to $8.

A committee was set up to negotiate the lease with Marjam, the current owners of the industrial park in which the club rented space, and to examine alternatives.

A 24-board open game was scheduled to start at 9:30 on Monday mornings.

Felix and Trevor have petitioned West Hartford for a grant to help cover the club’s Covid-19 losses.

Someone set up a Facebook page for the club.

Felix ran the meeting on September 13.

The cash account in the club’s treasury was back up to $100K. It was boosted by lesson fees and donations.

Donna’s final membership count for 2021-22 was 417. This seemed to me an incredibly high number. My gut feeling was that about half of the members from before the pandemic no longer played. That would indicate a membership of about 300. Who were all these people?

John Calderbank and Mary Sullivan, two people whom I had mentored in previous years, presented a plan to restart the mentorship program.

Since the discussion of the honoraria (money awarded by the board to individuals who did extra work for the club) was held in camera, I won’t discuss other people’s opinions. I argued that they all did superb work and were underpaid.

The last meeting of the fiscal year was held on October 18.

Trevor’s budget for the next year projected a $5,000 loss. Donna reported that 290 members had renewed at the new rate.

Fifteen mentors had committed to help the same number of newer players when the next three-month mentoring program started. I was one of the mentors.

The lease committee was operational. Felix encouraged them to be active, but Donna was clearly aghast at the idea that the board was even considering moving to a new building.

The annual meeting was scheduled for October 23. $1,000 was allocated for the luncheon items. Carole was in charge. The meeting would be held at the club, but members could also attend via Zoom.

Someone had been leaving Seventh Day Adventist literature on the table in the back room. This practice was expressly forbidden in the bylaws.

At the annual meeting on October 23 the cash account showed a year-to-year gain of a little over $1400. So, despite all of the hand-wringing, the club had actually prospered under very trying circumstances. The total donations for the year were over $26,000!

The bylaws proposed by the Policy Committee were all passed.

John Willoughby was elected as the new president. Ben Bishop took the VP slot. Eric Vogel succeeded Trevor as treasurer. The new board members were Rob Stillman and Diane Tracy.

The story of my second term on the board is recounted here.

1. Linda Erickson (introduced here) had been the vice-president. She resigned, and John Willoughby, who had been a trustee, took her place. So, three new trustees were needed.

2. Perhaps the most neglected story of the entire pandemic was the Center for Disease Control’s original position on masks. CDC statements indicated that any kind of face covering was good enough. In actuality the N95 masks were proven more effective against the type of aerosols that spread Covid-19 by a very large margin. Once I learned this I wore N95 masks any time that I was in the presence of strangers indoors.

3. A Bracketed Swiss is a team game in which the participants are divided into brackets based on the number of total masterpoints. Usually each team plays every team in its bracket and no teams in the other brackets. I envisioned two of three brackets of six teams each. Everyone would play five rounds.

4. My participation in the planning of this event is documented here. I played in ten of the eleven days. Details of that mostly miserable experience is described here. During the twelve days of the event a great many people were stricken by Covid-19, including four of my teammates and both of the co-chairs of the event.

2024 November: The Staycation Journal

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Unplanned and unwanted. Continue reading →

In November of 2024 two dates were circled on everyone’s calendar. The presidential election that featured Kamala Harris (after Joe Biden was convinced to stay on the sidelines) and Donald Trump was scheduled for Tuesday, the fifth. It was difficult to imagine a pair of candidates any more different than they were. Most supporters of each considered that the election of the other would be disastrous. The experts judged it a toss-up.

The other big day was Thursday the 28th, Thanksgiving. Sue and I had been invited to Burlington, VT, to celebrate the occasion with the extended Corcoran family, but we had felt awkward at the previous such gathering that we had attended, and so we declined.

The last regional bridge tournament on the calendar in New England was scheduled for Monday the 18th through Saturday the 23rd at the Holiday Inn in Norwich, CT. The Nutmeg State had not hosted a regional tournament since February of 2019.1 I had amassed lot of hotel points for IHG, the company that owned both Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza. During the summer I had unsuccessfully tried to use them for the Ocean State Regional in Warwick, RI, in September. No such rooms were available. Since the dates for the Harvest Regional in Norwich had already been published, I immediately reserved a room for all five nights and paid for it with points.

Xenia Coulter.

Abhi Dutta asked me to play with him on the first three days. Jim Osofsky and Mike Heider were looking for teammates for the Swiss team games all week.2 My other three prospective partners were fellow members of the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). John Lloyd agreed to play in the bracketed pairs on Friday, and Eric Vogel committed to the Get-Away Teams on Saturday.

Xenia Coulter, who grew up in Ann Arbor, attended U-M, and lived in a town near Norwich, volunteered to play with me in the open Swiss scheduled for Thursday. Xenia and I had never played together before. We spent quite a bit of time going over the convention card via email. The HBC scheduled a special game for Veterans Day, November 11. We played together in that event and finished third out of eight, which was worth 1.34 masterpoints. I added Xenia to my list of partners, which at the time totaled 151.

Here, then, is a snapshot of my calendar for early November.

In addition to what is shown above, I also played in my regularly scheduled bridge games on the first two Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays at the HBC as well as the Sunday afternoon game with Sue. I also played in the two Wednesday evening games at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC). In the week before the tournament I played Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday (twice), and the following Saturday. All of my preparation was relegated to the remaining three days.

The latest iteration of Covid was spreading fairly rapidly through the HBC. YL tested positive for Covid after the game on Saturday the ninth. Mike Carmiggelt. tested positive after the game on the tenth. I played against YL, but Sue and I did not play against Mike. We both wore masks because we had the sniffles. Other regular players at the HBC who reportedly had contracted Covid were Jim Macomber, Laurie Robbins, Lesley Meyers, and Bill Watson.

Wednesday, November 13: I never felt even a little sick, and by Wednesday my congestion was no worse than usual. However, Sue was much worse. She told me when I returned from the evening bridge game at about 11:00 that she had trouble breathing and could not sleep. I was very alarmed at this development. For the last few years she generally slept with a CPAP machine and supplemental oxygen. She asked me if we had any Alka Seltzer Cold Plus packets. I remembered seeing one in a drawer in my bathroom. I fetched, and she dissolved it in a glass of water and drank it.

I was already in a very bad mood. After playing two nondescript bridge games it occurred to me that I had come to enjoy the game a lot less than most of the other players. Almost everyone talked about the hands at the table, a practice that annoyed me greatly. People made the same old jokes, such as Eric’s “best for last” comment in the last round of almost every session, just to have something to say. I would have laughed if the remarks were original or funny, but I could not remember doing so even once since the lockdown. So, I had become almost completely a silent participant in club games.

Thursday, November 14: In the morning I drove to CBS and bought Sue Package of Alka Seltzer Cold Plus. It seemed to help, but she complained that it tasted terrible. I also picked up some groceries.

I had nothing of great importance scheduled for either the 14th or 15th. I am almost always worn out after the Wednesday night game. On Thursday I planned to go walking at about 2:00, but between shopping, naps and preparing supper, I never managed to do it. I had heard from Charles Schwab that one of my Treasury bills would mature on that day.

Friday, November 15: I sent out an email to the regulars at the SBC at around 8:00. It announced that there would be no more games in November and erroneously stated that the next game would be on December 3, which was a Tuesday.

I also did my cash worksheet for the rest of the month. I transferred a few thousand dollars from the Schwab account to cover the cash needed rest of the year. I discovered that I could not afford any of the T-bills that were available. I decided to buy a CD from Chase instead.

I did not find time to walk on Friday either. For the previous six weeks I had been reading a massive novel, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle that I had checked out from the Enfield Public Library. It was certainly one of the strangest books that I had ever read. It was published in 1969, when Nabokov was 90. The two main characters, who are siblings as well as cousins, converse in French, Russian, and English, with a little Italian thrown in. The main plot is about their torrid off-and-on sexual relationship, reportedly consummated more than one thousand times! There are also many subplots, and the setting is not on Earth (called Terra in Ada), but a similar place called Antiterra3. Despite the fact that Ada had been on the shelf for fifty-five years, no one in Enfield had ever filled out the little form provided for short comments at the back of the book. I rated it as 8. My comment was “Incomprehensible but awesome.”

I finished Ada on Friday and returned it to the Library. I checked out two new books, Pnin, a much shorter and more light-hearted novel by Nabokov, and Mrs. Osmond, the only “literary” novel by John Banville on the shelves that I had not read. I was surprised to see that Banville had also published a new crime novel called The Drowned. It featured both of his pathetic sleuths, Quirke and Detective Inspector Strafford.

Before going to play bridge at the HBC on Saturday I took an antihistamine to assure that I did not need to cough or blow my nose much. I wore an N95 mask. My partner, as always, was Peter Katz.

I played pretty well throughout most of the game. We finished second for the third week in a row.

My most grievous error came on the hand shown at the right. I, sitting West, passed. If the vulnerability had been reversed, I might have tried 2♦. Tom Katsouleas bid 4♠, and everyone passed. Peter led the ♠A. I played my lowest club (encouraging). Peter continued with the king and a third club, which I ruffed.

I neglected to notice that Peter led the 10 rather than the 8. I had to decide between ♥10 and ♦A. Peter had, in fact, asked me to return a heart. If I had, we would have set the contract. It would not have helped us much because the only team that beat the contract also doubled, and we did not.

Sue finally felt better. She fixed Jambalaya for supper, but she complained that she could not smell it. I ate my serving, and I even had dessert. I had been constipated for a few days, but it in no way affected my appetite.

While we ate supper I washed three pairs of bluejeans and one sweatshirt. An hour or so later Sue moved the clothes to the dryer and set it for thirty minutes. I checked them when the dryer stopped. They were all still a little damp. I put them on for ten more minutes, and I noticed that the dryer’s drum was not rotating. I had to hang the garments on the shower rod and hope that they would dry by the time that I left for Norwich on Monday.

Juan Cole was a professor of history at the University of Michigan. His website was called “Informed Comment.” He specialty was the countries of the Mideast.

Sunday, November 17: I woke at around 6:00 on the morning after a good night’s sleep. Michigan’s football team had had its second bye week, and so I did not rush into my office to check the results on the Internet. I tried to think of everything that I needed to do before leaving the next morning for the tournament. Aside from packing, the most important item was to pay Cox Cable and the statement balance on my Chase IHG credit card. I had some tea and a red Delicious apple (4016) while I scrolled through the websites that I checked every morning—The New York Times and Washington Post, Doonesbury and Non Sequitur, Juan Cole, the Onion’s “opinions”, CNN, and Twitter.

I then sent out an email that corrected the date for the next game at the SBC. It was scheduled for December 4, not, as designated in Friday’s email, December 3.

After a while I had a hankering for some Bowl & Basket chicken noodle soup, an envelope of which was surely the best bargain available for $.495. Really! A box with two envelopes still cost only $.99. I always ate two bowls. On this morning, however, I could barely finish the first one. I felt a little woozy and very weak. At 8:30 I woke Sue up and immediately went back to sleep.

When I woke up an hour or two later I vomited. I drove to CVS and bought a box of ten pouches of Purelax, the store brand of polyethylene glycol 3350. I dissolved one in a glass of water, drank it, and lay down. I got up three times to go to the bathroom and each time I had a small bowel movement. I felt much better. However, the next time that I got up I vomited again. There was no way that I could drive to Norwich and play two sessions of bridge the next day if I could not keep any food down.

I called the hotel in Norwich and postponed my arrival until Tuesday. I let Abhi, Mike, and Jim know that I would not be there on Monday. For supper Sue fixed me a piece of chicken, some leftover vegetables, and two biscuits. I had no appetite. I had a few nibbles, but I uncharacteristically left most of it on my plate. I did not vomit.

My negative result is on top. Sue’s positive one is below.

Monday, November 18: I did not rise from bed on Monday, the first day of the tournament, until after 8:00. Sleeping that late was extremely unusual for me. When I woke Sue up she informed me that she had tested positive for Covid. I was not surprised. Her coughs had diminished only a little, and she was still quite congested. She also said that she could not smell the Jambalaya. Her doctor advised her that if I tested negative, I should get the Covid booster and the flu shot.

I ate two bowls of soup. I ate most of a sleeve of crackers over a period of a few hours. I took the second sleeve of Purelax. It seemed to work pretty well. I felt somewhat better, but I had little energy, and I could not concentrate. Although I did not vomit all day, I canceled my hotel reservations and let Abhi, Jim, Mike, John, Xenia, and Eric know that I would not be coming. So, I would be on a “staycation” until at least Tuesday the 26th.

Sue and I watched TV all evening. Our chairs are ten feet apart, and I wore my N95 mask whenever I was around her.

Tuesday, November 19: My energy was better, but I doubted that I could have mustered the power of concentration necessary for two sessions of tournament-level bridge. I slept most of the day, but I had no other symptoms.

In the afternoon I drove to ShopRite and Stop and Shop and bought almost $50 worth of groceries. The most important purchases were the restocking of my personal staples that I had allowed to get very low because I expected to be at the tournament—Caffeine-free Diet Coke, soup, brats, apples, and potato chips.

I tried to schedule an emissions inspection for Sue’s car for Wednesday, but no one answered the phone at The Mad Hatter at 4:45. They reportedly closed at five.

Wednesday, November 20: I tested myself for Covid right after I awoke. The result was clearly negative. Sue spent most of the day in bed, as she had been doing for a week or so. She could breathe OK, but she was still very stuffy and had even less energy than usual.

I drove Sue’s Subaru Forester to The Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Only one other customer was inside, and he was not there for an emissions test.

What a throwback this place was. Three very stoic guys came in and out. The one who took my $20 and key seemed to be in charge, but the other guy who stood at the cash register might have been a partner. There was no one under 40.

I began to suspect that I might have had a very light case of Covid when my nose was running constantly on Sunday. Sue’s case is certainly not light.

The seven remaining envelopes of Purelax.

Thursday, November 21: I still did not feel “regular”. I therefore drank a third sleeve of Purelax.

I made an appointment for a flu shot and a Covid booster at Walgreens at 3:30. However, the questionnaire that I filled in online asked if I had been in close contact with anyone with Covid in the last fourteen days. When I answered in the affirmative, the program said that I was not eligible for the shots.

The pharmacy it the all-brick area to the right of the last awning.

Sue called Jason, the pharmacist at Walgreens. He advised her to tell me to answer the “close contact” question in the negative and to then fill out and submit the rest of the form. Unfortunately, I could not find a way on the web page to add my patient info to the existing appointment, and so I made a new appointment for 4pm.I arrived at Walgreens shortly after 3:30. I explained the situation to the lady at the counter. About ten minutes later she administered one shot in each of my muscle-bound arm. I did not even feel the first one. This was different from the previous occasion in that she did not ask me to wait around afterwards for fifteen minutes to see if I had an adverse reaction, and she never asked for my insurance card.

It rained for the first time in several months, but Enfield received less than an inch.

The heater in my car was not working again. I had tried every combination of settings. Nothing seemed to work. This happened in 2023. On that occasion I took it into Lia Honda. After a few minutes they told me that there was nothing wrong with it. It functioned correctly for the rest of the winter.

Friday, November 22: I slept until 8:10. I awoke after a very vivid dream about driving in the snow. I was behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler that contained file cabinets. It crashed because someone tried to get an oversized load through a snow-covered narrow road and got stuck. After the crash someone drove off with my tractor-trailer. Incidentally, I have never driven a truck of any kind. I did drive a pickup in the army. I got into trouble when I moved it without fastening the seat belt. That maneuver involved a journey of less than 50 feet that began and ended in a parking lot. An Air Force captain chewed me out for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Both arms were a little sore when I woke up, but I was in no way impaired.

Sue ordered some food from Olive Garden. I drove there and picked up the bag.It cost a little over $50 with the tip. I parked in pick-up space #6. To my left was space #8. To the left of that was space #7. Go figure.

In the afternoon I received a phone message from Lynn Duncan, a bridge player from the Boston area, asking me to play in the Swiss in Norwich on Saturday. I wondered if a card for me was on the partnership desk. I was probably feeling good enough to play, but I could not risk attending when Sue was sick. She was feeling better, but she still spent a lot of time in bed.

Saturday November 23: I walked six laps (3.33 miles) in the Mall. Santaland was up set up very nicely in front of the old entrance to JC Penney, but there were very few walkers or shoppers. Haven Games was the only place that was busy. I probably could have done the remaining three laps, but I did not want to overdo it.

U-M defeated Northwestern 50-6. That gave the Wolverines a 6-5 record going into the final game with Ohio State. It also clinched a slot in a bowl game.

Sunday November 24: I walked 5 miles outside, two laps of my usual circuit. It was 51° when I started and 45° when I finished. I noticed that the pine tree behind the fence at the corner of School St. and North St. that suffered from the same disease as the one that had blown over in our yard had broken in two. A ten-foot tall stump remained.

It never occurred to me to examine the results from the bridge tournament that I had just missed.

Monday November 25: I walked 4 miles outside. The weather was very nice, but a bit of pain in the lower right section of my back led me to cut off one mile by turning onto School St. from Hazard Ave. Still, I managed to walk 12.33 miles in three days, a post-Covid record.

Tuesday November 26: The staycation was over. For the first time in more than a week I drove on the highway. There was not much sunshine. I resolved to make an appointment for my car’s heating problems when I returned. I was pleased to see that the price of a sausage biscuit with egg at the McDonald’s was still $5.25 (including tax).

Geof Brod.

I played bridge with John C. We did badly. I overheard Sally Kirtley tell Geof Brod that the attendance at the regional tournament in Norwich was not very good. She also mentioned that approximately 90 tables worth of people played in an online regional that ran from the 18th through the 20th. The tournament’s flyer has been posted here. Geof remarked that it had not occurred to him that the ACBL was competing with regionals. This had long been obvious to me. Incidentally, no other district had scheduled a regional during this period.

Just before supper I watched episode 7 of Reindeer Mafia.4

1. I started playing bridge at regional tournaments in 2006. For the next fifteen years a regional had been held in February in Cromwell, CT. One was scheduled for 2020, but only a week or two before the event the Red Lion Hotel was closed by the state for failure to pay taxes. The tournament was hurriedly moved to Sturbridge, MA, that year.

2. The flyer and schedule for the tournament have been posted here. It included no knockouts, and the only bracketed games—in which all participants played against people with similar levels of experience—were pairs games on Friday and team games on Sunday. I intended to complain about this when the Tournament Scheduling Committee reported at the Executive Committee meeting in Warwick in September. However, the TSC presented no report. So, I tried to make my point at the end of the meeting, but no one was paying attention because we were being pressured to play in the evening side game. I was just told that they wanted to emphasize the NAP and the bracketed pairs.

3. Antiterra was described as a sort of inside-out version of Terra. The two calendars were out of kilter a bit. Antiterra had banned electronic technology. The telephone system, which was invented by the deranged aunt of the two principal characters, was somehow based on water.

4. A description of this streamed series from Finland can be found here.

2023 May 12-December 31

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My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here. On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my … Continue reading →

My activities for the first part of 2023 are chronicled here.

On May 13 Neil Montague finally succeeded at using MailChimp to send out an email for the New England Bridge Conference! My travails in trying to turn over my responsibilities in these and other matters involving communications are detailed here. This was a great relief for me. Some of the emails that I had sent in the previous few months promoted online events that paid gold masterpoints. Each one made me cringe.

On the same day Dan Jablonski finally sent me an email casting the deciding vote in the Weiss-Bertoni award. You can read the details and discover who won the award in this blog entry.

On the 17th I mowed the lawn for the second time. The high pollen content of some areas of the yard made it somewhat difficult, as it has in every May for the last decade or two, but I completed the task without resting.

June

On June 1 I tried to beat the heat by departing for my 5-mile walk at 8:30AM. I nevertheless found it as much as I could bear,1 and there was precious little shade. I noticed that the SmartFuel gas station on the north side of Hazard Ave. near the South Road intersection had closed after only a few months of operation. It replaced the Shell station that had occupied the location for decades. Signs said that it would become a Big Y Express station.

Raveis Realty, located in a house a little bit to the east of of the station, has also apparently one year. A few years earlier a spectacular display of tulips appeared near the west side of the Raveis building.

Zillow’s photo of 2 Park St.

The corner house on Park St. (the street address is 2) is somewhat mysterious. It had appeared empty with no “For Sale” sign for months. I saw two girls there the previous week. It seemed empty again on this occasion.

In the last quarter-mile I was passed by a female walker. I was pretty sure that that had never happened to me before. I did not like it, but I was too exhausted and hot to try to hold her off. My speed and endurance both decreased noticeably as I got older.

It was still very hot on the 2nd, but then it turned much cooler with a misty rain. I attended both days of the sectional in Johnston, RI, and played with Abhi Dutta. Details have been recorded here.

On June 7 forest fires in Canada were causing in the local area thick haze from the smoke. It was quite eerie and absolutely unprecedented, at least in my lifetime. Two days later the air quality still poor.

I learned that day I should have closed my dad’s IRA account at Country Club Bank in Kansas City earlier. There was not much money in it, but it took weeks to get them to send me a check. .Deidra Tossato finally sent me the form fifteen days after I requested it.

The Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) scheduled an individual game for June 20, the first day of of the regional tournament in Nashua, NH. I played at the HBC, but I did not enjoy myself, and I did not score well. My adventures in Nashua are recorded here.

On June 28 I played with two new partners—Jim Macomber at the HBC in the morning and Barb Gallagher at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in the evening.

On June 29 and 30 my nose ran all day. Despite this I had no trouble sleeping. I had no fever or any other symptoms of Covid-19.

July

I woke up on July 1 after ten consecutive hours of sleep, close to my all-time record. I experienced a little dizziness when I arose from bed, but it disappeared shortly thereafter. I tested negative for Covid-19 using the rapid antigen test that the federal government supplied for free.

Sue’s cousin from Michigan (on the Locke side) was in town. Sue visited with her, but I did not go. We visited her, her parents, and her sisters on our trip to Michigan in 2008, as described here.

Up to nine inches of rain fell in sections of western Connecticut on July 10, but Enfield received hardly any. The weather definitely seemed more extreme in the twenties, but it is still rather mild in southern New England.

The next morning the temperature dropped to 66° at 4:30. It was the first time that it had been below 70° in weeks. It rose to 90° that day and much hotter on the next. There was no bridge game at the SBC on either the 5th or the 12th.

On July 13 at 5:44AM the bookshelf in my bedroom came crashing down. It missed my head by about two inches. If it had hit me, I would have been seriously injured. The shelf disappeared into the black hole of Sue’s “sewing room”.

On July 14 thunderstorms began at 2:30AM. Flooding wreaked havoc in the northwest part of the state. The Connecticut River was 6′ above the flood level. Damage, however, was minimal.

John Willoughby, the president of the HBC, died on July 14. Both Sue and I had been his occasional bridge partner. I worked with him on the Planning Committee when he was the vice-president.

On the following day I heard Steve Jarmoc, a local farmer and ex-politician, on the radio complaining that the flooding in Enfield had caused him crop damage. The land around our house, which was perhaps two miles from his farm, was absolutely dry. Furthermore, Jarmoc mostly grew tobacco—an addictive drug that caused cancer and other ailments. In the previous few years he had converted much of his land to fields filled with solar panels. I seriously doubt that he suffered much damage, and what if he did? Every business suffered occasional setbacks.

I had a horrible bridge day on July 23. Donna Feir reported that the HBC now had 415 members2. It was 89° and sunny when I left after the conclusion of the Board of Trustees meeting. Up to 91° on I-91. By the time that I reached home it had fallen to 68°, and it was raining buckets. I was very relieved to find that there was no flooding in our basement.

August

On August 3 I discovered a document with my notes about the San Diego vacation that Sue and I took with Sue in March of 2006. In the evening I also found a paper bag with flyers and souvenirs from the same trip. I deleted the 1,000+ words that I had previously written about this adventure and started the entry, which you can read here, anew. It was rather thrilling to relive that week.

On the next day I walked five miles in the Enfield Square Mall. A strange new store, Da Money Pit, had opened. They seemed to sell sneakers, ball caps, and sweatshirts.3 The sneakers on display were wrapped in plastic, for no obvious reason that I could see. My “ghost walks” in the mall have been detailed here.

On the 5th the HBC held a memorial to honor John Willoughby. One dog and lots of people, including a surprising number of children, who were relatives or friends of John’s attended.

The next day I learned that Maria Van Der Ree, who was over ninety, had Covid-19. She recovered within a reasonable period of time.

At the HBC John Calderbank and I had a 54 percent game on August 8. That was by far our best performance up to that time. On the next day I scored 58% at the HBC with Barb Gallagher. There was no game in Simsbury because we only five pairs registered to play.

On August 9 the big news was about the devastating fire on Maui. The most destruction was in my favorite town, Lahaina, where 217 buildings destroyed or damaged. The gigantic tree that was the symbol of the town was badly damaged, but there was hope that it would recover.

Mark Oettinger.

On the same day I learned that Mark Oettinger had “resigned” as vice-president of the New England Bridge Conference. I later learned that Peter Marcus and his friends had pretty much forced him out at a meeting of the Tournament Scheduling Committee that I was unable to attend. This news saddened me greatly. I liked and respected Mark.

On August 12-13 I played in the Western Mass sectional in Great Barrington. That adventure has been described here.

On my birthday I played with the woman whom I had been mentoring. Fran Gurtman (introduced here). We did not do well. Sue bought me three shirts and some shorts from Kohl’s. Sue and I ate supper at Francesco’s in Suffield. I ordered Linguini d’Alessandro, which was chicken, sausage, peppers, mushrooms in wine sauce. I really enjoyed it.

On August 23 Sue brought cake to Eno to celebrate my birthday, but she did not arrive until just after 6:15. We had 4 tables.

On August 24 Fran and I had a 52 percent game, which was an improvement of 18 percentage points in our previous game. I made a costly mistake on the last hand.

On August 26 fifteen pairs came to the HBC for the Saturday afternoon game. We played a Swiss with 7.5 tables. It was the biggest turnout on Saturday by far since the pandemic. Peter Katz and I had a 76.1 percent game, by far my best score ever. More details can be found here.

The Ocean State Regional tournament was held August 29-September 1 in Warwick, RI. My adventures there have been cataloged here.

September

September must have been a boring month. The only notes that I recorded concerned the loss of my Costco Visa card from Citi. The details of this remarkable event have been recorded here.

The University of Michigan football team, one of the favorites for the national championship, started the year with five easy victories. They defeated East Carolina 30-3, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas 35-7, Bowling Green 31-6, Rutgers 31-7, and Nebraska 45-7.

Coach Jim Harbaugh did not participate in the first three games because he had purchased lunch4 for a prospective player. Four interim head coaches were assigned. Jesse Minter coached the first game and Sherrone Moore the second. Jay Harbaugh (Jim’s son) and Mike Hart each coached for one half in the third game. A random co-ed could have coached for all three games, and Michigan would still have won them all easily.

October

On October 3 and 4 I moved all of my programs and data files from my Lenovo desktop that was running Windows 10 to the Asus computer running Windows 11. I documented the experience here.

On October 10 I discovered that Windows did not want me to use Shuffling, the Dutch program that I had downloaded to creates pbn files. I did anyway. However, I also received an error in Dealmaster Pro. I had to reconnect the Lenovo box and run it there. This problem was fixed, but I did not record how.

I decided not to play with Alan Godes at the regional tournament in Marlborough. It turned out that he could not play on the only day that I needed a partner. I asked Ros Abel to play in the sectional in Orange, but she was not available. .

As usual, I started my preparation for lunch by boiling water for ShopRite’s store brand of chicken noodle soup. I was shocked to discover that the package contained no noodles at all. I have opened hundreds of these packages over the years, but this had never happened before.

This box in question bore the ShopRite brand, but at some point in the year the store stopped selling the product. A short time later a new brand called Bowl & Basket appeared. The price of a box containing two envelopes of soup was $.99 before the pandemic. As of October of 2024 the price had not changed, and the quality and quantity of the contents remained the same, at least apparently. I could not name another food item of any description that maintained its pre-pandemic price.

I woke Sue up at 6:30AM on October 11: She was scheduled for jury duty in Hartford. She left the house at 8:08. When she arrived she learned that her service was not needed. That evening Kathie Ferguson returned to the SBC on that same evening after a lengthy illness..

Throughout the last few months my car had repeatedly flashed the message that one of my tires was low on air. In the past this had happened once or twice a year. On those occasions I had just brought my car into Lia (without an appointment), and told them about the message. They checked all four tires, filled whichever one was low, and I drove away. The process took perhaps fifteen minutes.

On October 23 I brought it in to Lia Honda again. Because it had happened several times in the recent past, I asked the mechanic to tell me which tire was low. He reported that one of the tires needed patching and told me to sit in the waiting area. After 2.5 hours the work was completed, but the attendant told me that there was a problem with the brakes. I made an appointment for three days later to address this problem, which necessitated spending another few hours in the waiting area.

On October 27-29 the Connecticut Bridge Association held its fall sectional in Orange, CT. The details are posted here.

After only one day of rest I attended the regional tournament in Marlborough, MA. It ran from October 31-November 4. My thoughts about this event have been recorded here.

The Wolverine juggernaut continued with three more easy victories. They defeated Minnesota 52-10, Indiana 52-7, and Michigan State 49-0.

November

On November 16 I sent a recap of the attendance at the sectional in Orange. I have posted it here. The only person who responded to it was Cindy Lyall, who agreed with my assessment.

From left: Jan, the drummer, Peggy, the bass player, and Patty.

On the next evening my wife Sue talked me into attending a concert by the Patti Tuite band at the public library in Ellington. Although I was not crazy about the music, which was mostly blues, I definitely appreciated the skill of the two main musicians—Jan on the synthesizer, flute, and key-tar and Peggy on the alto sax, violin, and harmonica.The band also had a guy on bass guitar and a female drummer. The one number that I really liked was an instrumental with a complex melody that was unlike anything else that they did. Sue liked the entire performance. Patti announced the name of it, but my notes did not record it.

On November 18 I emailed to members of the Executive Committee my attendance analysis for the tournament in Marlborough. It has been posted here. Both of these reports required quite a bit of work because I no longer had access to the ACBL’s files that provided attendance information in a comprehensive fashion.

On the next day Sue and I decided not to drive up to Burlington, VT, to visit with the Corcorans on Thanksgiving. They had invited us much earlier. However, their house would be full of relatives, and we would probably be “fifth wheels.” We felt our of place the last time that we joined them.

On November 22 my Honda warned me that the battery on the fob was low. Over the next two days Sue located a suitable batter. I managed to replace the old one without much difficulty.

November 23 was Thanksgiving. Sue cooked a turkey. We ate our meals on TV trays and tried to think of something that we should be thankful for. I did not record that anything occurred to us.

A very strange thing happened in the last round of the game at the HBC on November 29: Eric Vogel and I were playing against Tom Gerchman and Lea Selig. After the bidding Tom announced that his integrity was intact because his partner Lea Selig bid 6♥, not he. He then disclosed that he had previously overheard Mike Carmiggelt talking about the hand.

I put my cards in the carrier, said “I quit”, got in my car, and drove home. Tom later sent me an email in apology. I replied, “No harm, no foul.”

That same night Ken made many strange bids at the SBC game. He invited to game knowing that we had a maximum of 24 points and only 8 trumps. I recorded that I did not see how the SBC would be able to hold any games in December. I was right. All of the games for the month were canceled.

Michigan finished its Big 10 season with four more victories to finish the regular season undefeated and ranked #3. They defeated Purdue 41-13, Penn State 24-15, Maryland 31-24, and Ohio State 30-24. Sherrone Moore was the head coach on the sidelines for the last three games because Harbaugh was suspended because of a ludicrous sign-stealing incident engineered by a rogue staff member named Connor Stalions.

December

The new month was welcomed by the first flower on the larger Christmas cactus that had been in Denise Bessette’s office. The other one displayed its first flower on the 18th.

On December 2 Michigan shut out Iowa 26-0 in the Big 10 Championship game. It was U-M’s third consecutive win in that game, and the tenth consecutive win for the team representing the East Division. Michigan, now seeded #1, was scheduled to play Alabama in the College Football Playoff semifinals in the Rose Bowl on January 1. There was some controversy because Alabama was chosen to play over undefeated Florida State despite the fact that the Tide had lost to Texas in September.

The temperature on December 15 and 16 reached the fifties. I walked five miles outside on both afternoons.

I learned on December 17 that Eric Vogel had contracted Covid. I wore a mask at bridge all week.

On December 20 the electrical connection for my cellphone’s charger stopped working. I had to plug the cable into a USB port on Asus. This was only a minor inconvenience; Asus has many ports, four of which are in front. I was astounded to learn that Sue had no recollection of my previous phone dying while I was on the 2022 cruise that has been described in detail here. We went to the Verizon store together, and the salesman showed me that the Pixel 2 I had been using was swollen in the middle. He said that it was probably dead. A little later Sue bought me a refurbished Sony Galaxy. I found this lapse of memory quite concerning.

On December 29 I received an mail from someone named Frank Wilson5 asking about downloading a zip or pdf file of Stupid Pope Tricks. I tried to reply to his reply address, fdmw@gmail.com, but it was blocked because the address was not valid. I had no idea what that was about.

On the next day I (and many others) received a shocking email from Peter Marcus that indicated that he was resigning from all his posts in the New England Bridge Conference. This reportedly had something to do with scheduling conflicts with another district”s tournament.

1. At least once in the nineties I ran more than five miles when it was over 100°. When I was in my twenties I considered no temperature to be too hot for any athletic endeavor. Boy, has that changed!

2. It was incredible to me that the HBC did not actually know how many people were officially members. Eventually, I wrote a set of programs that would allow the club to keep track of the membership—dues, contact information, and other things. The story of that system is documented here. The number of members exceeded 500 in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year.

3. The store is still open in October of 2024, but in all my trips to the mall I had seen fewer than a handful of customers.

4. This infraction was widely ridiculed by Michigan fans and called Hamburgergate. It was common knowledge that many large programs arranged for players to be paid under the table. By 2023 the NCAA had ceded the rights to the names, images, and likenesses (called NIL) of the players to the players themselves. By the next year some of them were earning upwards of $1 million to play their favorite sport for a few months out of the year.

5. Of course, I immediately thought that this might be J. Frank Wilson, who, with support from the Cavaliers, in 1964 recorded the remake of Wayne Cochran’s “Last Kiss”. It made it to #2 on Billboard.

2023 January-May 11: What Pandemic?

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2023 journal. Continue reading →

By the end of 2022 Americans were still contracting Covid-19, but very few died or became seriously ill. Most people had either contracted the virus already at least once or had been immunized with boosters. I still wore an N95 mask outside of the house for the first few months, but by the end of that period few people joined me.

January

For decades I have been an avid college football fan. New Years Day was ordinarily one of my favorite days. In 2023, however, it fell on a Sunday. The semifinals of the four-team College Football Playoff had occurred on December 31 Only pro games, in which I had little interest, were held on January 1. I was in my office in Enfield for most of the day.

On Monday, January 2, I played with Nancy Calderbank as part of the mentoring program at the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC). She had asked me to coach her through the transition from Standard American to Two-Over-One (2/1). Our results were not very good that day, but there was one memorable hand, which is shown at the right.

I had the dubious privilege of holding the cards in the East hand. When I received a miserable collection like that one, I like to add up the number of pips that are on my cards. In this case the total was 59, the second-lowest that I have ever seen.1 What made it really amazing was that more than half of the pips were clubs. Also, if deuces were aces, threes kings, etc., this hand would be worth 30 high card points. West’s monstrosity has only 70 percent of that number.

On the day after this bridge game I learned that one of my regular partners, Peter Katz, and an occasional partner of both Sue and me, Fred Gagnon, had contracted Covid-19 over the holidays. Neither became seriously ill, and both were back at the tables within a week or two.

On January 5 I sent the first email to the committee for the Weiss-Bertoni Award. The details of this project have been chronicled here.

The garbage disposal in the new kitchen had been stopped up. Apparently it was my fault. Sue said that all fat and grease must be removed with a paper towel before scraping the garbage from plates and cooking utensils into the sink. A plumber came out and fixed it on the 14th. He returned three days later to address a leak under the sink in the old kitchen. Tennessee Ernie Ford came to mind.

On the 15th I started work on a third-person autobiography entitle Cowboy Coder from Kansas. When the blog entry for this project is completed, I will link it here.

My wife Sue informed me that someone had told her years ago that we could get a break on our real estate tax because I am a veteran. That program exists, and we might have been able to use it in the first few years that we lived in Enfield, but our income, which is primarily from social security, seemed much too high.

On January 18 Sue was in a funk all day.. She played at the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) with Maria Van Der Ree in the evening game. Even though they came in last out of eight pairs, Sue seemed chipper at the end. She needs to be out with people much more than I do.

The infamous Tonto email went out on the 19th. The tale is told here.

Bob: Several early entries in the 2023 notes for the pandemic concern the demise of Sue’s cat, Bob, our last surviving pet. The notes for January 3 reported: “Bob drools a lot and smells bad. Sue gave him a bath of some kind, but his saliva is rancid. He sleeps most of the time, but he bothers Sue when he is awake.”

The litter box in the basement. The grey items near the box are pieces of litter that absorbed water when the basement flooded. The water later evaporated.

We had cats in Enfield from the time that they moved there. Throughout this period all of them were able to use the cat door installed in a basement window to go outside when they felt like it. They could be relied on to make use of it whenever they needed to relieve themselves. However, in 2022 it became necessary to make a litter box available to them. At first it was in the basement. By the beginning of 2023 I had to move it upstairs because Bob was no longer able to negotiate the stairs.

Bob finally died on January 28. In some ways it was a sad occasion, but neither Sue nor I thought that he enjoyed the last few months of his life the way that our other cats seemed to.

Sue and I get a reminder about Bob every evening at 8:55. Her phone announces “Eight fifty-five Meds Slash Bob”. We call this announcement “Slash Bob.”

February

The coldest day of the year, by far was February 4. It approached 0 in Connecticut, but it was much colder on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. The temperature was 8 below but the windchill index was an incredible -109° Fahrenheit.

February 7 was the first day of the regional bridge tournament in Southbridge, MA. Sue played with Mark Aquino in the Open Pairs. They did not do well. My adventures in the tournament have been described here.

In Sue’s absence I took my car in for the emissions test at Mad Hatter Auto Repair. Afterwards I calculated that we would owed $500 in income tax for 2022. The biggest reason for this was the cost of the cruise (described here) that necessitated a fairly large distribution from my 401K.

On February 10, only six days after that extremely cold day, the temperature reached a balmy 62°.

March

The first post-pandemic limited sectional was held at the HBC on March 26. It drew an incredible fifty-seven tables. The whole story is revealed here.

“Donald, my book will be coming out soon.”

On March 30 Donald Trump was indicted by the state of New York on 31 counts of business fraud! The indictments were in regard to Trump, through his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Stormy Daniels $150,000 to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their affair during the run-up to the election. Trump misused corporate funds to reimburse Cohen. That is what made it a crime in New York, which was, at that time, the official location of the companies. It was being filed as a felony because it was an illegal attempt to influence an election, which was a felony in New York.

An important Zoom meeting was held for replacement of the relational database that I had designed and implemented for the district. Details of that meeting have been posted here.

April

The income tax situation worked out better than my preliminary calculation had indicated. I had to pay the IRS $181. However, we received a refund from CT of $1996 I used one of the free filing services, but I had to pay $15 to file electronically in CT.

For the 2023 National Debate Tournament, U-M’s top team of Rafael Pierry and Kelly Phil won the Copeland award and were seeded #1 in the tournament. I could hardly believe that seven assistant coaches were going to attend the tournament in Chantilly, VA. Pierry and Giorgio Rabbini had also won the Copeland award in 2022 and were second in 2021.

Pierry and Phil.

Pierry and Phil were 7-1 in the preliminary rounds with 21 out of a possible 24 ballots. The U-M second team of Rabbini and Joshua Harrington also was 7-1 with only one fewer ballot. Pierry and Phil made it to the final round, but they lost to Wake Forest. Pierry attained the final round in three consecutive years, an achievement that will probably not be duplicated in my lifetime. I was nearly as disappointed with this result as I was with my own failure to qualify for the NDT in 1970, as described here.

There was quite a bit of activity about the Weiss-Bertoni award.

On Saturday, April 8, we went to see Tom, Casey, and Brian Corcoran in Tom’s house in Wethersfield. When we came back I found a dead mouse in the toilet of the bathroom in the older part of the house. I set traps the next day, but I caught nothing. Some mysteries are never solved.

On April 13 the temperature reached 90°. I walked five miles, but I had to stop, rest in the shade, and cool off three times. The next day it reached an incredible 96°, breaking the previous record by fourteen degrees. That temperature was never exceeded in the summer months.

The first CBA sectional was held in Orange on the 21st through the 23rd. I played all three days. Descriptions of my adventures were posted here. My most memorable achievement was the 512 miles that my Honda logged on a tank of gas. It took over 13 gallons when I filled it, but it claimed that it could have gone another fifteen miles. .

May

It was about this time that I discovered Bosch on Freevee. Sue and I watched it nearly every evening, and it didn’t cost us a penny. This and other ventures into the land of streaming are cataloged here. We could not believe that Amazon, which purchased the service from IMDB, was allowing people to view this high-quality police dram for free.

It was very hot on May 1 when I mowed the portions of the lawn that face either North Street or Hamilton Court. I was not able to mow the rest until three days later.

On May 8 I volunteered to send out the HBC’s emails for the summer through MailChimp. Lori Leopold had been doing it, but she had a lot of travel scheduled for the upcoming months. I somehow also was saddled with creating the official calendar from Donna’s handwritten version.

On May 11 the national health emergency for the pandemic officially ended. For several months I continued wearing my mask wherever I was likely to be in fairly close contact with others.

The day-by-day blog entry for the rest of 2023 has been posted here.

1. The lowest total that I have ever seen was an incredible 53 at the Simsbury Bridge Club fairly early in my bridge career. Unfortunately, although I often had my camera with me in those days, I did not record this event, and no hand record was available because the SBC was not yet using a dealing machine.