Eastern States (3)

So what exactly did we do at the regional?

Agent 99 and I played in two events, the horizontal IMP pairs (two sessions, one Thursday evening, one Friday evening), and a bracketed compact knockout (all day Saturday). On the Monday, I played with Elwood in a bracketed round-robin team event.

The IMP pairs was a disaster, as far as the result goes, but it was a good warm-up for the team events. It seemed like a very strong field to me - not nationally-known players, perhaps, but a lot of the local pros and experienced A players. (It was stratified, and there were only four C pairs.) It seemed like every time we sat down, we were facing a pair of veterans who knew exactly what they were doing. Thursday evening, neither Agent 99 nor I was in any sort of form, and we got hammered, basically lying some distance away last at the halfway point of the event. Friday evening we got our act together, somewhat, and actually managed to finish not last, overall. Apart from attitude, the adjustments we made before the second session related to our approach - we decided we weren't being aggressive enough on the part-score hands. At IMPs, you have to fight energetically at the one and two level, becoming more cautious at the three level. On Friday, we didn't let people push us around so much, and did more pushing of our own.

In the knockout on Saturday, we were teamed with another of the directors from the Manhattan and his wife, and that put us in the top bracket. But the field was not nearly so intimidating (most of the good players were taking a run at the Goldman Pairs). We survived two 3-way matches in the morning, then lost the semi-final after lunch, but came back strong to win the third place game. Nearly four and a half gold points for that.

In the round-robin on Monday, I played with Elwood in the same team that did well in the previous regional in New York. Unfortunately, I was as sick as a dog. I decided it was just a cold and not the swine flu, and went ahead and risked infecting most of the bridge players in NYC. It was a big event, 71 teams I think, and there were other events in the same room, so I'm not entirely kidding about most of the players being there. But I took every kind of drug I had available, and wasn't actually sneezing or coughing on passers-by. We were in the third bracket (eight teams to a bracket), and won five of our seven matches. Actually, we were kind of upset to lose the other two - we felt we lost the matches, rather than that the opposition beat us. But our performance was good enough for second in the bracket and more than six gold points.

And therein lies the tale. I started the tournament needing 10.88 gold to become a life master. I won a grand total of 10.78 gold. And there followed at least a little bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth.