Gold Cup

Just a quick note to keep the blog alive. The 2010 Gold Cup is in mid-stream in England. This is the premier teams contest in the UK, and I carry some fond memories of it from my early years of bridge. This year I'm trying to keep an eye on the Nick Stevens team (Nick Stevens, Paul Bowyer,
Jim Mason, Duncan Happer, Gary Watson, David Jones). Gary Watson and I went to the same grammar school, and taught ourselves bridge there, and were partners for our first few years of duplicate play. When we eventually parted ways (more a case of growing apart, rather than a sudden divorce), Gary formed a partnership with David Jones. I don't know how often they play together, but that means their partnership has been extant, at least off and on, for more than thirty years. I find that slightly amazing, and somewhat admirable. Gary was a great talent, very quick when it came to calculations at the card table, and when combined with his extrovert personality and good sense of humor, that made for some interesting bidding. Probably the ensuing thirty-odd years of experience have calmed him down a bit, but I haven't seen him in all that time, so I'm hoping that the team makes it well into the final weekend and I can watch him on BBO.

Nick Stevens actually went to the same school, a year below us. He didn't play in our card school, though. He learned from his parents, at home and in the clubhouse at the golf course. But the three of us became friends at Hinckley bridge club (the local club, frequented by Nick's parents and several teachers from the school, who were all complicit in making us both more frequent and better players). I have a feeling that Nick first played with Paul Bowyer back at that time too, so that would be another very long-standing partnership.

The team is the 14th seed. I think they are actually capable of winning the event, and I'll be rooting for them (from a distance). For now, I'm just watching for results on BGB
(http://www.bridgegreatbritain.org/goldcup/default.htm).

Pro-Am-Am-Am

Yesterday was the Manhattan Bridge Club Pro-Am-Am-Am. This is a bracketed Swiss teams event, where the teams are composed of 1 "Pro" (defined to be a Life Master) and 3 "Ams" (defined to be non-Life Masters). You play three matches, and the Pro has to play one match partnering each Am. This year, the event was sold out at 34 teams, that got split into four brackets based on the total masterpoints of the Ams. I got approached by a decent pair that I see regularly in the 299er pairs games that I direct, so I roped in Agent 99 as a ringer for the fourth seat. (She's not a LM yet, but she's distinctly better than your average Am). At least two of them have well over 200 masterpoints, so we found ourselves in the top bracket.

Unfortunately, one Pro had managed to find two ringers - he said to me that he was the only Pro that had two Ams better than he was (and he's not bad). So that team won. But I tried to arrange for our weakest line-up to play the first match, and our strongest line-up to play third. According to plan, we narrowly lost our first match, and then won the next two by increasing margins without meeting the strongest teams. As a result, we climbed up to second place. A triumph of strategy, if not of bridge, lol.

The key feature throughout seemed to me to be missed games. We only encountered a couple of slam hands, and nobody bid them. But each match featured a couple of hands where one pair or another failed to bid a making game. If there was a trend, it was that openings or low-level intervention by the opponents was often enough to throw off the hand evaluation of the Ams.

Anyway, that was a fun interlude in what has been (and continues to be) a fairly miserable stretch of life events. Hopefully, more bridge lies in my future.