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.