May
28

Teams

In anticipation of the summer NABC, I’ve taken a highlighter to the schedule and I’ve been thinking about teammates and partnerships for months now. It’s kind of a logistical nightmare to make plans ahead of time since most of the events I’m interested in have multiple rounds and who knows just how long one is going to last. I started saying “no” weeks ago, but I fear I’d already said “yes” too often.

Of course, bridge players are notoriously flaky so it isn’t as if this won’t all change ten times between now and July anyway, probably a day (or an hour) before the event. My experience has been that putting together a team in advance of a tournament is like trying to herd cats.

And I still need to find a pair for a knock-out team in Wilmington in a few weeks. It’ll be my partner’s first foray into a regional tournament. I’m hoping to keep us in a nice low bracket which will mean I’ll be a big fish in a small pond instead of what I’m more accustomed to which is being the tiny fish bringing bigger fish into a slightly smaller pond (could I have picked a worse metaphor for this?!). Fishy fish aside, I need to find a pair with very few masterpoints. Of course, with it being the first night of the tournament maybe I shouldn’t worry about the numbers too much because if relatively few teams enter there just won’t be that many brackets. I would just love it if I could just show up and play bridge. This networking stuff is such a pain.

One thing I’m quite disappointed about concerning the NABC is that way back in the fall of 2010 when there was a World Bridge Federation Championship and the attendant regional held in Philadelphia, my bridge teacher had asked if I would play on a team and I jumped at the chance, of course, but we couldn’t put it together. At the time we said we’d definitely play on a team at the NABC this summer, but in the intervening time he’s stopped playing for the most part and it just isn’t going to happen. It’s a sad situation all around.

Jan
19

Missing Piece

Did you hear the one about the bridge player who lost (the rest of) her mind when she spent three days working on jigsaw puzzles instead of playing bridge? For reasons I can’t quite comprehend my family seems to enjoy jigsaw puzzles, it’s as if they have some mutant recessive “busy work” gene that skipped me. However, most of my family members accept, with minimal complaint, that my version of quality time involves sitting in the same room as someone else while reading a book, so I try to meet them halfway and I help with the jigsaw puzzles (then I go back to my book). Sensing my lack of interest they usually just assign me a task like, “See if you can turn all these white pieces into those snow drifts.” This trip I thought I would be clever and I brought a puzzle with me that I thought would be somewhat less tedious than usual.

Unfortunately for me two things obtained. First off, there was quite possibly the most annoying puzzle I’ve ever confronted just barely underway when I arrived. It was shaped like an antique sewing machine (no straight edges!) and filled with a hazy picture of a dull-faced woman dressed in Victorian garb and sewing a quilt while surrounded by Victorian fluffery, and more quilts and two kittens playing with a basket of yarn. There were lots of pastel colors. The pieces were all kinds of weird shapes, many of which did not truly connect to the pieces around it … like the piece that was just a circle approximately 3/4 of an inch in diameter. This puzzle was created by a sadist who knew her market. Secondly, when we finished the damnable sewing machine puzzle, I discovered that the mostly primary colors and pop-art aesthetic of the puzzle featuring vintage Coca-Cola advertising that I brought with me served to make it no less tedious than the typical puzzle (though it is far less tedious than the aforementioned abominable kittens playing with yarn in a pile of quilts puzzle).

An aside, were one to eavesdrop on two people working on a puzzle one could be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into the lair of a couple of serial killers, “I think this is part of her face and this hand might belong to that guy over there, but it’s so hard to tell when they’re all in pieces like this.”

But is a desire to spend hours moving tiny pieces around until they form a bigger picture really all that different from wanting to move playing cards around to see what sort of pattern they come out in next? Yes, it’s completely different.

Jul
03

An Unconventional Skill

When one takes up the game of bridge there are a daunting number of things to learn and skills to develop. One of the beauties of the game is that it is a life-long endeavor (which is probably why they call it “Life Master” even if a few of us attempt to do it a bit quicker than that). In October of 2009 I attended my first regional tournament and had my first experience with something called “The Partnership Desk”. The partnership desk is a matchmaking service for bridge players. They take a person’s information and attempt to pair them with someone else so that they can play in an event together. This is no easy task at a tournament with the only information being a description of what system one plays and their number of master-points.

Master-point discrimination is rampant, I’ve heard stories of people with fifteen master-points refusing to play with those who have only five (both of these people would be considered rank beginners by almost anyone with more than say a hundred or so). The real issue isn’t how many points a person has, but how long it took to get them. I’d be nervous about playing at a tournament with someone who had the same number of points as me if it had taken them a decade to get them, but then again maybe they are an accomplished rubber bridge player who almost never plays in ACBL sanctioned events. I was lucky at that tournament to be paired with a couple of nice players and we fairly well. It became apparent to me while attending that tournament that while having the option of utilizing the partnership desk was important another solution was in order and that was social networking.

Social networking is not something I do naturally, but it is a skill needed for one to excel at this game. I had the foresight to create an e-mail address that was strictly for bridge use, but now I saw the necessity of getting the contact information for those people I played with (and against) that I seemed to gel with in some way so that later on when I was trying to find a partner for a tournament or put together a team for an event I could call on them.

My contact list for that e-mail address now contains not just e-mail addresses, but notes on where I met the individual and what sort of system they play. This paid off pretty quickly; in February of 2010 my regular partner at the time and I met up with two of the women I met at that aforementioned tournament at an out-of-state regional and we did pretty well playing in a K.O. event together. It is a bit amusing to me that this game which attracts a number of anti-social types requires one to network, but being able to do so pays off more than most conventions one might learn instead.