Interesting Stuff

Sunday, much to my surprise, my old bridge partner Jim called me up. He had been suspecting that I’d be back in town sometime soon, and was wondering if I’d like to play with him again. This was really touching, since we had only really played together 3 or so times before, and I hadn’t told him when I’d be back in town! So I was thrilled. We went to the Tuesday game, which is really large because they charge a little bit extra, award a few extra Master Points, and donate money to some sort of charity/fund thing. There were 15 tables there! Jim and I played surprisingly well – I counted 1 big mistake that I made, 2 games that got away from me without me understanding what was going on, and 1 small mistake that Jim made (there were other things we could have done better, but they were pretty small). The coolest part about the evening was that we had absolutely no misunderstandings – certainly we made a couple bad bids, but we at least communicated what we were trying to say. This apparently paid off – we took 2nd place! That is to say, 2nd place over all 15 East-West partnerships (we beat every life master sitting there), and 4th out of all 30 partnerships present. In our stratification(which is only the people with less than 50 Master Points), we took first among the East-Wests and 2nd among everyone. We had an incredible 60.1% game (for you non-bridge types, 50% is perfectly average, less than 35% is abysmally embarrassing, and no one ever breaks 75%. A 100% game would mean that, on every single board, you got the best score in the room). This is the first time I’ve had a 60% game, and only the second time I’ve broken 55%, so I was absolutely psyched. Jim quipped that we should take the scoring printout and frame it on the wall. We were given a whopping 1.76 Black Master Points, bringing my total to 4.70. I can almost certainly make Junior Master by the end of the summer (that takes 5 Master Points total). This weekend, there is a larger Sectional tournament that awards Silver Master Points, but I’m going to be in Wisconsin at the time. Boo!

I think the reason Jim and I do so well is that we understand each other almost completely. Bridge partnerships are built on trust and understanding at the bottom, and good performance on top of that. Jim is only a Junior Master and I’m not even that yet, but we can actually communicate with our bids and discards, and this information allows us to each do our parts better than if we only had a vague idea of what was going on. I think this is why Sheri and I did OK but not great – we have pretty good performance, but we are a bit weak on the understanding and severely lacking in trust, and that was pretty frustrating. I wish I could find someone like Jim out in California.

On an unrelated note, I spent today hanging out with Hansford, who is doing an REU up at the U of M. We went canoing on Lake Calhoun (and Lake of the Isles and that one next to it and even up to Brownie Lake), which was pretty cool. Hansford had never been canoing before. He then came over for dinner and we hung out and played Set and Xactika and stuff. It was pretty low-key, but a lot of fun.