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jianantonicI played in a bridge event yesterday that was not only new to me, but one I'd never heard of. I've never played in a non-online IMP pairs game, so I thought tournament IMPs were my final frontier, but yesterday the Vancouver club hosted a Swiss pairs game. Based on matchpoints. It was a barometer with 13 tables, and we played four boards per round. After each set, the scores were tallied and matchpoints were converted to a 20-point VP scale. The matchpoints were doubled, so 24 was a top, and 96 were available per round. 73 was worth a blitz. After each round, the first place team sits N/S at table one, and 2nd sits E/W, then 3rd is N/S at table two and so on. We blitzed round one and moved to table one, which we hung onto for the rest of the day. Even with several big wins (two blitzes, an 18 and a 16) in a seven-round event, it was surprisingly close most of the way. You don't play the same pair twice, just like any other single-session event, so just because we kept winning at table one didn't guarantee first place throughout. In the end, we had 104 of 140 VPs and first place by six.
We could have had a little bit more, but this happened:
Barometer events means there are lots of sets of boards (cards) made up and everyone plays the same hands at the same time. This means any table talk can easily carry and be influential to other tables, so we were urged to not talk about any of the hands until after the round. How hard is that? But this one pair of old men kept talking about the hands very loudly. We personally asked them to be quiet several times, as did everyone who played against them, and we called the director a handful of times more. Then right after one such director call, the old fart says loudly, "Well I thought about going to six! Nice hand!" Ugh. So when Z picks up a 23-count on the next board and I'm looking at AKQxxxxx of clubs, we both know without even bidding that this is a 6C hand. We called the director, said we knew too much about the hand to play it, even though the only tough decision is stopping in 6 or going onto 7. I maintain that we would've found either 6N (if we're missing an A, because it's matchpoints and we're both smart) or 7C if we do have all the keycards, but we did not impart this to the director. Both pairs at our table were given Average Plus on the board which got us both 14.4 matchpoints, but if we'd played it in 6N or 7C, the matchpoint distribution would have been 22 or 23 to us and only 2 or 1 to the opponents. But because we BOTH got 14.4 on the hand (even if we had stopped in 6C, we'd have 14 and they'd have only 10), we tied the match instead of winning, which irked me a lot. The offenders got a 3 VP penalty, but had I been directing, I would have disqualified them from the overalls, because this was an egregious and repeat offense.
Annoying.
But yeah, we won, so I shouldn't really bitch about it, hmm? I love how they have club games every day here. We're playing a lot, and so far there have been two events where we didn't scratch, but we've won all the others. Most are just 6- or 7-table games, but some are bigger, and we've picked up over 10 black points in the last three weeks. If I played another 3 weeks out here, I'd have enough to get on the Ace of Clubs top ten list for my unit for the year. Sheesh. In all of 2007, I won under 20 black points. That's because when you work during the day, you can't even go to our club games. The big ones are all in the middle of the day; winning a three-table evening game is worth about half a point. And I won almost all of mine last year half a point at a time. Woo.
We could have had a little bit more, but this happened:
Barometer events means there are lots of sets of boards (cards) made up and everyone plays the same hands at the same time. This means any table talk can easily carry and be influential to other tables, so we were urged to not talk about any of the hands until after the round. How hard is that? But this one pair of old men kept talking about the hands very loudly. We personally asked them to be quiet several times, as did everyone who played against them, and we called the director a handful of times more. Then right after one such director call, the old fart says loudly, "Well I thought about going to six! Nice hand!" Ugh. So when Z picks up a 23-count on the next board and I'm looking at AKQxxxxx of clubs, we both know without even bidding that this is a 6C hand. We called the director, said we knew too much about the hand to play it, even though the only tough decision is stopping in 6 or going onto 7. I maintain that we would've found either 6N (if we're missing an A, because it's matchpoints and we're both smart) or 7C if we do have all the keycards, but we did not impart this to the director. Both pairs at our table were given Average Plus on the board which got us both 14.4 matchpoints, but if we'd played it in 6N or 7C, the matchpoint distribution would have been 22 or 23 to us and only 2 or 1 to the opponents. But because we BOTH got 14.4 on the hand (even if we had stopped in 6C, we'd have 14 and they'd have only 10), we tied the match instead of winning, which irked me a lot. The offenders got a 3 VP penalty, but had I been directing, I would have disqualified them from the overalls, because this was an egregious and repeat offense.
Annoying.
But yeah, we won, so I shouldn't really bitch about it, hmm? I love how they have club games every day here. We're playing a lot, and so far there have been two events where we didn't scratch, but we've won all the others. Most are just 6- or 7-table games, but some are bigger, and we've picked up over 10 black points in the last three weeks. If I played another 3 weeks out here, I'd have enough to get on the Ace of Clubs top ten list for my unit for the year. Sheesh. In all of 2007, I won under 20 black points. That's because when you work during the day, you can't even go to our club games. The big ones are all in the middle of the day; winning a three-table evening game is worth about half a point. And I won almost all of mine last year half a point at a time. Woo.
I've been playing so much bridge lately, I know the blog gets boring at times like these. I just haven't been doing much else besides goofing off with Z's friends. I really like his buddies out here and am enjoying my time doing largely nothing. Lately we've been staying mostly at Joel's house in Vancouver, which is this giant mansion that I could really get comfortable in...
I keep saying to Z, I hope one day we're rich enough to afford a house like this...and then spend our money on something more fun than a house like this. But it is a sweet house, and definitely a nice place to unpack, if only for a few days. Joel's a lot of fun, too, and a very generous host.
I finished one of the books I was reading. I don't remember if I mentioned it here or not but it was called Women's Voices from the Oregon Trail and it had lots of diary excerpts and cool bits of history. I really enjoyed that book and would recommend it to anyone. It offers some pretty cool insights about the trail, and so many of the things those people endured don't even cross into our imaginations at all. It's a fascinating read.
I picked up a used copy of Atonement that I got for free at the bridge club. It's becoming a sort of winter tradition to read the book of whatever Kiera Knightly movie is getting praise at the time, and then go see the movie. Hopefully this one will still be in theaters when I finish the book, which I expect will be on the plane to Bermuda next week. It's a good book so far, but sometimes more entertaining are the notes in the margins. It must have belonged to a student who was reading it for school before, because the notes are very 12th-grade English. I try not to read them because I like to discover things for myself, but sometimes they're just plain comical. One of the main characters is Cecilia, and the first several mentions of her include references to her smoking and ash trays all over her room and things like that. Then after about 12 mentions of her smoking, there's a line about her looking for cigarettes, and the word cigarettes is underlined, and the word "smoker" is written in the margins. And it's not like the kid was just skimming the book because there are tons of underlinings and notes on every page.
My favorite note is when two little boys shake the bed of a young man who is napping, waking him up. The book says something like he's "uncomfortably aroused" (you know, because he was SHAKEN out of sleep), which is underlined with the note "pedophile?" in the margin. Nice.
So I've typed a lot here, mostly about nothing at all. I suppose it's time to go and find something to do. We're playing in a Swiss team game this afternoon at the club, then who knows what after that.
Peace.
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Date: 2008-01-21 04:14 am (UTC)