WILMINGTON, DE - My partner Christine Matus and I did not fare that well at the Wilmington Sectional duplicate bridge tournament this past weekend (May 31-June 2, 2013) as we showed up for a scheduled Saturday night pairs game only to find it canceled for lack of interest (we were coming in from … [Read more...]
Swiss downer: Scaredy-cats never win
May 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment
WILMINGTON, DE - For the first time in many weeks, we got our regular Thursday night four-person Swiss team together again last week (5-16-2013) at the Delaware Bridge Studio with Eileen Bickel-Thomas, recovering nicely from a minor operation, always steady Ed Maser, our fiery captain John Walston … [Read more...]
An unusual Grand Slam: Down 6 doubled, but a great bid
March 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Grand Slam bids are pretty rare in bridge. Bidding a Grand Slam with only 1 high-card point in your hand is even rarer -- and few if any bridge players would even dream of doing such a thing. But yours truly, otherwise known as the "bridge burglar," did exactly that on Thursday night in a Swiss … [Read more...]
Stealing a win at the Blue Hen Sectional
February 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment
WILMINGTON, DE - My partner Christine Matus and I seem to do best in bridge tournaments when we go some place where nobody knows us and we can fly under the radar. That wasn’t possible this past Saturday (2-23) at the Bridge Studio of Delaware’s Blue Hen Sectional when we both got mini-McKinney … [Read more...]
Psych bid: Down 2, but still a winner
February 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Snow kept down attendance at the Wednesday night (2-13) game at the Delaware Bridge Studio and with 2.5 tables, every board was played only twice, so you got a win, a loss or a tie on the board – there were no in-between scores. With that kind of scoring, anything can happen and in this case the … [Read more...]
Stealing the bid: Is there a bridge burglarette in town?
January 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Although I played twice last week at the Bridge Studio of Delaware with different partners and teammates and got some additional MasterPoints, I couldn’t find a good hand on the “bridge burglar” theme of stealing a bid or a contract. There was no clever trickery – if we got a good board, our … [Read more...]
Resist the urge to take that finesse!
January 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment
This week’s Thursday night Swiss team game with duplicated boards at the Bridge Studio of Delaware in North Wilmington presented some challenging boards – and perhaps therefore had some surprising results. In the shark tank of the highest ranked teams, Rick Rowland, who just got his Life Grand … [Read more...]
10-card trump suit: Stolen slam that should not have made
December 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
One of my regular partners, Christine Matus, and I wound up on different teams for last week’s mid-week Swiss Sectional duplicate bridge tournament at the Bridge Studio of Delaware Thursday night and since neither one of us is very competitive (haha!) we were happy that each one of us walked away … [Read more...]
How weak can a Weak 2 be?
November 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment
My colleague, friend and partner John Walston and I did pretty well in the Wednesday night pairs game at the Bridge Studio of Delaware this week (John subbed for my usual partner Arthur Zadrozny, who was having shoulder surgery to recover his powerful tennis serve). Going into the last round, we … [Read more...]
Snow doesn’t show, but ‘burglar’ does
November 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The threatened first snow storm of the season (which never materialized) didn’t do much to hold down attendance at this week’s Wednesday night open pairs game at the Bridge Studio of Delaware (sanctioned by the ACBL) -- we had five full tables. Steve Blomstedt and Jane Malloy were the overall and … [Read more...]