WWTBAM Bored

You wouldn’t think that a bridge tournament held in a desert would have to worry about flooding. You’d be wrong. I’m in Scottsdale (a Phoenix suburb) for a regional. On Friday, three days before the tournament started, the host hotel was flooded by a summer monsoon. Repairs won’t be complete in time.

Still, the show must go on. Two local clubs are serving as venues to play the events, and it turns out it’s not that hard to find hotel rooms in Phoenix in August. My partner and I played the two “warm-up” charity pair events yesterday. We had a poor game in the evening, but we won the afternoon event, starting us off with 11.67 red points.

Today we’ll be playing a two-day knockout teams event. I hope we’re still playing it tomorrow. —Bob

We advanced through both rounds today, so we’re guaranteed to reach the overalls in the event. The semifinals are tomorrow morning, and if we win we’ll play the finals tomorrow afternoon. —Bob

Bob78164 wrote:You wouldn’t think that a bridge tournament held in a desert would have to worry about flooding. You’d be wrong. I’m in Scottsdale (a Phoenix suburb) for a regional. On Friday, three days before the tournament started, the host hotel was flooded by a summer monsoon. Repairs won’t be complete in time.

Still, the show must go on. Two local clubs are serving as venues to play the events, and it turns out it’s not that hard to find hotel rooms in Phoenix in August. My partner and I played the two “warm-up” charity pair events yesterday. We had a poor game in the evening, but we won the afternoon event, starting us off with 11.67 red points.

Today we’ll be playing a two-day knockout teams event. I hope we’re still playing it tomorrow. —Bob

That must be Talking Stick Resort and Casino. They obviously didn't build with the monsoon season in mind. No place else had flooding.

We had our first drowning in a car swept into a wash Sunday. Idiot drove around "road closed" barriers. We get two or three a year.

Yes, the tournament was to be played at the Talking Stick Resort.

We lost our semifinal match when a disastrous fourth quarter turned a small lead into a large loss. We still picked up 17.28 gold points just for reaching the semifinals. In the “loser Swiss,” we finished first in Stratum B to add another 2.43 red points for the day. That brings my tournament total to 31.38 points. It doesn’t look like I’ll match the success I had here last year but the tournament is still off to a nice start.

Today is the start of another two-day knockout teams event. Again, I hope we’re still playing that event tomorrow. —Bob

Bob78164 wrote:Yes, the tournament was to be played at the Talking Stick Resort.

We lost our semifinal match when a disastrous fourth quarter turned a small lead into a large loss. We still picked up 17.28 gold points just for reaching the semifinals. In the “loser Swiss,” we finished first in Stratum B to add another 2.43 red points for the day. That brings my tournament total to 31.38 points. It doesn’t look like I’ll match the success I had here last year but the tournament is still off to a nice start.

Today is the start of another two-day knockout teams event. Again, I hope we’re still playing that event tomorrow. —Bob

Well at least you have better bridge skills than Genoa.

We won both rounds yesterday so we are playing the semifinals of the two-day knockout event this morning. If we win, a date with the world-class O’Rourke team probably awaits us in the finals. Otherwise there will be a single-session “loser Swiss” if enough teams sign up to play, and if not, I expect there will be a single-session pair event. —Bob

Well, that was a little frustrating. We won our semifinal match by 12 IMPs. Except it turns out we didn’t win it after all. Unbeknownst to any of us while we were playing (and I specifically checked on this with the directors at halftime), we were giving away a handicap of 12.16 IMPs. So instead of winning by 12, we actually lost by 0.16. We’ll never know if anyone would have done anything differently had we known about the handicap, but it sure would have been nice to know. Losing in the semifinals got us 11.30 gold points.

The afternoon session turned out to be a pairs game, since not enough teams wanted to play the “loser Swiss.” We finished 3rd overall, adding another 2.13 red points. My cumulative total for the tournament is now 44.81 points.

Tomorrow is a two-session Board-a-Match team event. —Bob

We finished slightly above average in each session of today’s event, but not quite well enough to reach the overalls. Our session awards were 1.57 red points, bringing my total for the tournament to 46.38 points. We conclude the tournament tomorrow with the traditional Sunday Swiss teams event, after which I drive back to Los Angeles to return to work tomorrow. —Bob

Bob78164 wrote:We finished slightly above average in each session of today’s event, but not quite well enough to reach the overalls. Our session awards were 1.57 red points, bringing my total for the tournament to 46.38 points. We conclude the tournament tomorrow with the traditional Sunday Swiss teams event, after which I drive back to Los Angeles to return to work tomorrow. —Bob

We had a poor final day. We did manage to win three of our six matches but we finished below average for the day. We picked up 1.50 red points for the match wins, so I finished the tournament with a cumulative total of 47.88 points. —Bob