Master Points!Yesterday was a day full of Bridge. A local Bridge group was holding a sectional tournament. Since Subrata's regular partner Ben is on vacation, I partnered up with him and we went with Becky and Grant - two other Bridge regulars - to spend an afternoon and evening at the Bridge tables.We ended up having quite a good session in the afternoon match. We started off fairly strong, helped in part by one of our opponents accidentally putting down a 4 Spades bid instead of his intended 4 Hearts bid. I'm getting better at my bidding; in this first round I only made one major bidding error - bidding 2 Diamonds thinking that was weak, when we had a convention that it was strong. It turned out not to be too bad since I had a highly distributional hand. (All of this means that I had a hand with few high cards - Aces and face cards - with a lot of diamonds and no spades.) Overall, we finished at 55% - i.e., slightly above average - which is my first over-50 score in Bridge matches to date! Woo-hoo! It also means I actually got half an ACBL master point, which will come in real handy when I get around to joining the ACBL. We also beat Becky and Grant by a couple of percentage points, which was pretty amusing; Becky called us 'bums'. Becky and Grant had been planning to leave after the afternoon session, but some scheduling mix-ups meant they got to stay for the evening match. I'm sure they're glad they did, as they ended up cleaning up, finishing at 68%, well ahead of any of their competition, and getting 3 master points in the process (that seems to be a lot for one match; I believe 300 master points makes you a Life Master). Subrata and I weren't as good. For one thing, we did have one spectacular bidding error on my part - against Grant and Becky! We ended up in 3 No Trump when I mistook Subrata's 1 NT bid as much stronger than it was. Yes, it was just a brain hiccup. I did joke afterwards that I could use Ben's excuse of counting 2 extra tricks based on Subrata's skill at the play, but Subrata said that although he's honored, it was in fact (given the hand I gave him to play with) a very great honor. He went down two tricks. Ah, well. We played reasonably but not spectacularly for the rest of the evening, with a couple of more minor errors, but we finished at only 43%. Well, it was still a positive day for me overall, as I feel my bidding is getting a little more consistent and I'm making fairly few stupid mistakes. And, Subrata is as easygoing a partner to play with as Becky is. And yes, I was pooped when I got home!
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