The Palo Alto Bridge Club

This morning, my cow-orker Ben asked if I'd like to go with him to the Palo Alto Bridge Club, since his regular partner - Subrata - was not available. (Subrata's been getting progressively busier with new projects at work.) I thought about it for a while, and finally decided to give it a try. It would be my first actual bridge match since I played a match with John last summer. (Read that entry for a brief synopsis of how Duplicate Bridge works.)

The club is in a nondescript building north of highway 101 (I hadn't realized Palo Alto extended that far north, actually), which I guess is just a building of rented office space. They have a large room which is - as you'd guess - filled with card tables. There's a table for food at one end, and a desk with computer equipment to determine the match results at the other. And also apparently a small library in an alcove, although I didn't check that out.

As you'd expect, Ben and I were nearly the youngest people there. There was one pair who looked like they might also be in the 30-and-under set, but nearly everyone else was middle-aged or older. When I asked, Ben said that the people there were mostly the usual suspects at the club.

One difference between the club and the match at the tournament last summer was that few people said hello, asked our names, or were chatty at all. I presume that this is because they all pretty much knew everyone, and knew Ben as well. So I was the only new person. It did make the atmosphere a little less comfortable, though. The first pair we played against were among the friendlier ones, however, which helped.

It took us about ten minutes to fill out our convention card, which lists the bidding and lead conventions we use, and which is available for our opponents to see. For the Bridge-savvy, I'm currently learning to use limit major raises, negative doubles, unusual 2NT, and the Michaels cue-bid. I'd be learning faster, but the opportunities to use them have not been coming up much lately, and other than a couple of limit raises, didn't come up tonight, either.

The most impressive set of the evening were the three hands we played against a partnership one of whom was blind. Ben also noted (privately) that the blind fellow seemed to be a much better player than his partner; I also got the impression that his partner (possibly his son?) was mainly there to let him play. He was quite good, though; the card were marked in braille, we bid out loud rather than using bidding boxes, we read the dummy hand off to him when it went down, and told him each card we played. He did ask us to re-read the dummy at times, but his memory was very impressive nonetheless.

We played against a couple of women in a later set who kept asking questions about our conventions:

WOMAN: How do you take your partner's heart bid?

ME: I... presumed that he preferred to play in hearts, for some reason.

WOMAN: You're not playing some sort of transfer system?

ME: Not with that sequence of bidding.

In fact, Ben was simply showing me a 5-4 split in spades and hearts (which I would have picked up on if I'd thought a little harder, but didn't really matter in this particular hand), and there's no reason to use a transfer bid (which is an artificial bid to have a particular partner end up as declarer of the contract ends up in a certain suit) in a sequence like that, that I know of.

I said to Ben privately that that question - and a few others - seemed like they thought we were playing a far more complex set of conventions than we actually were. Ben agreed, and said he'd found it pretty funny at the time.

I was pleased not to commit any major gaffes; I did attempt not to follow suit a few times, but every time it was from dummy when I was declarer, and as one of our opponents put it, "Dummy can't renege". I didn't miss any major bids from Ben - like missing those doubles with John last summer - but we didn't play a very adventurous evening, either.

At the end, we got the results, and Ben said, "Well, we didn't finish last." We actually finished at 43%, which seems not-too-bad given the level of competition. And, once I relaxed after the first several hands, I had fun. I'd do it again.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)