Saint Louis

So, St. Louis was as cold and miserable weather-wise as it was last time I was there, except for one day when it was sunny in the high 60’s. The quality of bridge pretty well mimicked that this time as well. We didn’t embarrass ourselves as we were close to qualifying in the NAP’s and after not qualifying in either that event or the Imp Pairs, we teamed with Meg and Chris to win a compact KO with relative ease. The semifinal match was kind of close but the other 3 matches were routs.

We had our chances in the imp pairs and probably were in decent position to qualify until Joe and Barbara came to our table half-way through the second session. Joel and I conspired to let Joe make a terrible 3NT contract. It would have been down 4 or 5 if I had made the obvious play of returning partner’s suit. He had preempted 3D with AQJxxx and his Q held trick 1. With 2 little both in dummy and my hand, he switched to something, then when I got in, I didn’t lead a diamond, thinking declarer had ducked with AKx and we had no future in the suit. We still could have beaten if by 1 but Joel sort of reasonably discarded the HK to try to get out of an endplay. I pitched another 25 imps on the next 4 boards and that was that. Except for those 5 boards, we were about average. 

Anyway, I was irritated that the Indian restaurants were not open on the weekend. I guess it’s my fault for not checking ahead of time and arranging my meals to include a lunch there during the week. I do highly recommend The Range, a cute burger joint with milk shakes and a huge beer selection. We celebrated Pi Day with pizza at Pi Pizzeria. The deal was the second pizza is $3.14 and we wound up taking over half of it back to the room. However, the pizza didn’t fit in the micro-fridge very well and after the maid came through the next day, half of our pizza was gone (the other half, which happened to be my half, was safely in the fridge). 

Meg, if you’re reading this, Joel says thanks!

So, it’s been awhile since I wrote on here. I promise it isn’t because I haven’t had anything interesting to write about – I’ve played quite a bit of bridge in the first 2 months of 2012, including parts of 2 regionals and the entirety of another regional but it has only amounted to 2.5 days of vacation. Things should settle down to normal sometime soon. There’s a big stack of score cards with hands jotted down and circles and squares and stars to help me find the blog-worthy or book-worthy deals. With a trip to Saint Louis for the NABC coming tomorrow, that stack will likely have to wait even longer.

What have I been doing? Working a lot. They’ve been encouraging us to work longer hours at work. I’ve obliged, plus I have spent a good bit of my free time learning about the D7 News and figuring out how I am going to do things different from (and how I’m going to do things the same as, and probably how I’m going to still need) Bob Heller now that I am in charge. The week of the Macon regional was really too much but it was all fun. While I had virtually nothing to do with the overall planning of the tournament, I had an incredibly busy week that included: 5 hours of work at my engineering job each week day, doing all the work for the daily bulletin, serving as caddy master, and playing 2 sessions of bridge every day (except the day we lost in the KO semis was only 1 session). And I must say, I performed very well on all fronts.