More about Frankfort

If you read the previous blog by my partner, teammates and friends, you will know that we had a great time at the Frankfort tournament and stayed up very late Friday night. Julie and I shared a room and spent most of that night talking and laughing; periodically she would count the possible number of hours that were left for sleep and say "this is not going to be good." I brushed aside her calculations and misgivings with the remark that "if **** can do it, we can do it." Of course this referred to someone who had an excellent game on Friday after a previously rough day (Cinco de Mayo).

In fact my predication turned out to be accurate. We won 4 of the 7 Swiss Team rounds, placing second in C and winning almost 2 silver points. We started out losing by only 13 points to the A team that ended up in first place, followed by 3 wins. That put us in 3rd place overall going into the lunch break. Unfortunately it also meant that our next opponents were very good players and we lost the next two rounds. However, we rallied and told each other to win the last round, which we did.

What did I learn this weekend? Well, one thing that made the play interesting was what seemed to be an inordinate number of distributional hands. This provided me with the opportunity to practice thinking about winners and losers rather than merely counting points. It got to the point where I was actually looking forward to these strangely lopsided hands rather than dreading them. Not only was I able to enter the bidding in a way that ended up well for us, my bidding often created a tension in my partner that was only relieved after we won the hand. Now that is fun!