A Short Trip To The Windy City: Chapter 1

by Howard Einberg

It started as an idea most of us would quickly dismiss as crazy. I wanted to play in the United States Bridge Championship.

For years I had been trying in vain to form a team to enter this event. But this year was different. First, I asked Bill Hall if he was interested and he quickly told me he and his partner Jim Munday were eager to go. Now I had to find a partner. I asked all my usual partners (Jim, David, Jeff, Nick, John, Peter, Paul, Mary) but for reasons that can only be described as normal they all refused. I was getting desperate when I finally asked a friend from Minnesota, Tony Ames, who surprised me by accepting.

Well now it was too late to change my mind, and Tony and I started to practice on Bridge Base, schedules permitting. These practice sessions ended up consisting of a grand total of four Monday nights. We played a simple 2/1 system with strong notrumps, quite a change from my usual systems. Tony and I did fine in our practice sessions, but I still had a long list of questions to discuss when I finally saw him the morning the event started.

In case you don’t already know, here is a little background on the USBC.

Unlike the Spingold, Life Master Pairs, or The Blue Ribbon Pairs, the USBC is not played at the nationals. It’s an event that takes place all by itself without any side games and the winner gets to represent the US in the World Championships. This year, the 10-day swiss/knockout event took place in a Chicago suburb, starting on June 1 and ending with a 120-board final played over last two days. We figured chances were we would play two and one a half days at the most before we lost.

The USBC is open to any team made up of US players. The entry fees are a little steep, $360 entry plus $120 per session for each team of four, but includes breakfast, snacks, buffet lunch, and a well-run tournament with a few other nice amenities.

We were one of the 25 teams who entered the contest, three of which received byes to later rounds. That left 22 teams competing for the final 9 spots in the later KO rounds.

My team was placed in one of two 11-team brackets where each team would play all the other teams in its bracket before any team was eliminated. After three sessions of play the round robin would be complete, and the bottom three teams would be eliminated. The remaining eight teams would then spend the next two sessions playing against the eight surviving teams from the other bracket. My team’s three goals at this point were to: survive the first cut,; not embarrass ourselves; , and maybe survive the second cut. The nine teams who survived the second cut would reach the KO rounds with the three bye teams added at various stages. The first and second goals were very much connected— if we survived the first cut we would not embarrass ourselves