A Short trip to the Windy City: Part 3 of 3.

By Howard Einberg

After another late night I asked for a 9:00 wakeup call giving me an hour to check out of the hotel, eat breakfast, and to get ready to play. At 9:05 while I was packing my cell phone rang.

It was Tony and his first words were not encouraging.

“I did something very stupid”

It was not what I wanted to hear. After all we were about to play the final four short matches to try to qualify for the knockout round of the US Bridge Championships. This was the third day of the event and although I was not tired yet, that could change in a hurry.

Tony proceeded to tell me he had locked his keys in his car when he had stopped for some coffee on the way to the hotel. Tony had driven to Wisconsin each night to stay with friends (about an hour away) to save the hotel expense. He was 25 minutes away and asked me to pick him up. I told him I would call back in a few minutes. Then I called my teammate Bill asked him to take my stuff to his room, get our seat assignments, and leave some breakfast at my seat for me when I returned. I called Tony and told him to take a taxi and that I would meet him halfway. Several cell phone calls later while I drove north Tony told me the taxi was stuck at a train crossing. By the time the train passed I was waiting on the other side of the RR tracks. The cab driver started after the train had passed, but a policeman directing traffic pulled him over for crossing a barricade claiming the taxi started too early. Tony then walked to my car and we were on our way

back. Even the cab driver was suffering from our bad luck.

With 15 minutes lost at the RR crossing we ended up getting to our table 8 minutes late. This was not the way to start our day. At least a glass of juice and a roll was waiting for me.

Things continued to go poorly at the table. On the first hand I passed partner in 3NT when I should have tried for slam. 3NT making 7 at our table did not make me happy. The second hand resulted in us doubling a game contract after I had opened 1NT. They scored it up. Hand three we let them make game that had no play. There is such a thing as momentum. There also is a point where things return to normal or in our case better than normal. For some reason our opponents started to underbid missing a game and slam. Although we did not know it at the time we lost this match by only 3 IMPs when it had seemed worse.

No score comparisons were allowed during these four matches. The idea was to prevent any teams from intentionally playing poorly to help or hurt certain other teams. Tony

and I along with all the other players in the “closed” room were not allowed to leave the third floor of the hotel. The next matches did not seem to go too well, so as the last match began we felt we needed a win or we would be going home. Our last opponents were Grant Baze and Gary Cohler meaning we had our work cut out. Grant and Gary bid two slams that went down, one of them missing two aces. We felt we had won the match — but the question was, was it enough? When we left the room the scores were posted including all matches except the last one. We were in 10th place meaning we had to pass one team above and stay ahead of those below us or we were out. Our teammates were still playing while I paced up and down the hall. We won by 20 IMPs and finished in 6th place.We had qualified for the KOs.

Now we had an hour and a half to eat lunch, cancel plane reservations, extend the car rental, check back into the hotel and I had to buy some clothes.

I had not planned on staying more than three nights and we had just added two more nights to our stay. Some of those things had to wait until later that evening but somehow everything got done including driving Tony back to his car and a call to the Auto Club to open the door.

The Rose Meltzer team (Sontag, Bates, Smith, Cohen, Larsen) was added to the nine qualifiers. Teams captained by Russ Ekeblad and Nick Nickell had byes to even later rounds.

As the lowest seeded team that made the cut, we had to play one of the top two teams in the first KO round. Bill Wickham’s team was the second lowest qualifier and would play the top team we didn’t. It tuned out we had to play Meltzer while Wickham played O’Rourke (Hampson, Greco,Cheek, Grue, Jacobus). The 5 winners of what was now 90 board matches would continue while the losers could only plan next year.

The morning prediction in the daily bulletin said, “The Einberg team did great to escape the RR 1 and 2, but they have run into the first lady of bridge. This four-time world champion has dropped in and will drop a haymaker.”

The bulletin was right. We started off poorly and were down by 41 IMPs at the end of Sunday. Sixty more hands to play Monday and our chances were nil.

Wickham did better. His team was ahead for a while but eventually lost. Our team continued to lose IMPs each quarter and eventually found out it would have to be another year before we could again pretend to be Cinderella at the ball.

Against the Meltzer team Tony and I thought we underbid the following hand to 6♦.

North: South

♠ 98542 ♠ AK

♥ A76 ♥ 6

♦ 9 ♦ AKQT854

♣AQ52 ♣ KJ5

The story regarding this hand is about asking yourself what can go wrong.

First you must hope diamonds split bad so that 7♦ goes down. You also have to hope they

don’t split so bad that you do down in 6. The opening lead is a heart and after winning the Ace there are two lines of play. You can try to draw trumps starting with the AK and Q going down if the suit splits 5-0 or you can let the ♦9 run if not covered maybe losing the trick but insuring there are no other trump losers unless something get ruffed. It turns out trumps split 5-0 and this was the time for a safety play.

As I sit here writing this article the final match has started. The top seeded Nickell team is leading the second seeded Ekeblad team. Gone are Baze, Levin, Hampson, Bramley, Meltzer, Lall, Hollman, Passell, Wold, Cohen, Pszczola, Garozzo, Welland and a hundred others.

I wonder why they did not just let the top two seeds play and skip all the hard work of all the losing teams.

Come to think of it, why even play the final match, Nickell is going to win anyway.

The experience of playing against all these top players and giving them a run for the money was something we all will treasure for a long time. Surviving the early round robin events and getting to play six world champions in a long match was fun and instructional. Palm Beach next year is now in the plans. I encourage you to play in events that you can not win.

You will become a better player and hopefully find out that good bridge players can be nice to their opponents.