...infested with sharks.
Yesterday, I went to my very first official bridge tournament in Lake Geneva. I was really looking forward to it, and so I was pretty nervous. Todd (my partner) is well past the rank of Life Master, and so we couldn't play with people like me. Instead, our competition was composed of all the veterans, with complicated conventions, systems, and partnership agreements. In other words, they were good.
I am not.,
We played two sessions, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. In the afternoon, we didn't play very well, but we had a few good rounds. Other rounds were... very bad. I passed a splinter, I made an absurd jump shift, I tried to use a convention we weren't playing with.... Spectacular failures, to be sure, but on the whole, the session was better than I expected. We ended up with about a 48% game, much better than I had even hoped for.
We went to dinner at a nice steakhouse, and talked about hands. I got mocked some, which only seems fair.
In the evening session, everything that looked promising and good in life as well as in bridge went to bed and left me.
We played a lot of hands, and most of them were bad. Of course, the ones that were good were just ordinary good, not remarkable good. Good, like everyone else. But the bad ones... I got rather accustomed to hearing the phrase "stone-cold bottom" in reference to our many adventures in the land of the sub-par plays. As Todd put it, we ended up in the right place a lot of the time, but I "mangled" the defense.
So, I feel really shitty about that. Defense, especially signaling, is why the game of bridge is like a deep, cold ocean infested with sharks. I got thrown in yesterday, and I am going to go do my bridge penance now. I bought a book on defense, and I am going to use it, damn it all! I will be better!
Todd is off to Europe for a month, so I have some time. When he gets back, I will have improved.
But ugh.

thebes // cairo