Mom and I played every session of the recent Durham bridge sectional. Friday and Saturday we had an amazing run of finishing first overall for all four sessions. Well, “overall” for the 0-200 players, that is. That included a 70+% session on Saturday morning, which is pretty rare — 60% is often good enough to win. We collected about 9.5 masterpoints, which is almost as many as I’ve won all year before this.
Most of the competition wasn’t too strong, of course, but there was one quite good team that kept finishing second to us. They got their revenge on Sunday by handily winning the Sunday Swiss teams event, where you need a team of four players to compete. We drafted my friends Rob and Brad who are good players if a little rusty. They did fine, but Mom and I couldn’t get in sync for too many hands, and we ended up in last place out of 10 teams (except for the two teams that bailed out early).
The event was well-attended and stretched the resources of the organizers, but they were up to the challenge. For some sessions, they even had tables set up in the hallways. The location was the basement of Northgate Mall in Durham — a place I never knew existed. There’s nothing about the basement on the mall map except for a mention in the directory of the location “Office Area”, which includes a few service businesses.