As many of you know already, I had a very successful trip to Detroit; we managed to win the Red Ribbon pairs. This is probably the premiere flight B event in the country (if there is such a thing), and obviously it was amazingly thrilling to win it. It's definitely the largest field I've ever won out of (176 pairs to start with), although I guess you could contend that the GNT-B field is implicitly larger (including teams that are eliminated at the district level, etc..) Anyway, obviously it was tremendous.

How did we win? We did not play perfectly, far from it. We played very well, and got lucky, although the only session in which the opponents gave us gifts left and right was the big game we had in the second qualifying session which left us in the overnight lead -- 69 percent (in a huge field, this is a ridiculous score), and it would have been higher except that on the last hand of the evening, I picked up AJ9x JTxx xx Axx white/red. After two (one?) passes, righty opened 1D, I doubled, lefty tried 1S and partner bid 3H. Righty now bid 4D. I thought that we were odds-on to make 3H and that if this was making, we were getting a terrible score anyway, so I made a matchpoint double going for the +200. Instead, I got the -710.

As you can see, it's certainly not true that everything we did worked out. But here's an example of an amazingly lucky thing:

Holding Jxx J876x Axx Qx, I think red/red, partner opened 1D. Righty overcalled 1H and I passed; lefty bid 1S and partner doubled. Righty now bid 2S, and I really ought to have bid 3D here, but I passed. Partner doubled again and righty passed. Now I was stuck. My hand seemed to me to be worth more than a 3D bid; partner apparently had a big hand, and I had six points in his primary suits. I tried to do something clever, namely bidding a temporizing 3H (which was ludicrous as partner was never bidding 3NT on this auction.) Of course, all of this could have been avoided if I had bid 3D in the first place.

Anyway, I was hoping partner would figure out whether to bid game or not, and which game, but instead my dummy in 3H was x AKx KQxxx AKTx.

So here we were, playing in their overcall suit at the 3-level after an accident, and ... +170 for a great result (5D is cold but the field didn't get there.) Now that's lucky.

The end of the second day was pretty amazing. We sat down to the final round knowing we were doing well and had a chance, and we sat down against friends, and wouldn't you know it, we got the worst possible normal result on both boards (not bottoms, but certainly at best average-minuses.) -100 in 3S when we bid aggressively, -100 in 2D when they defended optimally. I turned to them and said, "I think you just cost us the event," smiling (of course they had done nothing wrong, just the opposite; it would have been extremely unethical for them to punt to us in this situation.)

And when I saw the results with 2 rounds to go I was sure they had. A pair had had a slight lead on us going into the final session, with three other pairs very close; none of those other pairs had done well, but we were three percentage points ahead of the leading pair with two to go. Our second to last round was also average-minus, and I knew we would drop a bit. So it depended on what they did.

After being not at all nervous the entire time, my heart starting pounding madly as soon as the last card on deal 104 of the event had been played. We had played them fast, so there was a lot of waiting game. I went outside, had some food, made a phone call, paced around the hallway, and came back just as the results were finishing being entered. I stared at the directors and watched as the print-out started...

1412.31 Mike Develin-Li-Chung Chen
1411.20 Ron Nelken-Sidney Kantar

And I didn't feel safe yet. One matchpoint on a 43 top! That's a scoring error, an appeal, even a couple of scoring errors not involving either of us. The second place pair came and congratulated us and we were chatting, and they said, well, we should go look for scoring errors. I waited patiently. The Daily Bulletin editor photographed and interviewed us, and just as he was wrapping up, they came running up. "We found a scoring error. Seriously."

My heart sank.

They had been +600 instead of +500 on a board. Surely this would turn the tide. I wasn't really breathing.

The directors looked at the board. +690, +660, -100, etc., etc.. No +500's, +600's, or anything. They paged through it. "I don't think this is going to change the matchpoints," one director said. They punched it in and it came up 1412-1411 again. We had, amazingly, survived the scoring error, and that was that, and I was able to breathe again.

It was a tremendous experience.

The next two days, seventh in the NAP flight B, we weren't completely there (and of course were super tired on the last day with its 10 AM start), but we autopiloted our way to a seventh-place finish, whatever, it hardly mattered. Winning this event by a single matchpoint on a 43 top will live forever in my memory. To put it in perspective, over a four-day stretch, we won by less than one-tenth of one percent, an amazingly close margin. We needed every matchpoint double, every overtrick, every lucky break, every bad opening lead by the opponents and good opening lead by us, everything. What a game.

Vegas was, as always, a ton of fun. I admit that I was in a sleep-deprived haze most of the time (hyperoxygenation of casino air can only accomplish so much); the bridge at the tables was a lot of fun if unmemorable, at least the first two days (someday I'll realize that Sunday morning bridge is really just not for me and graciously bow out of it.) I even had some kibitzers for some of the time, during which I got a series of incredibly boring hands, most of which I put down as dummy (Victor certainly got his money's worth declaring on the trip.)

Tons of fun bridge and fun non-bridge. What could go wrong?