Swimming With Sharks

I've been playing a bit less and reading a bit more this week. Last night, one of my IAC teammates pointed me to an excellent 2/1 tutorial online. While it included Bergen raises, which I glossed over, it also taught me a thing or two about FSF (Fourth Suit Forcing) that I hadn't been aware of.

Of course, cramming knowledge into your head does not make for instant and flawless execution - just ask any college student.

Nonetheless, this Sunday was a special brunch and game at the club, celebrating the Rookie/Master win. My Master level partner, Jean, had even offered to play with me again for the game.

Until now, all I'd played at the club were the rookie/master and 199er games. Now, I was playing against some of the top club players around. There were going to be far less gifts than usual.

I was nervous early, and it showed. I missed making a reasonable 1NT answer after RHO overcalled. I found myself in more tough bidding spots, and didn't always get them right. We pulled in a few zeroes, including a table of 3 boards of 0, 0, 0.5.

That said, my expert partner pulled out some great competitive bids that seemed to score well. I was declarer a fair bit (more than I was comfortable with, maybe), and at least some of those ended well. The only strong feelings that I had were that the field was much tougher, and that my partner was quite good.

The last table was one of our better ones of the day, and as we were finishing the director dropped by to tell us that going into the last round, we were first east/west by a smidge. I was a bit surprised, but our last table made us clear top east/west, and second overall, for 2.5 masterpoints (a very big haul for the likes of me!)

I'm on a run of consecutive finishes in the money, and the masterpoints are fairly well rolling in right now. My confidence is rising, especially with Sunday's game, but I think I need a bit of perspective. My bidding is going a bit wonky, due to all this reading/thinking I'm doing , and my counting is getting a bit weaker, due to the lack of practice.

Maybe the best thing I can take from all of this is that I'm not totally out of place in the typical club game anymore. It'll be some time, though, before I'm truly at the level of the better club players.