Story by Martha Smith (BBO: MRSmith4)

“I don’t know, Carol. Maybe we should just call it a day and go home earlier tomorrow…” 

It was Saturday night, and my bridge partner and I had just finished three full days at the NABC Toronto. We’d done pretty well, playing in the Gold Rush Pairs (limited to 750 masterpoints) and had earned some red and gold points, coming in 50% or better in all of our sessions. The issue was that on Sunday, there were no Gold Rush Pairs. The only game we could play in and still get home at a reasonable hour on Sunday night was something called Fast Pairs.

“I don’t know…” I said. “We’re already fried from playing bridge 3 straight days. We’re gonna have to play against the Big Boys,” (Big Boys being our pet term for games with no upper masterpoint limit), “and those people have conventions known only on Mars! We won’t know what the heck is going on. AND we’ll have to play FAST! They’ll probably be calling the director on us for delay of game if we blink!”

“Well, let’s just try it. If we hate it, we’ll just skip the afternoon session and go home earlier.” My partner is more determined and competitive than I am. It’s not unheard for her to go cowboy at the bridge table.

So, Sunday morning, off to the Fast Pairs we went.

The first thing we learned was that the Big Boys in Fast Pairs are serious people. There was none of the laughing and joking around going on in the room, like there is in the Gold Rush. No chit chat…not much smiling either. These folks were all business! The atmosphere made us more nervous.

The second thing we learned was that Fast isn’t THAT fast: we found we were able to keep the pace of the game fairly well.  That made us less nervous.

The third thing we learned was that the Fast Pairs has a higher international presence. Many pairs around us were speaking in tongues. That included the pair at our third table. On our last hand with them, Carol and I reached a 6H in the South (me) contract, which East promptly doubled (those Big Boys don’t mess around). West played his ace of diamonds, taking the first trick, and followed with another diamond, which I won. At that point, the hand was a lay down, so I claimed. When East saw my hand, he suddenly threw in his cards and started screaming at his partner in… maybe Polish? He continued to rant for some time as the round was called. Carol and I had no idea why, because as far as we could see, a lay down is a lay down. But East was really mad. We happened to pass them on the street over the lunch break, and East was still chewing out his partner! We couldn’t understand what his problem was, as we don’t speak Polish, but whatever it was, we were feeling it must be good for us!

And we needed it, because the fourth thing we learned was that the Big Boys in Fast Pairs DO play conventions from Mars! We were getting crushed! While we weren’t at the bottom, we finished the two sessions with 45% and 38%.

The last thing we learned is that we weren’t the only people with a measly 200 something masterpoints who were afraid of playing Fast Pairs. It turned out that the C bracket in our section consisted of only two pairs. And because we finished higher than the other C pair in both session (by .2% in one of them), we got points! GOLD points! It way more than made up for the pain of getting trounced!

On the way home, we reviewed the boards and realized why East had been so angry with his partner on that 6Hx contract. You need some luck if you double with one point and a void in clubs as East did. And East did have some potential luck, as it turned out that West was holding 5 clubs. Had West led a club at trick 2 after he saw 5 clubs in the dummy, we’d have been down 1. Bad luck for East, good luck for me.  And as I always say, I’d rather be lucky than smart!

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