Exhaustion kicked in several days ago during the Rockwell Mixed Pairs. Somehow you and your partner managed to qualify for the second day, which inspired you to stay up too late reliving your brilliance, only to gloriously crash and burn the next night, idiotically using Losing Trick Count to justify opening 2C on this final West hand, causing your trusting and equally wasted partner to pole-vault himself in 6NT going down six, illustrating an important lesson you were supposed to already know.
There is now a cinder block where your battered brain used to be thanks to the Rockwell, and another across your lower back
, probably thanks to a hasty four-mile powe
r walk across the Mississippi River to Arkansas and back
during an afternoon break.
The aroma of Hospitality bruschetta wafts in from the hallway outside. Your opponents have not turned up yet, but it's usually okay to shuffle unsupervised. Top players tend to skip these formalities - they rarely compare score cards after a session, out of professional courtesy and the assumption everyone there is experienced enough to keep things accurate. They're probably all outside having a quick smoke - seems like a lot of the pros are smokers, night owls suited to a vampirish afternoon/evening schedule, avoiding the light of day, partying well past midnight and sleeping through morning. Your teammates will face Poles Jacek Kalita and Michal Nowosadzki. You and your partner Lisa are waiting on the Dutch contingent, Sjoert Brink and Bas Drijver. This pair helped bring the Bermuda Bowl home for the Netherlands in 2011. They now play for hire along with the Poles and Jacek "Pepsi" Pszczola, on Josef Blass's current dream team. The team has taken two national titles so far, including last year's Jacoby Swiss in Philly.
Everything's totally fine. Pepsi's foursome for this round has a combined 69,000 masterpoints. You and your teammates have 10,000. This will be So. Much. Fun.
So you're shuffling away, trying to keep cool, when suddenly, like a surprise film effect, two grinning thirtysomething chaps lunge at your table from nowhere, uttering incoherent sneezing sounds which you realize later must have been their names. They're thrusting their hands at you, and because handshakes are not customary before bridge you fail to go with it gracefully, gripping too tight, extracting a good-natured yelp from Bas. These guys can't be smokers - they look like they just hopped off a sailboat - startlingly ruddy, blonde and fit, dressed in jeans and striped rugby shirts. They also seem way too goofy for bridge players, until you glance into their pale eyes at just the right moment and catch the occasional flash of intelligence, pulsing, on, off, on, off; warnings from a distant lighthouse.
It's just such a novelty to sit at a table with two cute young guys. Lisa's got her poker face on, but you know she has to be pinching herself like you. You pull out your hands, there's an efficient auction and poof, you're declarer in 3NT. (This is also novel. Even when you and your partner have slam between you, somehow these experts manage to steal the contract. Now their casual willingness to let you play gives slight pause.) Bas leads a high heart. The dummy goes down: four small hearts and a decent amount of honors in the other three suits. With Ax in hearts in hand, you count your tricks. You've got nine for sure, and as long as they don't get back in with those hearts you might even get a club overtrick at the end - you have QJxx on the board and A10xx in hand. May be worth a try.
You hold up your doubleton heart ace on the first trick. Another is led, and you have to win it. You're feeling a little tired. For some reason the cards are sort of out of focus, so you adjust your reading glasses and try to shake it off. You play a spade; they both follow, which means the spades are now all good, as well as the diamonds. And this is when things get funky.
You're running spades and diamonds. The air in the meeting room is now hazy, like a fog. The fluorescent lights overhead have dimmed, and you could swear there's a full moon above your partner's head. Instead of last week's wilted laundry, you are now wearing a long, white, ruffled nightgown. You seem to have lost your shoes and socks, and the floor beneath is no longer industrial carpeting. It's cobblestones, slightly damp in the evening fog.
That's okay, you tell yourself. Just keep running spades and diamonds and this will pass, even though sometimes you have cards in your hand, and sometimes you're holding a bouquet of posies. Bas on your left discards a high club, which makes you think about that tempting, unnecessary club finesse. There are still some hearts out, but surely, surely not enough hearts to set your game contract even if the finesse fails...hmmm, wonder what their discard system is?
"Upsiiiiide dooooowwwwn," says Sjoert. He's not wearing his rugby shirt any more. He's in a tux with a black cape and a high collar. His ruddy complexion has become pale, waxen, but he's still cute, and he clearly must have the king of clubs; the finesse is on, so what's the harm?
You lead the club queen from the board. Sjoert pauses, then delicately takes a card from his hand. A drift of fog skims the table surface. The card, when he places it, snaps faintly against his long, unusually pointy fingernails. It's not the king. He's ducking.
You could forget about the overtrick, play your ace and finish it off for game, but where's the fun in that? There are hardly any hearts left, and besides: The king. Is not. On your left.
You let the queen ride, and in a flurry like bats in the moonlight, Bas swoops in. He takes you with his club king, and then the table turns red with a gush, because there's a flood of hearts, hearts, hearts, and all your lovely winners are going, going, gone and there's nothing you can do, you have no silver bullets, and you have no time, no time to lift the hem of your flimsy nightgown and run barefoot over slick cobblestones out to the hall for a slab of garlicky bruschetta to stuff in
Sjoert's mouth, no time to grab a sharp little golf pencil and drijve it (sic) deep into Bas's wicked, false-carding heart.
The thing is, if you'd only kept track of the hearts and (just one last pun) maybe Counted them (like on Sesame Street) you'd have known this could happen.
But the other thing is, if you keep letting these brilliant immortals feed on you like this, eventually it may be worth it. Because, as legend has it: someday, once they've squeezed you for all you have and there's nothing left, you'll become one of them.
[Editor's note: No record was kept of any actual hands played between Brink, Drijver, the author of this piece and her partner. The 3NT hand was played during the second session of the 2019 Jacoby Swiss as described, but against different opponents who were nowhere near as mediagenic. No harm is intended. I mean, look at them. Could anyone this cute make a false discard?]
