Finally, we did it, Chris and I got to play together in a really serious bridge tournament. My brother was out sick, so he sadly couldn’t join us, but after learning a lot from my first 2 bridge tournaments we were ready for round 2. Chris had his morning warm-up of crushing bridge bots:
Then, we headed off to Lloyd Center on the TriMet ride together. They were all very nice there, as high schoolers rarely play bridge, and Dave Brower the owner granted us free entry to the tournament. This was going to be a tough one as we were put straight into the open section, in an analogy to chess as I am a chess player, this is like a 1200 being put into an 1800+ section to get thrown around. In our first round, we faced off against someone who was in the top 500 in ACBL master points. After getting utterly crushed when they didn’t bid on a 15-point hand then putting us down 3 on a doubled 2 diamonds stealing 800 points in one round. Not a great start, but we continued through, and in the open section, you obviously get the esoteric systems, as a pair pulled a Strong Club with a 10-12 point No Trump on us. Then, in the first round after 1 club (strong hand), 1 diamond, and 2 clubs we get a 25+ point alert. Chris and I were looking at each other like, “What is going on?” Luckily their esoteric system was pretty complicated and they were still grasping it so they had only an 18-point hand and we were able to sneak a victory by.
Overall it was a fun experience, we learned a lot from playing an actual tournament in bridge. At first, we started to think we were pretty good at bridge, as we could start to easily rank high in Funbridge tournaments and crush Funbridge bots. However, this tournament was a learning experience for both of us as we realized that the reason we could beat those bots so easily was that we could predict them so well. We knew the meanings of their bids, and how they played and so we had most of the information. To get better, we would have to train together and play more esoteric bidding systems.
You can find more about the hands we played here: https://www.bridgewebs.com/cgi-bin/bwoq/bw.cgi?pid=display_rank&event=20230802_1&club=portland