First Ever Blog – The Canadian Women’s Bridge Team

This is my first ever blog and I hope to get better at it over time.  I plan to write about the Canadian Women’s Bridge Team and their experiences in Shanghai as well as bridge in general.

I was surprised and thrilled to be asked to be the captain of the team when Mike Gamble couldn’t go.  Mike told me that the last time he had to back out of being captain the team won a medal.  This meant that his dropping out practically assures us of winning one. 

Our team is a mix of younger players and older players.  Some have a lot of international experience and others none at all.  The team has a lot of talent but perhaps our biggest disadvantage is that some of the partnerships are new.

The original foursome of  Sylvia Caley, Isabelle Smith, Julie Fajgelzon, Pamela Nisbet led the CWTC throughout the round robin and had a convincing win over the Gordon team in the final to qualify for Shanghai.  They added two top Canadian players with a lot of experience in Rhoda Habert and Francine Cimon.  Each of them has won medals in international play.  The new partnerships are Sylvia and Rhoda (who had played together previously for a number of years), Francine and Julie, and Isabelle and Pamela.  They have been practicing hard.  A team picture of the original foursome and the results of the CWTC are on the CBF website at:
www.cbf.ca/BWeek/index.html

Last week, I watched part of a session where Eric Kokish worked with Pamela and Isabelle on bidding.  Eric provided hands in a BBO teaching session, bidding the opponents’ hands.  Pamela and Isabelle bid the hands and Eric led the discussion about the bidding.  It was fascinating to watch and helped me to understand why Eric is in such demand as a coach.  Eric and Beverly have amazing material but the best part is how Eric helps the pairs to discuss the hands in a non-threatening way and think about their understandings (or lack of them) and develop communication.  The ladies told me afterwards how valuable the session was to them. 

Thanks to the generosity of Master Point Press, we have been able to select and purchase team jackets from Land’s End.  They are semi fitted light blazers in a cream colour which will be adorned with a stylized Canadian flag patch.  We are all getting together in Montreal on Labor Day and it would be fun to take a picture of all of us in our jackets (although the patches won’t be on them yet).

I have been going through the WBF convention cards of the other teams with a lot of help from Ray.  This is a lot more difficult than you might think because of the significant number of abbreviations and strange convention names that people use.  Admittedly some are just unfamiliar to me (being North American).  Have you heard of Verdi, Okuneff, Crowhurst, Jacoll or Ghestem, to name a few?  A prize if you got them all right. 🙂 

Ray does the research much faster than I do because he focuses on the important  parts of the convention card that need defenses, while I like to think about the logic and cohesiveness of their system (which requires much more detailed reading).   We are about done that part and I have started to provide defenses mainly using material provided by the Kokish’s who have been very generous with their time and support. 

We would like to get matches with some tough opposition – the tougher the better.  If anyone want to volunteer to provide our team with some online practice let me know.