Well, as expected, we were eliminated from the Vanderbilt last night. I thought we played well, but the other team was better. The way this works is that each team is made up of two partnerships. Each partnership plays a pair from the other team. The same hands are played at both tables, with the respective pairs playing the opposite hands at each table. The scores from each table are compared and added, then coverted into a scale called International Match Points (IMPs).

We lost by 28 IMPs, 78-50. That doesn't sound very close, but if your team bids and makes a game at one table and defeats that same game at the other, you can get 10 or 12 IMPs, so the real difference comes down to about 3 hands out of the 32 we played. Sure enough, there were about three hands where if we'd done the right thing we could have won the match. Of course, it's easy to play the woulda-coulda game. The opponents could point to a couple of hands on which they clearly did the wrong thing. Had they avoided those errors, they would have beaten us handily. It's always easy to overlook that in the postmortem.

We had our chances and came up short. On to the next events. I expect to play in a pair game today. For the dinner break, a large group of bridge players and local friends are going to our favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. Asya, my partner from yesterday, is taking the day off from playing today so she can go on an eight-mile jog in preparation for dinner. Mmm, dumplings...