Deal Of The Week: February 27, 2025
It's a small club game, and on this day one of the pairs has failed to show, so we are stuck in the dreaded 2½-table Howell, until a single player is phoned who can arrive in ten minutes and play with me. We don't have BridgeMates or even Howell table markers at this club, but I am able to print small guide cards for each pair, showing where to go, which boards to play, and who to play them against (by pair number) each round. In the ten minutes I have before my partner arrives, I print these out, snip them up, sort them, and distribute them with a piece of tape so they can affix them to their scorecards, a good practice that prevents them being lost before round 4. I also quickly write where the board sets go in rounds 2-5 on my sheet, so I can move the boards at the end of each round: the 3-table Howell is a bit irregular and it's important to get it right. Partner arrives with perfect timing, and we finish only a few minutes after the other two tables, thanks to a few claims and me scoring up quickly. I consult my sheet and set out the boards for round two and move to the next table along with everyone else. My LHO notices that the boards on our table are not the boards we should have according to the printed guide cards, so I put them back and get the right ones for our table and we begin playing. Soon, on the final hand of the round, I am facing this deal (click Next repeatedly to go through my horror story....):
The solution to the mixed-up Howell movement? There wasn't one, I had to change some things around to avoid pairs playing boards twice, and in the final round we had at least one repeat opponent to avoid seeing the same boards twice. I can hardly blame our first-round opponents, who sat E-W in round one, moved as directed to N-S at the same table, and played the same boards again without noticing, since it was my mistake that caused the problem. As I say, bad day at the office.....
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