Diary of a Bridge Pro #17

The Hal Files

Hal Antonson was a dutiful client and computer maven. He made his money at Microsoft, worked there twenty years. The clip featured above, the closing minute of the 1968 film 2001, A Space Odyssey, could be the most important piece of film any of us will ever see.
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I first saw that one with my family at Radio City Music Hall the weekend it opened in November of 1968 - my sister Carolyn was home from her first semester at Ann Arbor and we made a family outing of it. Kubrick reached me that day, I may have been only 9 but I was struck by the image in that crowded, darkened theater, Hal the Computer watching and lip-reading - for even to me at 9 that was apparent, what a film-maker! Certainly the monkeys and the monolith were lost on me at the time - maybe they still are - 

What extraordinary parents I had! That clip is way too  heavy - here’s the one I’ve been wanting to feature, I always thought this song was original to Joni Mitchell, but no - she did get some celebrities to appear on the studio version, featured here.

  For our crowd here at this DBP blog, I think this b/w cocktail party is an even better tribute -  worth noting here that this was around the 100th song Joni ever recorded - I was a huge fan as a teenager, greatly inspired by that whole singer-songwriter tradition - the 100th song she ever recorded, and the first that she hadn’t written herself.

  Just sayin’.

  Check out this, one of the first she ever recorded - Me and my Uncle, the Dead made this a staple of many of their over two thousand shows:

Now this elegant, cocktail party version of Twisted, by the woman who actually wrote the song - with Count Basie!

And now Joni once more, with her hit version, from her Court and Spark album, 1974 - complete with contributions from Cheech and Chong (“This chick is crazy - flip city! Shooby-dooby!”) and a Steely Dan founder too - I couldn’t confirm this, but they say - that if you can remember the 60’s (which were at their peak when this was recorded, in January of ‘74 in LA) - then you weren’t really there.
  The guy I know who was most there was bridge legend Kyle Larsen - born January 2nd, 1950, he lived in San Francisco and was a daily visitor to Haigh-Ashbury in the brief period in ‘66/’67 when that two-block stretch didn’t just feature regular performances by Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane, but - it might as well have been the center of the universe, for a lot of us.
  Here’s Joni’s Twisted, the version most of us know best:

It is not the most attractive trait of bridge pros to estimate the money of their (our) clients - but we do. In our defense, how can we recommend the most suitable services for a client if you don’t know what they can afford?

Hal wasn’t rich enough to hire an entire elite team for the major events - that’s a very price undertaking. It’s at least ten weeks a year of bridge, if you’re thorough - fielding a team for the Spingold, the Team Trials, plus the other major championships (Vanderbilt and Reisinger), maybe a practice tournament before each nationals - then in May you’ll want to contest the Trials in suburban Chicago.  If you win there you’ll head off a few months laters for  some other country, perhaps to Bermuda itself. As USA1 (or USA2) you’ll be traveling there with your team and a small American delegation to contest the Bermuda Bowl as the US representative. In pursuing that goal you’ll be chilling with the snow leopards, those rare mammals who inhabit the highest rung of the food chain, “Masters of the Universe” as they were known in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.

Once you start to play in that milieu you’ll be part of “The Show” - that’s the term minor league ballplayers use when referring to the major leagues, and it’s apt for bridge as well. Duplicate at your local strip mall isn’t “The Show” - playing in the Spingold, even the very first round - that is.

Competing in the major North American team championships, and then the Team Trials, then possibly the Bermuda Bowl - this is the bridge equivalent of trying to win the “America’s Cup” at yachting, or a polo trophy in Westhampton with a crew of hired Argentinians.

All kinds of rich guys do it - some of ‘em second or third generation Americans like me, whose grandfathers fled the shtetl and they found themselves in the right place at the right time to make small (and sometimes large) fortunes here, in Wall Street or tech, depending on the era.

“From Poland to Polo in a single generation….” 

If you want to sponsor a bridge team at that level, expect to spend north of a million dollars a year.
Hal was not the type of sponsor to hire an entire team for the Spingold, but he was quite happy to hire me to play at nationals, and at some regionals too.

   Between bridge games and bridge conversations, Hal and I liked to talk about his experiences at Microsoft. 

Hal: …. So yes, I created and developed some bridge software for Microsoft - it was just kind of a hobby for me, a project I found interesting personally - I was mostly a hardware guy, getting inside machines with a wrench and a pliers and fixing these mammoth computers - then later I got into writing code - I found their bridge software kind of unwieldy so I wrote something better for them - they must have made 20 million off what I wrote for them….

Brian: So did they give you a fat residual check for royalties on all those sales?

Hal: Royalties? No way - they gave me an “‘Attaboy!”

*****

Convergent, then, that Hal would have noticed Gates at the Nationals in San Francisco in the late autumn of 2019 - just prior to lockdown, the last nationals to be held for two years - the last open nationals to be held for three - The Covid Story, which of course Gates himself had so much to do with - 

“There’s Bill,” Hal remarked to me in that downtown hotel ballroom that day - I make the time 12:53, for the playing room had that bubbling spirit of hope which dissipates as the matches go on and reality sets in - the reality that states: No, this isn’t going to be the tournament where my teammates and I all play well and behave well, remember out systems and bid responsibly, count the distributions and plan the play, we’ll sail unchallenged to the Winner’s Circle, we fantasize….
No, this tournament is going to be like all the others. Reality Check.
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  Reminds me of a classic Talking Heads song, maybe you’re reminded of it too:

In terms of net worth, many of my clients fall within shouting distance of 20-30 million - just an educated guess. For regular people there is little distinction between twenty million and two hundred million - even five million might seem like immense wealth to a teenager or teamster.

For the very wealthy, these distinctions are not irrelevant at all, but important.

The difference between having a few or even five million, and five hundred million is the difference between hiring a second-tier pro for a few days at your local regional once a year, and - flying around the country on a private jet, and fielding a team of stars at every tournament you attend. You’ll bump into the other whales, in the finals of the KO’s, at the airport in Teterboro, at the Michelin - Star restaurants you both patronize.  

I played one especially small regional with Hal, there in eastern Washington State along the Columbia River, we played a team game with some friends of his and a couple of pair games together. We finished second in the Saturday rendition, I was pleased with that result - he seemed to be too.

  What would a diary entry from that tournament look like? Let me try to write one now:

  Tri-city Regional, Pasco, Washington, October, 2019

….smallest regional I’ve ever been to, I’ve played sectionals way bigger than this jamboree - this tri-city regional in eastern Wash State gets to host this regional one year in seven - for half the field this might be the only regional they play this year - some touring pros here - Passell with Nanette and also with Kranyak and JLall - Bruce Ferguson - Howard Parker - the guys on this circuit find it quite pleasant and medium lucrative - my motel is a two minute walk from the playing room, both my motel and the host venue look like your classic airport Holiday Inn - we played a team game the first day, joined up with some old PNW friends of Hal - second and third days  - we played pair games - highlights include bumping into JLall one day and Kranyak the next at the Asian restaurant in the strip mall across Route 397 from the venue….

   Hal and I managed a third and a second in the two pair games - got beat up pretty bad in the team game we played - would have been nice to win something with him but a third and second are credible so the trip wasn’t a failure, could almost be labeled a success  - at least I can put a tick in that box (played a really small regional with one client in eastern Wash State: Check - ).

  On the second day Hal and I had lunch at the local fish tavern set on one of the rivers that runs through the industrial districts of this tri-city region. On the ground here, Trump is president and the locals are fine with that (unlike the New York I left from and will return to), though no one has much to say on the subject, pro or con - maybe a T-shirt of bumper sticker of MAGA Hat - we are in between the coasts here, militia country.

  Yes, it’s hard not to notice something of a cultural divide here in Amerika - unlike the Vietnam Era, however, few people are much concerned with it, one way or another.

  Haters gotta hate.

  *****

   John K. seems to be everywhere we look, try your luck at this hand I played against Kranyak during this year’s visit to South Florida:

You hold JT87x, x, void, AQJxxxx (I did): 7-5 distribution is very rare. 

​https://www.durangobill.com/Bridge.html ​

You might enjoy that link - that’s where I learned that the chance of holding 7-5-1 distribution (“Any of the 24 possible 7-5-1 distributions”, I should say) - is around one in 900 - 
That is consistent with our experience, no? If we played three afternoons a week at the local duplicate club, we might go three or four months before we’d hold that pattern again. 
Definitely worth waiting for! 
With this 7-5-1 (5=1=0=7), it’s no one vul, and you’re in third position, after two passes - Accept the One Club opening that I chose - Kranyak, on my left, doubled - Partner, Walter, bid One Heart, and Kranyak’s student, on my right, bid 2 Diamonds. With a weak hand I couldn’t think of a good reason to introduce the spades, so I continued with a simple Three Clubs. Kranyak seized the day with a bid of 3 No Trump. Put yourself in my seat and act after this 3NT bid is passed back to you, making the sequence to date:
P - (P) - 1C - (Double) - 1H - (2D) - 3C - (3NT) - P - (P) - Answer to follow in #18 -