The Good and the Bad, With a Little Ugly Thrown In

As the 5:20 p.m. match gets underway, Canada’s Bermuda Bowl team has experienced both good and bad on this, the third day of the round robin.

We got off to a really energizing start on Day 1, overwhelming one of the pre-tournament favourites (Poland) by 31 IMPs. Match 2 was a closely fought, low scoring affair in which Australia prevailed 21-20 IMPs.  We closed out the opening day defeating Guadeloupe by a healthy margin (37 IMPs).  With the new WBF 20-point victory point scale in use, we finished Day 1 with a total of 44.4 VPs, good enough for second spot. It was early days, but we felt we were entitled to smile a bit over dinner by the sea side.

Our opening match on Day 2 was against Bahrain, a somewhat surprising representative from WBF Zone 4 (Asia and Middle East) which is usually dominated by India and Pakistan. They put up a good fight, but Canada ended up ahead by 13 IMPs. Then we marched on to disaster, as the team took a drubbing from England (-22 IMPs) and then lost a back-and-forth battle to Japan by 12 IMPs. At the close of this day, the smiles did not come so easily. We had dropped into 9th place with 69.3 VPs.

We knew all along that Day 3 would be extremely difficult. First up would be Netherlands (the defending Bermuda Bowl champions), followed by perennial contender Italy, with China rounding out the day. We got back on track in a big way, handing team Orange their biggest loss so far (we prevailed by 34 IMPs) and vaulting back into a qualifying position. What a fabulous start to our toughest day! The camp had been re-energized. The feeling didn’t last long as Italy annihilated us by over 50 IMPs (on BBO, no less). We’ve lost a little to average so far today, having picked up just 17.62 over our first two matches.

As we write this post, Jeff and Paul, Dan and Darren are taking on the strong team from China. Let’s hope we all get to smile a little at dinner tonight.

And by the way, none of the older members of the team appear in this picture. With age comes wisdom!