08:34 13 February 2014 Atlanta, Georgia by GS Jade Barrett, CsbNews correspondent
“You throw batting practice, you warm up pitchers, you sit and cheer. You do whatever you have to do to stay on the team” – Bob Uecker, also known as Mr Baseball
The two weeks following the Bermuda Regional is downtime for the [ilink url=”https://www.facebook.com/pages/Great-American-Bridge-Tour/124487180911255″]Great American Bridge Tour[/ilink] , as the athletes rest, bond and enjoy their families, pets and home. A few of us take the stray club game or local Sectional gig, nothing too strenuous, but always a welcome opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. Roman Smolski and Vera Petty
During one weekend of February, our best minds gather together to update system notes, discuss developments in conventions and advancements in treatments as we prepare for the tournament year. While the [ilink url=”https://www.facebook.com/pages/Great-American-Bridge-Tour/124487180911255″]Great American Bridge Tour[/ilink] athletes can play any system, our primary system is Pressure 2/1, so-named by UK and Bermudian great, Roman Smolski (he observed that our teams never stopped attacking, pressuring our opponents – as well as ourselves – essentially all the time). We spend the first day considering the challenges of the past year: great bidding disasters, remarkable failures of memory brought on by over complication of system, evaluations of unfamiliar devices faced by the team, changes in the alert procedure and reviewing the ACBL Conditions of Contest. During this time we will begin the arduous task of documenting our bidding agreement, dotting our “i’s” and crossing our “t’s” and with any luck at all, limit our errors.
