The cache is not at the posted coords, but that is a good place to park.
I have two passions. Geocaching helps me to exercise the body (when I’m not doing PNGs). Tournament Bridge helps me to exercise my mind. It’s a good idea to get both kinds of exercise.
Perhaps you have noticed the Daily Bridge Hand that is published in many newspapers. It’s often on the same page as the crossword or Sudoku puzzles. When I get a newspaper (which isn’t often anymore), it’s the first thing I look for. It shows the bidding by each player and summarizes the play of the hand with a focus on a particular technique for making the bid.
Contract Bridge is a card game played by four people with a normal deck of 52 cards where you and your partner bid for the privilege of naming the trump suit. The higher you bid, the more tricks you must take to make your bid. You might say that if you get most of the high cards, then you will likely win most of the hands. Well, that may be true in someone’s living room, but there is a method that takes a lot of the luck out of the game. It’s called Duplicate Bridge. In Duplicate Bridge (which is really Contract Bridge), a ‘board’ is placed on the table. The board has four slots for the cards, one facing each direction. In Duplicate Bridge, each player removes the cards from the slot facing them. The bidding proceeds normally as it would in someone’s living room. Then, instead of playing the cards to the middle of the table, the cards are played right in front of each player so as to not mix the cards and hands together. Then, at the end of the hand, a player’s 13 cards are put back into the slot in the board and the score is recorded. The board is then passed to a different table where four new players that have not seen that hand will bid, play and record their own score. Afterwards it will be played and scored by as many as six or seven more tables of players that haven’t seen that hand. Then there is a method to compare scores from all the times the hand was played. So you and your partner may have had most of the high cards on a particular hand, but every other table will be playing the EXACT SAME HAND. You can have the majority of the high cards but if you don’t play them well, you will get a low score for the hand. Here is a typical duplicate bridge board:
Tournament bridge is simply an extension of duplicate bridge. There are several local duplicate bridge tournaments every week, including in Portsmouth, Eliot ME and York Me. All of these duplicate bridge games are sanctioned by the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). If you wish, you can try your luck at sectional or regional tournaments. The competition there can be fierce. The National tournament is held 3 times each year, and yes, there are the World Championships as well. Anyone can play.
So what is the prize if you do well or win a tournament? You earn Master points. The sum of Master Points you have won over your bridge playing career is a measure of your prowess at the bridge table. You can achieve various levels including Rookie, Club Master and Life Master, to name a few. Some players earn the Life Master ranking but many do not. Beyond Life Master, there are even higher levels most of which I will probably never get to.
Solve the puzzle to learn a bit more about Tournament Bridge (and to find the cache, of course)
You are looking for a camo'd bison tube. N 43° 17.ABC W 070° 53.DEF
A - North's partner:
East - 2
South - 0
West - 3
B - Term for the player who wins the bid:
Director- 4
Dummy- 6
Declarer- 8
C - Number of tricks you need to take to complete a “Grand Slam”:
7 - 1
10- 5
13- 8
D - Convention for asking partner how many aces he holds:
Blackwood- 7
Jacoby- 0
Cappalletti- 9
E - Movie star well known in the bridge world:
Bill Gates - 2
Matt Damon - 8
Omar Sharif - 5
F - Team game at tournaments named for certain Europeans:
French - 6
Swiss - 3
Danish - 1
Bug spray is a must during spring and summer!
It would be much appreciated if you do not copy and paste the same log for your day of caching.
As always when Geocaching, have fun, be safe and leave no trace.
Congratulations to rjb43nh and Serendipity12 for CO-FTF!
