Posted 9:50 PM by Floyd

Last weekend I bought a laptop and after much pain and travail set up a wireless network where my desktop performs connection sharing for the laptop. (Special shout out to Declarer friends Jon and Beth Leonard for setting me straight with some of the networking options. After that we played Bohnanza and Outpost and they beat me like a rented mule.)

Now that we have two computers, Sherry wanted to play on Yahoo's free bridge game. I had played there for a little while around 1999. So we entered our Yahoo ids and proceeded to the bridge game.

What a nightmare! I had forgotten all the unpleasant aspects of bridge Yahoo style. First of all, it's hard to enter a game, especially when trying to play as a pair. The game is divided into various lounges. Each lounge can hold up to 180 people, and access to them is blocked when they are full. So Sherry joined a lounge that had 175, but when I got the bridge page it was full and I could not get in. Then when we got to a lounge I tried to find a table that needed a pair. The list of tables is rearranged continuously, so it's hard to focus on one and you might misclick.

Our troubles had only begun when we finally got to a table. Sherry was stuck and had to get up from her seat; immediately someone took her place. On OkBridge people are good about asking if they can sit, but not so here. The player would not get up when I asked! So we left and I started my own table.

At this point our opponents were the problem. Apparently Yahoo bridge is played lightning fast, and the players get results that reflect the amount of thought they put into the game. On the first hand Sherry and I bid up to 5D in a competitive auction. I had a problem on my last bid, and as I was thinking my RHO complained that we were too slow. He hit 5D, and made a terrible switch to ensure that we would make it. Then he and his partner left!

It was like that for the next hour -- terrible players who got up and left whenever they didn't like their hands or their results; people who whined about slow play then wouldn't accept claims. Maybe it's time to buy a second household membership to OkBridge.