Nauseating Bridge Quotes: Steve Bandes

STEVE BANDES (alias, The Hair Curler – for perpetually twisting his cowlick): (cross-referenced to Stasha Cohen, Allan Stauber and Anonymous)

Bandes (commenting to some players, including me, about his partner’s defense on a hand): Not only did he lead from 3 drek, he MUDDED on me besides!

—

Bandes was my partner in a pair event. N had responded 1♥ to RHO’s 1♣ . The opponents then quickly got to 3NT (perhaps by 1N-3N, but it occurred 30+ years ago, and was not recorded at the time). Per the above, I knew better than to MUD on Bandes from 3 weak hearts. That would lead to even more hair-curling incidents. In addition, we were playing 4th best. Since I didn’t have 4, I assumed that if I wanted to lead hearts, that meant I had to lead the highest of the next lower suit. But I wasn’t sure if that meant by rank, or by the way my hand was sorted (assuming that I had a lower one, or if not, maybe that meant a wraparound to the first suit). All of that seemed very confusing, so I led the top card, i.e., the HJ from J8x. Dummy had KQ9x. Declarer, a woman who was pretty much a novice, had Axx. She won the K, and played some other suit to her hand. At some point she played the HA, and then played her low heart to the Q with no apparent thought whatsoever, and even much less than that in her spaced-out-time discontinuum. She got 4 heart tricks, and all the other tricks that she was entitled to.

Bandes (after we had left the table): What a brilliant lead! Too bad it was wasted on a moron!

PS: Please also see a mildly related hand played by Stasha Cohen.

—

Bandes is a good player who sometimes could get somewhat absentminded — probably because of his Ph. D. We were East-West in a 3 board per round duplicate game. He, as declarer, and the opponents took quite awhile to play a hand. (Bandes really is much slower than I am!) After it was finished, he was relieved that the round was finally over, and wanted to avoid getting in time trouble on the next round. He hurriedly got up and started to rush off to the next table, even though everyone else was still playing, and there was a moderate amount of time left.

Anonymous Opponent: Wait! You can’t leave yet! We have TWO more boards to play!!!