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Louisville is the most important town of Kentucky, more than one million of inhabitants, on the Ohio River. The time zone is East Coast (GMT-5; CET-6), but the saving daylight time has started yesterday in Kentucky, then count respectively -4 and -5.
The Vanderbilt Cup is the most important trophy of the Spring North America Championship. It was donated by Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, the man who invented the contract bridge. It happened in the night of October 31th 1925, crossing the Panama Channel in the steamship Finlandia with his friends, but we’ll tell it another time. Just we like to recall that H.S. Vanderbilt also invented the Strong Club, and that he has won three times the sail America’s Cup: 1930, 1934, 1937 (in 1932 and in 1940 he won his own bridge cup!).
It is important to know that the points earned in Vanderbilt Cup will affect the starting place in the trials, where the winner will be second US team for the 2011 Bermuda Bowl (the first one, winners of 2010 trials, is that of Fleisher: Fleisher-Kamil, Levin-Weinstein, Martel-Stansby. See www.USBF.Org). Better will be the position earned here, in Vanderbilt Cup, higher will be the starting one there, in the trials that will take place in May, at Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas, immediately after the Cavendish.
Vanderbilt Cup is in KO format; the roster now counts 67 teams: it must thin out to 64, so having a power of 2 as it need in a KO event. Today 54 teams rest and 13 play for ten places; tomorrow, the KO stage will start.
At the moment, the Diamond team (Diamond-Platnik, Gitelman-Moss, Greco-Hampson) has already earned the bye in trials’ quarter finals because the results in preceding 2010 NABC, Reisinger and Spingold. If they get the final in current Vanderbilt, also being runners up, they will start the trials from semifinals. The other teams can hope only to enter quarterfinals, in the best case. Last, the teams that employs foreign player will have only a part of the placement score, but, of course, life is no only made of score: the victory is worth more!
The Italians playing the Vanderbilt Cup are: Fulvio Fantoni and Claudio Nunes in Zimmerman team, last year winner (but the Italians didn’t play in 2010). Lorenzo Lauria with Alfredo Versace, and Giorgio Duboin with Antonio Sementa, in Jimmy Cayne’s team. Norberto Bocchi and Guido Ferraro in Jacobs team. Gabriella Olivieri and Dano De Falco in the team of Patricia Cayne.
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Paolo Enrico Garrisi