The Kranyak team (Gavin Wolpert, John Kranyak, Kevin Bathurst, and Kevin Dwyer) won the 2013 United States Bridge Championship (USBC) defeating in final the Fleisher Team (Marty Fleisher, Michael Kamil, Zia Mahmood, Michael Rosenberg, Chip Martel, and Chris Willenken) 270 – 202.
The Kranyak team will be USA1 for the 2013 Bermuda Bowl in Bali: as they are only four players, a pair will be added.
The road to the victory. In the Rounf of 16 Kranyak defeated Blanchard (Bob Blanchard- Shane Blanchard, Bob Hamman-Justin Lall, John Hurd- Joel Wooldridge) by 76 IMPs, in the quarter-finals they defeated Diamond (Diamond-Platnick, Greco-Hampson ) by 60 IMPs, and in the final they defeated Nickell by 75 IMPs.
US Bridge Federation Officia site >>
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Together with some friends Gavin Wolpert created an online bridge community to share news, tools, articles and many other bridge topics: Bridgewinners.com. Here, a few hours after the victory, Gavin wrote the following interesting notes:
About the victory – Surreal that we won… Before the Semis, Greg Humphreys sent me an email kind of needling me about a board I messed up in the quarter finals of the event. My response to him was “yeah its nice to be able to mess up like that and still win”. This was sort of our team motto. We can afford to make mistakes, we just need to back our judgement. Feeling comfortable with making mistakes makes it so much easier to play well. None of us cared if we looked stupid, we just wanted to win and knew our whole team felt the same way.
About his partnership with John Kranyak – I can’t speak for my teammates, but Kran and I did almost zero preparation for this event. We played last year and get to play regionals from time to time. Every time Kran started trying to add something extra to the system before the event I just said, “sorry if we lose cause we weren’t playing that, then so be it”. I told Kran jokingly after the event, “I don’t want to play another hand with you before the Bermuda Bowl”.
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