 Winners of the
Wagar Women’s
Knockout Teams:
Top, Kathy
Sulgrove, Pam
Wittes and Renee
Mancuso; bottom,
JoAnn Sprung,
Peggy Sutherlin
and Karen Allison.
Sprung captures
Wagar Knockout
The team captained by JoAnn Sprung jumped
out to a 55-IMP lead in the first quarter and were
never threatened in winning the Wagar Women’s
Knockout Teams 169-119 over the squad led by
Hansa Narasimhan.
The winners are Sprung, Philadelphia; Kathy
Sulgrove, Twinsburg OH; Pam Wittes, Venice CA;
Renee Mancuso, Los Angeles; Karen Allison, Las
Vegas, and Peggy Sutherlin, Dallas.
They defeated Narasimhan, of Los Altos Hills
CA; Irina Levitina, Fair Lawn NJ; Jill Levin, Bronx; Sue Picus, New York City; Debbie
Rosenberg, New Rochelle NY, and JoAnna
Stansby, Castro Valley CA.
Sulgrove, whose previous North American
championship was the Mixed Pairs in 1984, was
winning the women’s KO for the first time. All of
her teammates have won the event previously,
Sprung pointing out that her last win in the event
was 10 years ago.
“We were lucky enough,” said Sprung, “that
Pam and Renee were available and wanted to play
with us.”
Said Mancuso: “We all meshed well.”
The match was decided more or less in the first
set when Sprung jumped out to a 66-11 lead.
Harasimhan won the second and third quarters, but
picked up only 24 IMPs. They dropped the final set
60-41.
Next NABCs
Orlando - Nov. 18-28, 2004
Pittsburgh - March 10-20, 2005
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Spingold enters
semifinal round
Teams captained by Mike Kamil, Nick Nickell,
George Jacobs and Warren Spector have advanced
to the semifinal round of the Spingold Knockout
Teams.
All but one of the quarterfinal matches was
close as Kamil took the measure of the Jimmy
Cayne squad (Charles Weed npc) 127-118. Nickell
led the Lou Ann O’Rourke squad by only 10 IMPs
going into the final quarter before prevailing 129-
103. Spector’s lead over the Mike Moss squad was
only 7 IMPs, but they came through with a 149-138
victory.
The only runaway involved Jacobs, who
knocked off the Peter Schneider squad 182-102.
In the semifinal round, Nickell – with
Richard Freeman, Bob Hamman, Paul Soloway,
Jeff Meckstroth and Eric Rodwell – will face
Jacobs, playing with Ralph Katz, Lorenzo
Lauria, Alfredo Versace, Steve Garner and
Howard Weinstein.
The other match pits Kamil – Christal
Henner-Welland, Peter Bertheau, Fredrik
Nystrom, Fulvio Fantoni, Claudio Nunes –
against Spector, whose teammates are Mark
Feldman, Ron Smith, Billy Cohen, Gavin
Wolpert and Vincent Demuy.
Teaford squad wins
0-1500 Mini-Spingold
A team of good friends that includes twin
brothers rode a monster second quarter to an easy
victory in the 0-1500 Mini-Spingold Knockout
Teams.
The winners are Mark Teaford, Kihei HI;
Ronald Resnick, Wailuku HI, and twins Norton
Rimer, La Jolla CA, and Myron Rimer, New City
NY.
>>>>>>>>>>> Page 2
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Tops in the IMP Pairs: Nikolay Demirev and
Jiang Gu.
Jiang Gu of Mountain Lake NJ learned to play
bridge in his native Shanghai. Nikolay Demirev
learned to play in Bulgaria. Apparently they learned
well because today they reign as the NABC IMP
Pairs champions. In the final session they climbed
all the way from 20th to the top.
Right behind them were Steve Robinson and
Peter Boyd.
Gu came to the United States in 1995 where he
works as an analyst for a major pharmaceutical firm. He took up the game when he was 17, and
he’s happy he now competes in America. “The
players here are much more advanced, and I enjoy
playing against good players.”
Demirev has been in America only four years,
and he’s working two jobs – a teacher of an English
Second Language class and a mental health
counselor. But that’s not what he wants to do. He
earned his MD as a doctor in Bulgaria, but he has
to do two years of study and a year of residency to
practice medicine here.
He started playing when he was 19, which
made his mother unhappy – she told him he had
much better things to do with his time. He is now
married, and his wife Darina also plays.
They began playing with each other because
they both had a partnership with Xiadong Shi on
OKbridge. Shi introduced them to each other, and
they started playing regularly on OKbridge,
building their own version of two-over-one along
the way.
Attendance to date - So far at New York 2004, the total attendance is 11,452.
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