 Three women
have recently
earned ACBL’s top
rank of Grand Life
Master — Rose
Meltzer, Nadine
Wood and Jayne
Thomas.
Meltzer, the
only woman to win
the Bermuda Bowl,
recently crossed the
10,000-masterpoint plateau to achieve Grand LM
status.
Meltzer and her team – partner Kyle Larsen and
teammates Peter Weichsel-Alan Sontag and Chip
Martel-Lew Stansby – won the 2001 Bermuda Bowl
in Paris.
They were together again in mid-February at
the San Mateo regional when Meltzer topped the
10,000-masterpoint mark while playing in — and
winning — a knockout match.
But winning wasn’t always so easy. Meltzer
won her first North American title – the Women’s
Swiss Teams at the 1998 Spring NABC in Reno –
and took the plunge into open competition the following
year.
The Meltzer team debuted in the 1999 Spingold – and went out in the round of 64. The team went to
the 1999 NABC “and we didn’t make it to the second
day of the Reisinger,” remembers Meltzer.
In January 2000, however, Meltzer and her
international squad– Weichsel, Sontag
and Polish stars
Adam Zmudzinski
and Cezary Balicki– won the World
Transnational Open
Teams.
Meltzer and her
American team
won the Spingold
that summer and
Meltzer became the first woman to win the event
since Edith Freilich in 1963.
The following year, the team won the repechage
final of the United States Bridge Championship and
were on their way to Paris.
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 Wood, the District 6 representative to the ACBL
Board of Directors since 1992, has also earned her
10,000th point to become a Grand Life Master.
Wood met the other Grand LM requirement
when she and Jeanne Fisher won the Women’s Pairs
in 1989.
Wood, who lives in Silver Spring MD, is a
caterer who is well known for her tuna salad – a staple
at the Women’s Team Trials.
Wood was chairman of the 1984 and 1993
Summer NABCs in Washington DC. She is a longtime
member of the ACBL Board of Governors and
served as chairman
1988-1990. She is a
past president of the
M i d - A t l a n t i c
Bridge Conference
and the Washington
Bridge League.
Thomas, president
of the ACBL
Charity Foundation
and former District
9 (Florida)representative
to the ACBL Board of Directors, topped
10,000 masterpoints earlier this year, playing at a
Florida tournament. She met the other Grand LM
requirement when she and Virgil Anderson, another
former Board member, won the Silver Ribbon Pairs
in 1994.
Thomas, a retired math teacher, is the business
manager of Unit 128 (Florida) and serves as the
unit’s tournament coordinator. She is also the unit
and district coordinator of the Grand National
Teams and North American Pairs.
She is a longtime member of the ACBL
Goodwill Committee and is a formerpresident of
District 9 and Unit 128.
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Flight A North American Pairs winners
Henry Lortz and Wayne Ohlrich
The Seattle-based duo of Henry Lortz and
Wayne Ohlrich are the new Flight A North
American Pairs champions, but their success is
partly due to a bizarre conjunction of an extremely
close field and a series of appeals to which the winners
were not a party.
At the end of the second final session, the recap
sheet revealed that the top 15 pairs were separated
by less than 1-1/2 boards, and that the top three
places were separated by less than a matchpoint.
Lortz and Ohlrich were third behind New York’s
Chris Willenken-Glenn Milgrim and the Texas pair
of David Hadden-Alexander Kolesnik.
There were three appeals cases pending, two of
which involved both of the leading pairs. Although the leaders, who were non-appellants in the cases,
won their respective appeals hearings — leaving
the scores intact — the third case caused a slight
fluctuation in the overall scores.
Lortz and Ohlrich
picked up one matchpoint as a result of the adjustment,
pushing the pair ahead of Willenken and
Milgrim by the ultra-slim margin of .03.
Lortz and Ohlrich are both software engineers
who have been playing together 10 years. This is
the first NABC victory for both players, and is
especially significant for Lortz who became a
Grand Life Master by virtue of the win.
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