The men of card weekend assembled once again this past weekend in St. Cloud, MN for the 12th annual 500 tournament of champions. The card gods were brought together to determine supreme authority for another year. Here’s the setup, adjusted slightly from my 2007 article:
The Wikipedia article on 500 – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_%28card_game%29 – has a pretty good review of the game. We play without the nullo (misere) options and the winner of the game is the pair with the highest score after 4 hands. We then play the best two out of three games to win a match. Once that’s done, each set of partners plays against each other set of partners. So we play 4 hands the best two out of three, three times with one partner. That usually takes about 3 hours. Since we typically start Saturday morning and end on Sunday noon (with a break for an interesting dinner on Saturday night), we usually get 4 or 5 series completed in the weekend.
The group of 8 consists of the following:
Shoney – the cheese-head – he recently moved to Wisconsin with his wife and two boys and manages a team for an insurance company
Kohler – he travels from the East Coast each year – he lives just outside Philadelphia in New Jersey and just finished a long vacation
Nelson – he lives in the Cities with his wife and two girls (almost exact same age as Katie and Amelia) and works in IT for a legal publishing company. He and I used to be partners in the WebAce Consulting business just after college.
Rosco – he lives in Watertown, SD with his wife and two girls. He owns and operates a pizza company in town. He is always responsible for bringing pizzas for lunch on Saturday – he usually brings 6-7, but it’s never enough.
EF – he lives in the Cities with his wife, daughter and son. He’s a lawyer and the resident liberal. This year he came sporting his Obama, Hope and Change shirt much to the chagrin of the rest of us.
Vogs – he lives in St. Cloud with his wife, daughter and son. He’s a teacher of geography and this year’s host.Dr. Stubbs, now Bart – EF brought in another liberal to try to balance out the group. He’s a lawyer in the Cities and lives with his wife, son and daughter. He’s a fellow Twins fan who attended the first game this year.
The cards officially got underway on Friday night at about 10 after 11 when I arrived after Katie’s dance show. We played 2/3 of a round late Friday night until about 1:30 and got started again early Saturday morning. We used to play until about 3am and get up at 10, but now that we’re all old, we get up at like 7am to get back after it. Rosco brought along 6 rail-thin pizzas as usual for Saturday lunch. Kohler decided to play a little trick on Rosco, since those 6 pizzas don’t really feed 8 hungry animals. He decided to order some real, pan thick pizzas and cheese bread to “complement” the other 6 pizzas. Rosco was actually the first one to see the delivery boy appear. He asked why he was coming to our house (since we already had pizzas). It worked out pretty well – we needed the extra pizzas.
We got back into cards after lunch, but as we played, we saw a lot of this:
I started off playing with EF and we went 2-1 together. In the second round, I played with Shoney and we went 2-1 as well. Kohler and Vogs went 1-2 together. This may seem uninteresting now, but you’ll understand when you see the results. I got on a roll when I played with Rosco, as we went 3-0 and then 3-0 with Kohler before supper.
We ended round 4 right around 5:30 so we decided to head out to dinner. Vogs had secured us a reservation at DB Searle’s. We meandered up to the 3rd floor, and sat down. Three years ago, we, sorry Kohler, made a wager with the waitress to guess what card game we were playing. We were somehow able to goad him into doing it again this year. Somehow, someway, the waitress was able to come up with the right answer. It was amazing ;). Anyway, Kohler, being a man of his word, produced the $100 tip.
We called off the card game at about midnight on Saturday night, and we felt that the only way to get all the remaining games in by Sunday around noon was to start at 7am. Nelson made sure of this by walking around with his iPad at 6:45 am playing some various alarms. At some point in the morning, the lack of sleep must have affected EF because he bid 7 diamonds, but apparently forgot that and threw his diamonds into the blind and led the 4 of clubs. This will forever be known as the “EF Dementia”, and no, he did not make the bid.
We wrapped up right at noon on Sunday, quite surprisingly, and polished off another couple super-thin pizzas. I played with Bart at the end and we went 3-0 to finish off the victory. Here were the final standings:
- Pittsy – 15-6
- Kohler – 14-7
- Bart – 13-8
- Nelson – 13-8
- Rosco – 11-10
- EF – 9-12
- Shoney – 8-13
- Vogs – 1-20
Yeah, that last score is not a misprint. It was a long weekend for Vogs.
He must be commended for his hosting however, as everything went pretty well and it was a great chance to reconnect with old friends. See you all next year.
Eric's space 