In February 2023 the Gold Coast Congress was again played in Queensland, Australia. It is the largest bridge congress in Australia and one of the leading bridge congresses in the world with about 2000 players including 44 from overseas and 190 players from NZ.
We were particularly pleased this year to have some of Americas best young players including Finn Kolesnik and Adam Kaplan, Kevin Rosenberg and Amber Lin.
Actually Finn and Adam won the main Pairs event.
Finn and Kevin gave a wonderful and entertaining lesson about “Winning the Soloway” NABC Event recently in Phoenix, Arizona. The special connection here is that Finn Kolesnik was playing with an Australian/New Zealander now living in the USA, Ishmael Delmonte, and Kevin was playing with Simon Cope from the UK.
In the semi-finals of the Soloway Teams in the last quarter they were down 46 IMPS against the famous Fleischer team and got up to win.
In the final the Cope team played against the Street Team, and in the third quarter was down 33 to 20 when the Street team went on a 23-0 run.
In the last quarter of the Final Cope was down by 24 IMPS with five boards to play.
The full talk goes for 45 minutes however we are going to shorten it but start with a funny self-deprecating story told by Finn about Ishmael who many of our Australian players will know well as a champion player, teacher and bridge club owner when he lived in Australia. Finn is aged 18 and is the shorter of the two and Kevin is 26.
