Collins-Tucker win NAOP at Spring 2000 NABC

 Atlanta players win North American Pairs
[From ACBL Website]

Longtime partners Patty Tucker and Kevin Collins of Atlanta pride themselves on their steady
game and being able to deal with disaster at the bridge table calmly. Thursday night, they 
had to deal with a new experience - winning a North American championship for the first time.

Tucker and Collins, representing District 7, put together two strong sessions to win the
North American Pairs, Flight A, going away. With a total of 436.25, they were two and a 
half boards ahead of the runners-up, Victor King of Hartford CT and John Stiefel of 
Wethersfield CT.

Collins, 45, is a scheduling engineer for Lockwood Greene, an engineering company in the
Atlanta area. Tucker owns a used book store.

The two have been playing together for about 10 years. They employ a variable 1NT opener
- 10-13 non-vulnerable and 15-17 vulnerable - and they strive to play good solid bridge
without taking a lot of flyers.

"We like to let the system do the jacking around," Collins said.

Tucker said one of their secrets of success "is the ability to recover from disasters. 
If we get a bad board, we just kind of go on to the next one. We never argue at the table,
and if a hand is too hot we wait a couple of weeks to talk about it."

Last summer, Collins, Tucker and their teammates surprised the seeding committee in 
the Spingold Knockout Teams at the Summer NABC in San Antonio by pulling off a series 
of upsets to get to the round of eight.

Tucker thought it was funny that in a writeup in The New York Times about surprise 
winners in San Antonio, she and Collins were not mentioned as part of the squad that 
had knocked off the favored George Rosenkranz and George Jacobs teams.

"If you want to know who our teammates were," Tucker joked, "you should read The New 
York Times."

The victory in the NAP was achieved by Tucker and Collins the first time they had 
qualified for the national final. "It's just wonderful," she said.

Other MABC Players Also Do Well

Two other MABC Pairs also did very well in the NAOP event.  Despite a disastrous final round
Bob Heller and Emory Whitaker finished thirteenth overall, while Richard Brown and Wayne 
Hollingsworth finished twenty-fourth in the event.

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