Sac and squeeze

The very first board of the very first match in a GNT game, we are playing one of the strongest pairs in the room. I pick up:

W

Me

♠

AJ9xxxx

♥

AJx

♦

x

♣

xx

And the bidding goes:

W

Me

N

North

E

East

S

South

—

—

—

1♣

1♠

Dbl

2♠

Pass

3♠

5♣

Pass

Pass

?

Do you agree with my bidding so far?  What's your bid?

From my point of view, 5C is making.  Is 5S a worthwhile sacrifice?

The best case scenario is that partner has Kxx of spades and shortness in hearts. In that case, I go down 1.  The worst case is that partner has KQx of spades and nothing else. I then go down 3. I rolled the dice and bid 5S, got doubled and went down ... five!  Turns out that the real worst case scenario is that partner raised with 10xx xxx Qxxxx Qx.

Needless to say, we lost that match.  But only by 7 imps.  Without my ill-advised sacrifice, we would have won.

We lost the next match too and found ourselves in a round-robin with two other two-loss teams.  "Why are they here?," sputtered our opponent to the director who patiently explained that the reason he had play us in the round robin was because we had lost our first two matches.  "I don't want to be here either," I mollified him, "I would rather be playing there."

Our opponent had just about settled down when this hand came up (I was West):

Once North  put in the King diamonds, I realized that I could squeeze South out of his king of spades. If the finesse worked, in other words, I didn't need to take it.  North, the danger hand, with his established hearts would be kept off lead ...  Here's the full hand (click Next to follow the play)



He wasn't happy about that either.  Playing in the last round of a Swiss teams having lost all your matches, you should not be subjected to a squeeze.

We ended up blitzing the round robin and ended up fifth. Not bad, but I had hoped to do better.

Classified ads for Team Matches on BBO

If you have ever played "pick-up" team matches on BBO, you know the routine. You show up with a partner, reserve seats for yourself and pard and wait for people to join your team match.  Ten to fifteen minutes later, the match picks up 8 players and you start playing.  After the first board, two people leave declaring that their partner is an idiot.  Finding substitutes is a royal pain and substitutes keep bailing in the middle of a game.  What you wouldn't give for reliable opponents!

Is there a better way? How about if you could come with a local team of players you know. Perhaps the team of four that you use to play the Grand National Teams.  What if other such "serious" players register online as a team, and specify their typical availability (weekends? weekdays? weeknights?).  You could private-message them, set up a match and play.  

The closest analogy would be an Inter-city league or classified ads for team matches.

A couple of objections raise themselves.  How do you know the other team is any good? Here, being part of a social circle where people use their real names is ideal, and Bridge Winners provides one for serious bridge players.

So, here's the way it works:

1. Register your team online.  Essentially, you provide your BBO and Bridge Winners user names. You also specify your availability and self-rate how good you are.
2. Look at the list of teams who are registered and choose a team that is around your level. To do this, look at their self-rating, the Bridge Winners name of the team captain and the best team that they have beaten in the past.  Send the captain a private message on Bridge Winners suggesting a match within the next week.
3. Plan out when you are going to play, how many boards and the format (Board-a-match? IMPs? ACBL GCC?).  Swap convention cards using Bridge Winners.  Do all of this over email.  Also swap the list of BBO user names so that one of the captains can create a Team Match on BBO.
4. After the match (or in the case of a no-show), the winner should report the results of the match.  This goes to update the Team List. Essentially, people looking to schedule future matches can learn when the team was last active (I will periodically delete teams that haven't been active for 3 months), whether their scheduling is reliable and whether their self-rating is accurate.

Use the "Test" and "Test1" team names to try out the forms and see the results.

A couple of caveats:

1. It's mostly on the honor system, but I hope that it will work and be of use. Obviously, if people start reporting bogus matches, the ratings cease to be of much use but it will probably still function well as a classified ad service.
2. I created the system because I have been wanting to learn the Google Apps API, and this was a small enough task.  There is one glaring problem that I hope someone familiar with the Google Apps API can help me with.  If there is a problem with a registration or match result (such as if the user specifies a team that doesn't exist), I ignore their submission.  I obviously need to alert them that they gave me a wrong team-name, but the documentation warns that "user-interface elements are visible only to an editor who opens the form to modify it, not to a user who opens the form to respond." and sure enough, it doesn't seem to be possible to display an error dialog to the user submitting the information.  So, how can the user be told his request did not go through?  Gah!  Until some kind person can tell me how to do this, wrong submissions will be silently ignored.

Right through the pack

Over Spring break, we made a family trip to the Pacific Northwest.  We spent one rainy afternoon in Portland immersed in Powell's World of Books, the largest used book store in the world or something close to it.  It's a Portland institution.

We went into the store as a family of four, but in a couple of minutes, we had all dispersed.  The wife went to the pottery section.  The daughter took down every knitting book in the store looking for cool animal-pattern hats.  The son made a beeline to origami books.  And me?  I went looking to see what books they had on card games.

For the most part, the used bridge book selection was terrible -- their buyer must not play bridge.  There were really dated books on Kaplan-Sheinwold and the like.  Among the dated books was a paperback with a publication date of 1947 with an introduction by Ely Culbertson. The bidding on a deal I saw had the dealer opening 1S holding 4 spades and 5 (much better) hearts. I was replacing the book on the shelf when the blurb on the front cover caught my attention.

"Rated one of the top three bridge books in a 1984 ACBL survey!", the book proclaimed. A 1947 book that people remembered 37 years later?  That piqued my curiosity and I started to read the first chapter. It seemed very weird, and definitely not likely to be rated best of anything. So, I flipped over to a middle chapter and started reading the chapter.  And was immediately hooked.

It is an awesome, awesome book.  The bridge deals are amazing and the writing crystal clear. They are mostly run-of-the-mill hands, but the depth is incredible.  Darvas and de Hart manage to capture the ineluctable beauty of card play, The stories are cute and the illustrations charming. How could I have not heard of Right Through The Pack before?  Forget Victor Mollo who gets repetitive after a couple of stories.  Robert Darvas never bores you.  Every story is different.

This was by far the most entertaining bridge book I have ever read.  If you have not read Robert Darvas' classic, run thee off to a bookstore and get thyself a copy.

A misfit auction that doesn't call for a trump lead

Playing a 10-board online robot tourney, I am leading until the last board.  On the last board, I hold:

and the auction goes (I am South):

and it is now my lead.

What do you lead?  Does this auction call for a trump lead?

Normally, if you double for takeout and partner passes, you ought to lead trumps.  The idea is to cut-down ruffs in dummy.  And that's what I did, to poor effect (click Next to see the play):



But here, even though they have had a misfit auction, the high-card points are evenly divided. South is better off establishing side-suits.  Leading a club was worth 91% and a win.  Leading a trump got me 50% and second place.

Broken streak

When a streak starts, you don't even notice it.  The first three boards of an online pairs tournament, our opponents got a little overboard and I didn't think much about it.  By the sixth or seventh board of only positive scores, it starts to be a little obvious.  Is the streak going to continue?

Well here was our scorecard for the night:

The board that broke the streak of positive scores (#10) was a bit of a fix. Partner opened his 4-card spade suit in 3rd seat, stealing North's bid. I raised with my 3-card suit and South balanced with 2NT showing the minors.  North simply passed instead of bidding 3D.  3D, which is the normal contract, is down 1, but 2NT made on the nose ...

Not that we avoided all disasters of course. In #9, we played a hand that was cold for 7NT in 6C ...  (#7 was simply them taking all their tricks). Still, 12 positive scores would have been a nice streak ...