A Guinness with That

Thanks to a chain of contacts initiated by frequent commenter Paul Gipson, I got to play bridge in Ireland the second night after I got here.

Not only did I have a pleasant partner, friendly opponents and a glass of Guinness at the table, we even scored up 64% for second place!

The one dark spot was this board. See if you can make a better decision than I did.  I was South on this hand and had started 1S. West made a negative double. Partner prempts 4S and east bids 5D. What would you do at this point? Pass, double or bid 5S?



Would your decision change if I told you that this was a strong pair? (I didn't know this at the table).  Well, I passed and 5D made. They were one of only two pairs to bid a E-W game. 5S would have been a good sacrifice; this was the full hand:



Still, it was not all terrible  judgment. Here was a defense that turned out to be worth all 18 matchpoints. In the following hand, 1NT is 12-14 and 2D is natural. Against 4C, you lead the Ace of hearts and partner encourages with the 4 of hearts. Now what?



Click Next to see my defense:


Did you find the spade switch on trick 2?  I thought it was a relatively straightforward deduction, given partner had bid. Also, 4H our way makes on anything but a trump lead. So, I expected the board to be flat.  Some pairs bid 3NT and made on a diamond lead by North. Others were in 3C making 4. No one was in a heart contract.  +50 was the only positive North-South score!

Preempting the play

With a system change, I find myself playing a lot more low-level contracts, playing them blind and messing them up. See if you can do better.  You open 1NT (12-15) and three passes later, you get to play the hand. You get a heart lead, you play low from dummy and East inserts the 10 of hearts. Plan the play.

N

dummy

♠

Jxx

♥

Kxx

♦

xxx

♣

Axxx

Lead: ♥7

S

You

♠

KQx

♥

Qxx

♦

KQx

♣

Q10xx

The contract is only 1NT. I can come to 7 tricks with 2 spades, 1 heart, 1 diamond, 2 clubs and a possible extra trick either in hearts (if west has the Ace) or diamonds (by leading twice towards my hand).  The problem was that the 7 of hearts looked high and so, I thought it was East who had the heart length. So, I ducked a heart.  Bad assumption. Then, when I was in dummy with a heart, I decided to use that single entry to lead a diamond. Second bad move.  I needed to breach clubs, full of holes as they are.

The whole hand:

.

N

North

♠

Jxx

♥

Kxx

♦

xxx

♣

Axxx

.

W

West

♠

xxx

♥

AJxxx

♦

AJxx

♣

J

Lead: ♥7

E

East

♠

Axxx

♥

10x

♦

10xx

♣

K9xx

.

S

South

♠

KQx

♥

Qxx

♦

KQx

♣

Q10xx

.

Standard bidders would open my hand 1C, west would overcall 1H and then the hand becomes much easier to play because you have an approximate count.  So, this was a matchpoint zero.

Beginner's grand luck

About once a week, I play on BBO with another young dad. We get online after our kids are in bed and grab an hour or so of bridge. But the time never quite works. The free tournaments on BBO start at 9.30 and at 11 (central time) -- too early and too late respectively.

Last week, our opponents kept bailing from the table. This was so annoying that we decided to try an ACBL speedball tournament this time. This was our first speedball, so I didn't know what to expect. But beginner's luck was with us.  Witness this hand, my first ever grand slam contract:

Obviously, the bidding is not very scientific. Partner and I play a straight-forward 2/1 with no gadgets. So the bidding could not be that scientific. If I had the queen of clubs rather than the queen of diamonds, the grand may have no play, but partner hoped that my 4D indicated no stoppers in any other suits. He bid the grand, I got a diamond lead, and the hand pretty much played itself.

The other 90+ score, the first board, was a gift.  6H is cold on the hand, but our opponent didn't ruff a diamond in dummy before pulling trumps:

Obviously, that we had this opponent on this hand was a tremendous piece of luck. The 71% game was worth 1.1 matchpoints (we were third overall).

Letting a doubled contract through

Playing in the strongest game in town, partner and I started out shaky, but stabilized to finish with a 60% game, which was good enough to win in both directions. This was the "unit championship", so we got a whopping 3.5 master-points for this.

We had our worst boards against the pair who went on to win North/South. I'm not sure which direction the causality runs -- do we tend to play badly against pairs who are in fine form, or does the pair we don't get good boards against tend to win?

See if you can spot the misdefense on this board against the pair who would go on to win in the North/South direction. We were sitting East/West, and after partner opens a weak NT, I know that we have the majority of the points. On principle, we do not let them play a 2-level contract undoubled. Also, partner will not bid again unless he has a 5-card suit. So, the final contract was 2C doubled. We had two chances to set them, and we muffed both chances.  Can you do better?

I was sitting West, so click on West to hide the other hands and then click "Next":

-180 was a bottom, of course.  +100 would have been a top.

Going -800 undoubled

Partner and I have been playing a big club system for a few months now, and we have discussed how to deal with overcalls and preemptive overcalls of 1C.

Over overcalls, we use negative free bids, a cue-bid as a takeout, double for a balanced hand and/or 9+ points. NT bids show stoppers. Over preempts, we use positive free bids, cuebids to indicate game force without a stopper and NT to indicate game force with a stopper. Double shows a balanced hand that is not strong enough to insist on game.

At the club this week, one pair came in with having rehearsed a defense to 1C.  Over partner's 1C, they bid a 2H preempt that was explained as spades or the minors. Now, our use of cue-bids went out the window and unable to sort out our values, we ended up in a minor suit game when 3NT was cold.  As luck would have it, partner had a 1C opener on 3 boards that we played against this pair, and we ended up messing up every one of those.  On one of those 3 boards, I bid 3NT because I had two of the three suits stopped; partner, with a two-suiter passed, and so instead of bidding a slam, we went down 8.  First time I have scored -800 undoubled.

We now know how to deal with "suction" now, of course, but that discussion came too late.  Too bad that we misunderstood each other's improvised bids. Three zeroes resulted in a 50% game.

p.s. It has now been one year since I started this blog. Thanks to all you regular readers (there are about 70 of you) for coming back. Special thanks to my frequent commenters: Paul Gipson, Jeffery Lehman and Memphis Mojo -- I have learned a lot from you over the past year.  Thanks also to John Goold for sharing a standalone version of his blogging tools with me and to my partners for putting up with all this learning!

Bidding 4 and making 7

We played in the Lawton, OK sectional today, and I am still basking in my second-ever flight-A win. Our first flight-A win was the knockout a few months ago, and it was with the same teammates that we won today's Open Swiss.

Partner and I average 150 master points, so this is all rather cool and novel, but we're under no illusions that the best players won. As you'd expect, we were lucky -- of the strongest two teams in the tournament, we had to play only one, and we escaped with a tie.  Both teams had one loss each (where they got fixed) and we got away with playing the unexpected victors of those matches.

Still, I'll take my 6 silver points!

As in the knockout, I found that we bid and made our games for the most part. We took our tricks on defense (defeating a couple of their game contracts) and competed well on part-scores. It's the slam hands that continue to mess us up.  Here's one where I could not find the right bid:

W

Partner

♠

AKx

♥

10x

♦

KQ9xxxx

♣

x

E

Me

♠

xxx

♥

AKQJ9x

♦

A

♣

Axx

Partner dealt and opened his hand 1D:

Partner

Me

1♦

1♥

2♦

Now what?

A minimum hand consistent with partner's bidding -- Axx xx KQxxxx Kx -- makes the slam cold, so I do need to explore slam here. But what is my bid?  3H is not forcing, and partner might pass with a singleton or void.  3C would be, but that would ask partner if he had a third heart or a spade stopper. Here, partner might bid either 3D or 3NT. 3NT doesn't tell me much, though since it could be nothing more than QJx or Kxx of spades.I gave up and simply bid 4H.  

Bidding 4 and making 7 is never a nice feeling.

At the other table, they bid a small slam. Their auction went:

Opp1

Opp2

1♦

1♥

2♦

4NT

5♦¹

6♥

—

—

(1) one ace

Blackwood holding 3 little spades seems a tad frisky, but it certainly did work for them.

In Ireland, bridge is exclusive

I will be traveling to Ireland in a few weeks, to County Clare. Since I had such a blast playing bridge in London, in New York and in Bangalore, I thought I'd see if I could continue the streak ... were there any bridge clubs near Shannon?

Oodles, it turns out. (17 actually). There's even, conveniently, a page that lists them.

However, they don't seem to care for visitors except during the summer months. "Members only," the clubs state quite baldly, although some add that "new members will be accommodated". What on earth does that mean? I have to play an annual membership fee to play one game? And some clubs claim to welcome "summer visitors". Why are people visiting on business in autumn considered minced meat?

I wish I could email and ask, but not one of the 17 clubs has an email address listed.

Pretty exclusive, these Irish bridge clubs!


p.s. I do not mean to be too hard on the Irish bridge clubs. They probably have more players than they can handle. Still, coming from America, where most clubs are open and prominently advertise the director's contact information, it is striking how closed the Irish bridge scene is. But then, in America, bridge is in pretty poor health whereas they have 17 bridge clubs in one small Irish county. So, maybe the air of exclusivity works.

p.p.s.: At least, in Ireland, they list their games on a public website. I've been to Delhi three times in three years and have yet to find a game.