Bridge Blog 1162: Picking up where we left off

    Nothing sharpens the senses like a long layoff. When I walk into the Niagara-on-the-Lake Duplicate Bridge Club on Friday, Sept. 5, I haven't played since the middle of August. I feel such a rush of happiness that I give my Canadian partner Selina Volpatti a huge hug and she gives one back.

    It feels good to hold the cards again too, but what to do with them? Especially when the first hand, Board 1, gives me six Diamonds to the A-J-10 and all four Aces. When Selina opens the bidding with a Heart, my singleton, I respond 2 Diamonds, just to see what she'll bid next. When she goes 2 Spades, I do a little math and figure her for at least three Kings and couple other honors. I go straight to 6 No Trump.

    Unfortunately, she has a penchant for opening light. The dummy comes down with just 10 high card points. Kings of Diamonds and Hearts, Queens of Hearts and Spades. I still might make it if the Hearts break in my favor, but West has five of them to the Jack. Even after the Diamond finesse works, best I can see is 11 tricks. Six Diamonds, three other Aces, King-Queen of Hearts. What I don't see is West with the King-Jack of Spades. Leading a low Spade through her to Selina's Queen would nail it. Then again, the hand record says it's only good for 5 No Trump. 

    At any rate, here we are with a bottom board. Familiar ground. At the other four tables, somebody stops at 2 No Trump and makes 12 tricks. Everybody else plays it at 3 Diamonds, making one or two overtricks.

    We go on to one of our overwhelmingly aggressive days, winning the auctions on 17 out of 24 boards, winding up fourth out of five North-Souths with 46%.

    Actually, we finish that first round with 8.5 out of 16 match points, which is 53.12%. Since I'm declarer on all four boards, guess I haven't lost my touch. Or have I? As declarer on seven more hands during the rest of the afternoon, I contribute three more bottom boards and pick up only 9.5 out of 28 possible match points.

Bridge Blog 1161: First date

 

With my usual Canadian teammate, Selina Volpatti, unavailable for the game Friday at the Bridge Club of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont., it seems like a good time to take my friend Judy Zeckhauser up on her desire to play there together one of these days.

But Judy hasn't been at this game as long as I have – she has fewer than 500 master points and I have nearly 3,000. As we review conventions at 140 kilometers per hour on the Queen Elizabeth Way, it becomes clear that we should avoid anything exotic.

The folks at BCON are gracious to Judy, but competitive, as usual, in a 7½-table game. After four boards with our first opponents, Kathy Morrison and Sandy Smee, we emerge with a mere 8.5 match points out of a possible 24.

Then, as East-West, we’re off to face John Mackay and Clyde Paul, the eventual winners Friday. Even so, we find our footing, holding them to four average boards for 12.5 points out of 24.

That delivers us to Marg Dykstra and Donna Fettes, who immediately slam-dunk us, bidding and making a 4 Heart contract that others make but don’t bid. They go on to drub us worse than Kathy and Sandy, 17 points to 7, though I’m still kicking myself for not grabbing that Queen of Hearts trick against Marg's 1 No Trump contract on Board 16 and holding her to eight tricks, or maybe seven, since that happened at three other tables. A quick hit of the calculator shows us at that point with a paltry 38.88%.

Then we meet up with perennial partners Joan Soifert and John Marksell. Joan declares that they're having a terrible day and, despite our expressions of sympathy, we extend their bad luck further on the first board when their overly ambitious 4 Spade contact makes only eight tricks, like every other North-South does. We sink them again on the next two boards. Discouraged, they fail to bid the makeable game on the fourth board. We depart for the next table with 19.5 out of 24 match points. Our overall fortunes have suddenly brightened to 48.43%.

We could have done better than a flat 12 out of 24 points against our next opponents, Susan Messer (whom I often see at Niagara-on-the-Lake) and Barbara Staples, another toughie. Here's how we miss a slam on Board 3, mostly because I just didn't think we could bid it:  

Three passes to me and I’m holding the best hand I’ve had all day – six Spades, five Hearts, singleton Ace of Clubs and Queen of Diamonds, 21 high card points. Wham! I simply slam down a 4 Spade bid. Would 2 Clubs, showing huge strength, be better? Hard to say. Judy has a six-point hand, three Hearts to the Queen, two small Spades. Hand analysis shows 11 tricks in Spades, which I make, and 12 in Hearts. Nobody bid the Heart slam, but one East-West took all 13 tricks playing Hearts, obviously because North didn't grab their Ace of Diamonds when they had the chance.

We meet the roving pair – Chris Loat and Don Munroe – on the next round and we nail them. I make an iffy 2 Spade contract to tie for a top board, then Judy, holding four trump, a void and a couple Aces, delivers a knock-out punch by doubling Chris' 3 Spades, Down three vulnerable. Total top board.

Another double by me against a 4 Club contract gives us another top as we join Jan Andreychuk and Pat Braun, two more seasoned players, at the final table. Looking at the Ace-King of Clubs and two other Aces, I can't not double. Down three, thanks to Judy chipping in with the Queen of Clubs and King of Hearts. But then they get it back when a mistake Judy confesses to puts her down two on a makeable 1 No Trump contract.

It doesn't feel like a great day for us, so the final tally is a surprise. 54.49%. Fourth overall. Second in the B strat. Our reward: 0.61 of a black point and 0.31 of a red point. It’s a happy ride back to Buffalo.

Bridge Blog 1160: Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

What’s the difference between earning master points and finishing dead last? Near as I can figure from reviewing the 24 boards in Friday’s game at the Niagara-on-the-Lake Bridge Club, it took just five of those 24 boards to seal our fate at the bottom. With 51.5 match points in a seven-table game, we came in at 42.92%. Had those five boards turned out differently, by my estimate, we could have collected an extra 15 match points or so and wound up in second place North-South.

Board 4. Selina doesn’t like to rebid her six-card suits, which cooked us here. She’s got Diamonds. I have six Hearts, five Spades. High cards in both those suits are Jacks. At 3 No Trump, she’s down four. At 3 Diamonds, it’s down one, which would have given us 2.5 more match points.

Board 9. Bad sacrifice on my part, pushing Selina to 4 Spades, which opponent Susan Hawes doubles because she’s holding five of them (her partner is void). If they play at 4 Hearts, they’re down one. Plus 4 match points for us if I pass.

Board 14. Selina opens 1 Diamond, I bid 2 Clubs with six of them, she bids 2 Spades. I’m holding A-J-9-2 in Spades. Why don’t I raise to 3 Spades? She would go to 4. It makes 5 Spades and would give us an extra 1.5 match points.

Board 20. Another bottom at 5 Hearts doubled vulnerable, down three. Blame me for the bad minus 800 sacrifice. Down two, minus 500, would have been a top. Down three also would have been a top if any of the other East-Wests had bid their 6 Diamond or 6 Spade slams. So it could've been 5 match points for us instead of zero if the stars aligned.

Board 24. I open 1 Diamond. Selina responds 1 Heart. Holding 4 Spades and a relatively balanced 13-point hand, I go 1 No Trump. Selina has 10 high card points and A-Q-4 in Spades and can’t resist raising to 3 No Trump. The math is not in our favor. Her cards come down and I see 3 Spade tricks, 2 Club tricks, a Diamond and a Heart. There's no way to expand on that. Down two. We’re 2.5 match points better at 1 No Trump.

Bridge Blog 1159-A: Way Overdue

A week ago, at the Buffalo Summer Sectional Tournament, none other than one of my bridge idols, Saleh Fetouh, remarked that I hadn't posted anything here on the Bridge Blog in a long time. 

I had to concede that he's right, though not from a lack of bridge thoughts bouncing around my brain. There just hasn't been enough of a break in the parade of other obligations to write them out. 

By maybe here, having taken off from work for the past seven days for my Birthday Week, there's a window of opportunity. Let's start with the one that's the longest overdue and most nagging.

Bridge Blog 1159-B: A sure thing

It's the Longest Day game on Saturday, June 21, at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. Board 12. The opponents are our old friends Chandi Jayawardena and Wybren "Weeb" Hoogland. We manage to drive Chandi, sitting West, up to 4 Diamonds, thanks to a Heart bid by my partner, Selina, which I boosted to the 3-level.

I have a flat and mediocre hand, three three-card suits topped by Jacks, but my Diamonds are sparkling: K-Q-J-10. I've got three tricks in Diamonds. Partner surely has one more somewhere for that bid of hers. I double. Hearts are led, but the Ace belongs to Weeb and it's a singleton. 

We get nothing more than my three Diamonds. Plus 510 for the opponents. Bottom board for us. When I mention it to Saleh Fetouh, he shrugs. "It happens," he says.

Bridge Blog 1159-C: Busted bonanza

That Longest Day game would have paid off handsomely in master points if we had been on the ball. We're in the B strat, so all we needed to collect 2.30 points for the top of B was 55%, which is well within our wheelhouse on our good days. 

Not this time. Even if we'd succeeded in the busted double, we wouldn't have come close to scratching. As it was, we were next to last North-South with 38.19%, one of our most wretched recent results.

Bridge Blog 1159-D: No regrets? Well, not too many

Despite our sorry showing on The Longest Day, club play on shorter days has given Selina and me a string of successes lately. Since the beginning of June, our record looks like this:

June 6. 61.25%. First N/S at Niagara-on-the-Lake Bridge Club. Also notable as one of the rare occasions where we managed to beat genial game director Claude Tremblay and his wife Muriel. They almost always win.

June 13. 56.97%. Second N/S at NOTL, behind Claude and Muriel.

June 27. 45% with Lynn Hale, 11th out of 15 pairs in a Howell game at NOTL.

July 4. 48.50%. Fifth N/S at NOTL.

July 16. 55.21%. Second N/S at Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines. Missed first by 0.52%.

July 18. 55%. Third N/S at NOTL.