Bridge Blog 565: When it rains, it pours

The rain started falling halfway through the afternoon session Tuesday at the Airport Bridge Club and what a rain it was! More than an inch before it was over – most we’d had in one day since Aug. 5 – and we really needed it. My flowers have to be overjoyed.

Meanwhile, master points continued to shower my way in two sessions with Beverly Dale – we were Ms. Dale and Mr. Dale. At any rate, I was winning auctions left and right in the morning, playing declarer on 12 of 24 hands while Beverly only got to play one – a 4 Heart bid on which she took all 13 tricks.

I should have deferred to her on another, where she opened a weak 2 Hearts and I pressed forward over minor-suit bidding competition to 5 Spades (doubled, down five) with a ragged seven-card suit.

We hung a similar catastrophe on our final opponents of the morning. Judi Marshall pressed ahead to 4 Clubs against one of our sure contracts (it made 4 Hearts vulnerable) and went down four doubled vulnerable.

It was our only top board of the session, but we had two other near tops against Judi and her partner and it lifted us to 59.18%, first overall, 2.22 master points.

Beverly got to be declarer more often in the afternoon session, but faltered badly a couple times, going down five and getting bottom boards on each occasion. We rallied once again in the final round, this time against Mike Silverman and Art Matthies, tapping them for two of our four top boards of the afternoon. We came home at an even 55%, third overall in B, second in C (the strats were moved wayyy up because so many experienced players were in the six-table game). That gave us another 0.98 points. Two-day total – 6.87!