Bridge Blog 620: Paging Mr. Jacoby

Sometimes it takes a bonehead maneuver – and the subsequent chastening from your partner (and opponents) – to knock you into focus. In the second hand of Tuesday’s game with Beverly Dale, she opened 1 Heart, Mike Silverman bid 2 Diamonds. I’m holding six Spades, Ace-Jack, and four Hearts headed by the King-Queen, plus a singleton King of Clubs. I bid 4 Hearts, since there’s our nine-card fit, and that’s it.

Except Beverly goes on to take 12 tricks. She has the other three Aces. It’s a slam. All at the table agree that I should have used the Jacoby 2 No Trump bid to show my four-card support and strong hand. My lame excuse – I haven’t bid Jacoby 2 NT in a long time and I didn’t recognize it. Either people don’t play it (like my Wednesday partner Celine Murray) or it doesn’t come up.

At any rate, it’s a low average board for us, not the worst of outcomes. There are a couple absolute bottoms later on – the double that I let stand after we battled Celine and Dotty May to game level, bidding Hearts and Spades. Celine turns out to have no Hearts at all and Dotty beats the double. And then there was the hand where I’m five-five in the minors and trying to foil Jerry Geiger and Judy Marshall’s almost certain game in Hearts. I bid a Diamond, Jerry doubles, Bev bids 2 Spades, Judy doubles, I’m void in Spades. So I bid my Clubs. Jerry doubles again and Bev passes. She has one Club, three Diamonds. We’re down four. Diamonds, on the other hand, would have been down only two.

At that point, I’m telling our opponents we’d trade them a top board for a bottom board, but we manage to break the pattern and finish with a 54.98% game, second in the B strat in our direction, fourth overall, for 1.23 points. That pushes me past the 20-point mark for December – 20.30.