Bridge Blog 1190: Good Friday on the Titanic

I had that sinking feeling even before I saw the standings posted on the wall with one round to go on Good Friday afternoon at the Bridge Centre of Niagara in St. Catharines, Ont. Selina Volpatti and I were dead last with 29%.

Let's face it. Below 30% is just plain disgraceful. Nobody else was even under 40%. Believe it or not, I breathed a sigh of relief when I checked the final results on Live for Clubs and discovered that we wound up at a still pretty awful 32.08%, thanks to a 50-50 final round.

Our descent into the depths began right away with our first opponents, Ineke and John Bezuyen. First board we played, I should've pushed for the 4 Spade game. Second board, I doubled their 5 Club vulnerable bid (after all, I had their Ace and another one), but they made it. Minus 750. Amazingly, another N/S doubled a bid of 4 Clubs! Minus 910. 

After that, we flung our inhibitions aside. We took the bid on 16 of the other 22 boards. Red flags were everywhere. Doubles were thrown at us five times, every one of them good. Three times we went down three vulnerable and once we suffered the dreaded down four vulnerable for minus 1,100.

Yes, winning all those bids lost us the game. Out of a possible 85 match points in the hands where we were declarers, we collected only 22. That's a paltry 25.88%. On defense, we were more respectable – 16.5 match points out of a possible 35. That's 47.14%.