Bridge Blog 675: Unaccountable

Just as suddenly as the weather has turned perfectly springlike, my bridge game as taken a turn for the sunny side.  I’ve scratched now for three sessions in a row.

First was with Usha Khurana on Thursday, a 51.62% game, third in the B strat, 0.28 points, despite being perplexed at times (see Blog 674) .

Then Selina Volpatti and I had our best session yet in the St. Catharines club, 56.92%, 0.36 points, fourth in the B strat overall in a 16-table game where everyone was jammed into the room they don’t use any more because the floor was being replaced in the room they always use. This despite Selina being exhausted from chairing a six-hour meeting the night before.

Finally there was the individual game Sunday at the Airport Bridge Club’s Cinqo de Mayo sesssion, where you have a different partner every round and play by the standard yellow card, which means no fancy conventions.

One which works despite the restrictions is the 2 Spade bid relaying to 3 Clubs over a 1 No Trump opener. I know, because I needed to consult with the yellow card before I used it. I corrected my partner to 3 Diamonds and he went on to 3 No Trump, making it.

In a game where you never know how well you’ll do, I did well – 57.95%, third overall, for 0.60 point, doubling my point tally for the month so far.

Speaking of monthly points, the ACBL has my pending total for April at 16.50, plus those 5 points they’re belated getting around to including from the ACBL-wide charity game in March. But there’s still something missing – that quarter of a point from April 26 in St. Catharines.

Bridge Blog 674: Caught looking

When you’re at bat in baseball, you get only so many pitches worth swinging at. Same goes for bridge hands. At any given session, only a few fat contracts come your way and the good players get home runs off them.

Usha Khurana and I watched a home run pitch go past us late in the session on Thursday at the Airport Bridge Club and we instantly regretted it. Board 17. Nobody vulnerable. I’m sitting North and I’m dealer. Here’s the hand:

Spades: A-7; Hearts: A-K-Q-J-7-5

Diamonds: J-9-4; Clubs: 10-7

I open 1 Heart, Usha bids 2 Clubs, I rebid the Hearts and she offers 3 Diamonds. With six sure tricks in Hearts, an Ace stopper in Spades and my partner covering the minor suits, I had no trouble bidding 3 No Trump. When East led a low spade, I knew we should have swung for the fences as soon as Usha laid down the dummy:

Spades: K-3; Hearts: 2

Diamonds: A-K-8-2; Clubs: A-K-9-8-5-3.

Three sets of Ace-Kings to go with my six Heart tricks. Fool proof as long as the fool bids it. Here are the other two hands.

East

Spades: 10-6-5-4-2; Hearts: 10-3

Diamonds: Q-5-3; Clubs: J-6-4

West

Spades: Q-J-9-8; Hearts: 9-8-6-4

Diamonds: 10-7-6; Clubs: Q-2

It wasn’t a bottom board for us, just a little below average. We got 3.5 out a possible 8 match points. Only one North-South bid the slam – at 6 Hearts, yet – and made it. Another bid 6 NT, played from the South, and, unaccountably, went down two. Three pairs who played it at 4 Hearts took all 13 tricks. Two others bid 4 Hearts and took only 12 tricks. One other pair wound up at 3 NT, getting the same result we did.

Bridge Blog 673: All April wrote

No last-minute additions to the April point total in the month’s waning days. The 51.19% game with Sharon Chang on Monday could have been good enough to deliver, had a miracle of stratification come along, but it didn’t. And the 41.84% effort with the lovely Pawan Matta on Tuesday was a certain miss, although at least we weren’t dead last. (See Blogs 672-A and 672-B).

Nevertheless, April is nearly a 17-point month. There’s the 13.80 at the Airport Bridge Club, another 0.25 at the Niagara Bridge Centre in St. Catharines and the 2.70 from the sectional tournament.

Bridge Blog 672-A: Bad to good

Pawan Matta and I lost all hope right from the get-go on Tuesday at the Airport Bridge Club. On our very first hand, we ventured to the edge of a slam in Hearts, but stopped at a 5-bid. I played it and made an overtrick. That will be bad, Pawan reckoned. Everybody else will bid it. Here’s the hand.

North

Spades: None; Hearts: K-J-8-7-6-5-2

Diamonds: K-Q-8-6-2; Clubs: 6.

South

Spades: A-6-4-2; Hearts: 9-4

Diamonds: A-J-7-3; Clubs: A-K-9

East

Spades: Q-9-7-5; Hearts: Q-10

Diamonds: 5-4; Clubs: Q-J-4-3-2

West

Spades: K-J-10-8-3; Hearts: A-3

Diamonds: 10-9; Clubs: 10-8-7-5

It’s Board 1, so nobody’s vulnerable. I’m sitting North and I’m the dealer, looking at a fistful of red cards. I open 1 Heart. I forget Pawan’s response. It could have been 1 Spade or 2 Diamonds. I rebid the Hearts. She ultimately goes to 4 No Trump to ask for Aces and, having none, I bid 5 Clubs. She signs off at 5 Hearts.

I think East led a low Spade, taken with the Dummy’s Ace. I pitched a Diamond and led a Heart from the board. West (Don Grant) appropriately held up his Ace and my King won. I led another Heart and watched Ace and Queen fall together. Clear sailing after that.

This terrible hand gave us 7.5 match points out of a possible 8. North played the contract at 4 Hearts at all but one of the other tables. Only one fared as well as I did. Six times they made just one overtrick. Then there was the unfortunate North who bid the slam in Hearts and guessed wrong on the trump play. Down one.

Bridge Blog 672-B: Beyond bad

While I was wondering about the outcome on Board 1 Tuesday (Blog 672-A), people were talking about Board 12 in tones of disbelief before the game was over. 3 No Trump, they’d say as they tried to keep from laughing. OK, it was a gamble. I admit it, but I thought it had a chance. Here are the hands.

North

Spades: K-Q-8-6; Hearts: A-K-J-7

Diamonds: 8-7-3; Clubs: Q-9

South

Spades: A-7-4-3; Hearts: 10-9-5

Diamonds: 6-5; Clubs: K-J-8-6

East

Spades: 9-2; Hearts: Q

Diamonds: A-K-Q-10-9-4-2; Clubs: A-7-2

West

Spades: J-10-5; Hearts: 8-6-4-3-2

Diamonds: J; Clubs: 10-5-4-3

For Board 12, West is dealer. North-South is vulnerable, East-West is not. West (Ken Meier) passes. I bid 1 No Trump. East (Joe Rooney) doubles. Pawan bids 2 Clubs – Stayman – and I go 2 Hearts, bidding my four-card major suits up the line. Rooney bids 3 Diamonds, revealing the long suit implied by his double. Pawan might have passed, but goes 3 NT. OK, she’s got a stopper in Diamonds. The rest just might work out.

Wrong! Joe leads his Ace of Diamonds and I see just how exposed we are. He takes seven Diamond tricks and the Ace of Clubs. Down four. Joe, who’s usually quick to double my wilder bids, says he didn’t want to double this time and chase us into one of our suits.

No question that it’s a bottom board. Only a few North-Souths wound up with plus scores on this one. Top board was 3 Spades, played by South, making the bid. Next best were North-Souths who let East-West play it at 4 Diamonds (down two) and 3 Diamonds (down one doubled).

Four North-Souths went to 4 Spades (three of them down one – yes, it only makes 3 – and the other down two). Another went down two at 3 Hearts. No Trump? Naaahhh!

Bridge Blog 671: Par for the course

When it was mentioned that I’m third on the Airport Bridge Club’s point list for April, I was astounded. When the month started, I was still in that miserable slump. And since then, it’s been a mixed bag of triumphs, catastrophes and miracles of stratification.

Still, the total was only 13.2 points, which led me to try to fatten it at the Sunday Swiss team game. Playing with the experienced Eva Schmidt, and with Dotty May and Florence Notto as our teammates, we had potential and showed it by winning two of our first three rounds. But we faded after lunch, getting beaten by the winless Mike Kisiel team and  slam-dunked by Jerry Geiger and John Ziemer. Two winning rounds gave us 0.60 of a point.

At any rate, with two more days to play, I can hope for another 17-point month in April, which at least is up to the par of January and February. May, meanwhile, does not look promising. I’m scheduled to be out of town for more than a week. And then there’s Memorial Day weekend.

Bridge Blog 670: Big and bad

A succession of major miscues has been taking the fizz out of my feeling of confidence over our Swiss team’s play in the Buffalo Spring Sectional Tournament. On Monday, I missed partner Barbara Sadkin’s opening bid and we wound up with a bottom board, which made the difference between finishing first or second. At 59.02%, we were less than a percentage point behind Jim Mathis and Paul Libby. First in B gave us 1.68 points.

On Tuesday, I had one of my best games with Pawan Matta, but it would have been better if I unblocked her long suit as we defended against a 3 No Trump contract. They made it – another bottom board – when they should have been down two or more. Still, we were first in B with 56.37%. No double points that day, so our reward was 0.65.  

With Celine Murray on Wednesday, there was more than one misstep. Failure to hit my partner’s short suit let opponents make three overtricks, that was the first one. Then there were a couple underbids on makeable game contracts. And finally there was an unnecessary sacrifice bid. Without all that, we would have finished over 50%, though we would have needed 54% to catch some points. With it, we had 45.14%.

June Feuerstein and I started off with a terrible bit of miscommunication. I bid 2 NT. She responded 4 NT. Thinking this was Blackwood, I showed her my three Aces – 5 Spades. Thinking that I was showing her my strong suit, she raised it to 6 Spades. We had only five Spades between us. Down three for a bottom board. We finished the day with a flourish, however, being only pair that bid the 7 Spade grand slam. It was hardly enough, though. We were next-to-bottom with 43.38% in a game that was marked by a massive directors’ mistake.

It was a 12-table game and to make sure that the boards and players didn’t snag in the middle, a relay between two tables was set up. But something went wrong with the relay and halfway through the game, the problem came to a head when some of the players were looking at boards they’d played earlier. We turned in our boards, shuffled them and played out the rest. Scoring was complicated, to say the least. Club manager Bill Finkelstein, characteristically, noted that this the only club that could have recovered from a problem like this and finished the game.

Over in St. Catharines, Ont., on Friday with Selina Volpatti, the big miscue again came in the first round. I jumped to 3 NT over her 2 Diamond response to my opener. Looking at the hand records, I’m not sure why I didn’t just open 2 NT. Oh, well, I took all the tricks, although the hand record says we should only make 6 NT, and we got 2.5 out of 14 match points. Best we would have done, though, is 9.5. Eight tables bid the small slam, several made the overtrick, and two bid grand slams. We wound up fourth in the B strat with 49.59% for 0.25 of a point. And we wouldn’t have caught the third place pair even if we bid that hand correctly.