Bridge of AngST

First major tournament in 3 months.

After Spring Fours, I did not play bridge for nearly 2 months thanks to exams. In between I fell sick, but that’s another story. Since then, I’ve played a few games at CBC, but rather poorly. Besides, the cards don’t seem to be going my way much. (Although this is all very subjective I admit!)

Planning the trip was rather hectic. Qunxiang agreed to play 2 weeks before, and then I had to find accommodation. Due to the clash with the Gay Pride Festival, almost all the hotels in Brighton were gone, thus I ended up finding a hotel in East Croydon, for less than half the price of what was available in Brighton…

Friday
First session was easy, and we actually finished the night in the top 1/3 of the field.

Saturday
Second session saw us moved up to the other room, where we started facing tougher opponents, and the cards starting going against us…what can you say when opponents bid their cold slams and get good matchpoint scores for it? Admittedly, I wasn’t playing at my best, and I probably let 2 or 3 contracts through.

Third session saw us back in the smaller room again. A bit of a mixed set, but 2 good wins out of 3 rounds was very welcome.

Sunday
The last session was probably about the only time I felt I was in “the zone”. Unfortunately, 2 out of the 4 rounds did not go our way, so we ended up slightly below average with 126 VPs and 7 wins out of 14.

I will start my recap of the 184 boards of Spring Fours from the end first, meaning the Hamilton Cup.

	♠ 2 ♥ J87652 ♦ KQ65 ♣ A5
♠ AQ85 ♥ 43 ♦ T84 ♣ 9732

(2S shows spades and clubs, at least 5-5)

Partner kicks off with the Heart Ace, then a low spade to your Ace. What do you continue? A heart? Then well done.

Dealer S Vul N/S Scoring Imp Lead ♥A	♠ T9743 ♥ A ♦ 2 ♣ QJT864
♠ KJ6 ♥ KQT9 ♦ AJ973 ♣ K		♠ 2 ♥ J87652 ♦ KQ65 ♣ A5
	♠ AQ85 ♥ 43 ♦ T84 ♣ 9732

Of course, I did not have that problem as I was declaring 5H! However, teammates failed to find the right defence in 5D.

	♠ AQT32 ♥ Q762 ♦ Q84 ♣ 4
♠ 987 ♥ KT5 ♦ KJ65 ♣ AJ5

North opened 2S, which got doubled by partner in the balancing seat and of course you pass. Now what do you lead?

Suppose you lead a low heart, won by partner’s ace and he now cashes Ace diamonds and returns another one. How would you play now after declarer plays a trump to your ten?

Yes, it’s already the second week of school. Our schedule this year is such that we are playing almost every Monday.

Our first match went swimmingly well, 33-17 at half-time and 74-4 in the 2nd half! This meant that we walked away with a 12-0 win.

Yesterday night was not that good though, and looking through the hands, I’ve probably messed up the most. Why? Delivery, as described by Sartaj Hans in the link.

Holding:
AQT8
-
K8
AKJT872

and hearing partner open 1D (playing 5 card majors, better minor) and rebidding 2NT (showing 15-17 bal) after you response 2C, how would you proceed?

There are some scientific ways, but suffice to say I messed up and did not consider this very carefully: I have 17 HCP, partner has shown at least 15, of which most are in the 3 suits other than clubs. She has a heart stop so this would be at most AQx (since she did not rebid hearts she is unlikely to have 4), more likely AJx, ATx, KQx or KJx. This would account for 4-5 more of her HCP. This also means that out of the 8 HCP that opponents have at most, 5-6 are accounted for in hearts. This would make grand in either clubs or spades (if there is a 4-4 fit) a very good prospect indeed.

However, I lost my way and after finding the spade fit I stopped in 6C! Grand was laydown with partner having KJ53, AT7, AQJ3, Q6. Every single card I needed! Nonetheless, I went relatively unpunished when teammates did very well to shut the opponents out and go 4 off doubled in 6H. So we still gained 4 on this.

The second half was dismal for us. Leading 47-19 in the first, we lost 21-44 in the second. Boards 16-18 were the biggest losers.

Board 16 was just plain switching off. Holding 9, KJ52, AK86, 8764, I somehow misread Rachel’s 5 and 2 after leading the diamond honours. Not giving her the ruff meant that opponents made 4S and 12 IMPs out.

Board 17 was a terrible mix-up after the bidding had gone 1S (2D) 3C. I think this is forcing, Rachel didn’t think so. 3NT was cold, but I could have made 3C on hindsight. That would have limited our losses to 1 imp instead of 5.

Board 18 poses an interesting bid problem. Holding 5, Q7, KT6532, AKT7, Red vs White, would you bid 3D after LHO opens 1NT, partner passes, RHO transfers to spades and it goes pass pass to you after LHO bids 2S?

Despite losing the second set, we were still 5 imps up at the end, though this still meant it was 6-6 on VPs.

Long while since I last updated! Many things have happened since then: getting dumped out of the Portland Bowl by Cambridge B, late entry into Coventry Pairs League with Cat Evans, getting top in that day, getting knocked out by Clee and Co. in the Inter-varsity BBO cup, and a long one-month hiatus from bridge.

Exams are approaching, but nonetheless, I couldn’t possibly pass up on the Spring Fours could I?

Partnering Darren again, BUT with the agreement this time round that 1S-4H is a splinter and not to play. Though my lack of play started to show very, very quickly.

First, I forgot what feature ask we were playing, so Darren and I had this auction: 2S-2NT(What’s that? Me: Feature ask)-3H(meant as I’ve got a heart void)-4S-AP and Darren tables AQJT953 in hearts!

Next, I opened 1NT(12-14), gets doubled, Darren bids 2H and I think…and alert it. (2H is supposed to be natural) Despite opponents having the correct meaning of the bid eventually (and legally), they went 3 off in 3NT.

Try this one:

♠ A87 ♥ 2 ♦ AK952 ♣ KQJ8

The bidding goes:

Since Darren and I play high card feature showing, our auction was:

Not bad, since I know it’s going to be on the spade finesse!

The full hand was:

Dealer E Vul E/W Scoring Imp Lead ♥A	♠ A87 ♥ 2 ♦ AK952 ♣ KQJ8
♠ ♥ AQJT75 ♦ 876 ♣ T542		♠ K532 ♥ K9643 ♦ J3 ♣ 63
	♠ QJT964 ♥ 8 ♦ QT4 ♣ A97

1 down was 13 imps out when other table did not bid slam.

I found myself in this 3NT contract:

Dealer N Vul N/S Scoring Imp Lead ♣6	♠ AQT7 ♥ AK42 ♦ AJ6 ♣ T9
♠ J842 ♥ QT83 ♦ 742 ♣ 73		♠ 95 ♥ 65 ♦ K853 ♣ AJ862
	♠ K63 ♥ J97 ♦ QT9 ♣ KQ54

The club lead makes things tricky, does E have the club J? The main spotlight on this board though, was the fact that I made an undeserved overtrick when East ducked twice on the finesse of diamonds! And I knew East had it as she tanked on both occasions and started getting very fidgety/irritated/frustrated.

More hands to come.

Having returned to Singapore for the December holidays, and needing some practice with Jackie for this weekend’s Youth Teams, we decided to play Thursday morning game even though this is MPs and not IMPs…

♠ QJxxx ♥ AQ ♦ KQx ♣ AKJ

♠ AKT7 ♥ T8xxxx ♦ ♣ QT7

Against relatively weak opponents, how do you play 4S? How would you play 6S? How would you bid the 2 hands after north opens 2NT?

I played badly, and still got a joint top. Why do I say so? I was in 4S, receiving the lead of diamond A. Now I erred by only drawing 2 rounds of trumps and taking the heart finesse. This lost and a heart was returned for a ruff. Hence I only made 11 tricks. If only I had drawn 3 rounds of trumps instead!

♠ x ♥ QJTxx ♦ ♣ AQJxxxx

Now after partner opens 1NT and you hear 3D on your right, how would you bid? I chose 6C, which was raised to 7 by partner, going 1 off. There were plenty of NT contracts going down more so -50 seems to be a winner. Andre suggests that 5NT in this situation would be showing a 2 suiter and asking partner to pick one.

♠ xx ♥ QJTxx ♦ KJx ♣ Kxx

♠ xxx ♥ AKx ♦ Axx ♣ A98x

I opened the W hand 1H and it went 1H-2C-2H-3H-4H (I really shouldn’t have opened! But having done so I should cue bid) and now I get the lead of the Q of clubs! I ran it to my K in hand, drew trumps in 3 rounds, led a small club, now LHO plays small and I insert the 9 which holds, cash the A, play a small club discarding a spade and now LHO returns a diamond. No one else made +450 of course!

How I’m wishing that CPL Div 5 would be this easy…Or Youth teams this weekend!

So on Sunday, during our usual meeting session, James suddenly comes in all flustered and asks if I can play on Monday evening. After some exchange of SMSes as to whether we were playing at home or away, I found myself sitting opposite Rachel in Meeting Room 6 in Student Union HQ. The opposing team has Martin Jones playing.

The first 12 boards were terrible, but not a disaster, actually they were fine except for the two boards which gave away most of the 8-29 scoreline.

How would you play this 3NT contract after 1NT-3NT on a 2 of club lead?

♠ Qxx ♥ Kx ♦ Jxx ♣ AJT98

♠ Kxx ♥ QT87x ♦ Axx ♣ Kx

I won the first trick (E contributed the Q) with the K and played low towards K of hearts. Taken by A, K diamond return which I ducked and now a small heart on which I played the T losing to the J. One down.

Still wondering if I should play the clubs first, since after a spade lead by teammates, declarer ran the clubs, guessed hearts right and made +2.

The 2nd half was 20-23, with 16 of our imps coming in on one board where Rachel made 5HX helped by misdefence while 6HX went 2 off at the other table.

As this was KO match (cup match?), the margin didn’t matter though.

Not really much to mention.

7 teams left in the consols. 6 rounds of 16 boards each.

First match against the ladies team ended with a loss.

I sat out the match against NUS. As it was the round before dinner, and after dinner was our sitout, I went home for a break, returning only for the last 8 boards against Blue Moon. We lost to NUS as well as it turned out.

The half-round against Blue Moon ended 32-22 in our favour. 8 boards declared by NS, S taking 7 of them. (I was EW)

Lost to Mokymouse 41-19 in IMPs. I single-handedly threw away 20 IMPs in 2 boards through sheer loss of concentration.

Nothing much else to play for except for pride. We managed to get a win against LCY. I sat out the last round against X-deer, which we lost.

Still managed a 5th in the Consols. LCY did a great job all round to win.

In tradition with my last outing at Youth Teams, I ended up in a team with teammates whom I have never really played with before.

Much thanks to Kelvin (Ng) who was the matchmaker and hooked me up with Xiaoming, Xiaoling and Kenneth. Our later additions were Zhibang and Xiaoxuan so I was the odd one out in a HC alumni team.

Throughout the tournament, I partnered Xiaoming who did a brilliant job, if I am not wrong, he played all 90 boards, partnering Xiaoxuan when I took a break during the Sunday morning session to attend Easter service. It is with great shame that I admit I doubted him on a few occasions which didn’t give very good results of course. Moral of the story: Trust your partner, for he might very well turn out to play even better than you.

My first task for Xiaoming was to attend the captain’s meeting in place of him, where they decided to draw instead of playing adjacent team numbers in the first round, which meant we would avoid playing X-men and YMouse in a triangle. Instead we got TS, which featured Mr and Mrs Thomas Goh. Having played them often at the weekly games, I was well aware of the threat they posed. Nevertheless, I hoped that we would be able to get off to a good start.

We started with board 4, which saw:

Dealer W Vul All Scoring Imp Lead	♠ A4 ♥ AK8 ♦ KQ73 ♣ T852
♠ K8765 ♥ 74 ♦ A ♣ AKJ64		♠ T92 ♥ 93 ♦ J9652 ♣ Q73
	♠ QJ3 ♥ QJT652 ♦ T84 ♣ 9

It was bad enough that we sold out to them when we had 4H cold. Even worse was the fact that we could have downed 3S, but let them make 10 tricks instead. Xiaoming led the Ace of Hearts, but was confused by my 6, which could have been easily solved had i thrown the Q down. He switched to a club instead. Teammates went 2 off in 4S. -9 imps.

But of course, our opponents did not see the full picture. The next board saw them bidding to 3H, making 10 tricks. This was a cold game though. I could sense that after these 2 boards, our opponents probably thought that they had conceded two game swings. In reality, we were still 3 imps behind even after the non-vul game swing on board 4.

Board 6 saw them bid to a cold 3NT after a few rounds of bidding. I made a mistake on the first trick. Holding AQJ7, with 5432 in dummy and partner leads the 9 (this shows 0 or 2 higher honours). What do you play? I went up with the A and returned a spade. Declarer cleared out partner’s diamond A and cashed his tricks for +2, Of course, it was cold either way but this still wasn’t a good play by me. Lost an imp to the overtrick.

Board 7 saw both myself and my counterpart going off 2 in 2NT. Board 8 saw Xiaoming go 4 off in 3C after West opened a weak 2S. Teammates made 4S. Score 6 imps to us. Board 9 was an overtrick’s difference in our favour in 2D contracts.

Despite the fact that I had a string of negative scores in my scoresheet, I was pretty optimistic. The boards looked pretty flat, and teammates should be holding the ground pretty well. Boards 4 and 5 might even be good for us. (I didn’t look into the possibility of 4H on board 4.)

Now on board 10, teammates made a 3NT which in theory fails, but in practice makes as South would not lead from AQxx in clubs. Our opponents at the table had a misunderstanding, and ended up in 3D+1. This board scored 11 imps for us.

Board 1 seemed flat as it was a pretty routine 1NT-2H-2S. Xiaoming made 10 tricks. The element of luck for us was the misunderstanding at the other table where South misbid 2D instead of 2H, and spent 3 levels trying to convince North that he had spades. 4NT-4 and 2S+2 scored 9 imps.

Board 3 was interesting.

♠ 85 ♥ 95 ♦ AJT6532 ♣ 52

Why 1NT? I had the inkling that opps would overcall if I opened 1C, perhaps with 1S and make life difficult. As it is, the 1NT opening worked. I decided that 3NT had a chance with my stops and Qxx in partner’s presumbly long suit, which might depend on a finesse. As it is, I was right, but the finesse was wrong, so I went down. 2 imps to them.

We won 35-12 which translated to a 22-8 victory.

A return to Friday night Pairs at SCBA after 3 weeks. The search for a partner proved elusive…until I found Jason aka Pinochio on BBO.

We finished 3rd with 54.5% thanks to several lucky boards:

First up, a really bad slam that makes.

Dealer E Vul - Scoring MP Lead	♠ 743 ♥ KJ ♦ 7 ♣ AQJ432
♠ KQ ♥ Q63 ♦ KQT92 ♣ 985		♠ AJ652 ♥ A954 ♦ A863 ♣
	♠ T98 ♥ T872 ♦ J54 ♣ KT7

6D did I hear you say? We played in 6S!

After the lead, Jason led a small heart from table to hand, N dropping the J. He thus decided to play for a 3-3 break in trumps and N for KJ bare in Hearts. Small from hand to small to table felled the K and 12 tricks was for the taking.

Not as fortituous, but the way Jason played it amazed even our opponents.

Dealer N Vul - Scoring MP Lead	♠ 5 ♥ AT98754 ♦ J ♣ T976
♠ Q982 ♥ Q3 ♦ T98643 ♣ 5		♠ KJT763 ♥ K6 ♦ 52 ♣ KJ4
	♠ A4 ♥ J2 ♦ AKQ7 ♣ AQ832

Bidding was simple: After Jason opened 4H, I did a check on keycards and placed the contract in 6H.

How did he play it? He played the trumps by playing A and another! When E (a well-known expert in local circles) played the K on the 2nd round and saw his partner contribute the Q, he raised an eyebrow. After the hand was over, he tried to lecture Jason on his method of playing the hand. No comments =)

Some bad mistakes by me include holding up Aces unnecessarily on defence. This happened at least twice, rather expensively. Once on the other board in the same round as the preceding example, allowing E to make 1NT+2 when 7 tricks was the maximum.

And of course, we have free gifts.

Dealer S Vul E/W Scoring MP Lead	♠ T85 ♥ A72 ♦ K852 ♣ T84
♠ Q974 ♥ QT983 ♦ Q3 ♣ K7		♠ AKJ6 ♥ K4 ♦ T7 ♣ AQ953
	♠ 32 ♥ J65 ♦ AJ964 ♣ J62

I can’t remember the exact bidding, but After I bid to 4S as W, S took a very long time to think, and finally returned with a bid of 5D, which Jason was happy to double.

Having seen Jason open 1C, I was happy to lead KC and another, which eventually led to a result of down 4 for a happy score of +800. (Which was a top, of course)

Thanks Gerben for your suggestion.

I performed the triangle as suggested, though I worked it out myself on Monday night, and set up an Excel file for scoring. (ACBLScore doesn’t handle the half match triangles, and I couldn’t be bothered to figure out ASE Scorer)

In the end:
- 3 rounds of 4 boards each.
- In the 2nd round, one team which was in the triangle actually had players who went missing. After 10 minutes, I gave up and started the two other teams to play normally.
- Plenty of players who shuffled the boards after playing them, thus I had to scrape several boards.
- Sitting in the wrong direction as well, what with a team having 2 NS pairs.
- Slow play in general
- Games were usually a trashing or pretty close.

Nonetheless, this was all pretty much anticipated as majority of the players are playing contract bridge for the first time. (I now make it a point to educate people that floating bridge aka Singaporean bridge on wikipedia is NOT real bridge.)

I came up with my own 4 board 20 VP scale, to simplify things. This was done with reference to the other existing 20 VP scales.

In the end, two houses came up with the same VP total from their three teams, but one house had a penalty due to some infraction, so the winner won by 1 VP.

Amazingly, there were no lead out of turns, but there were 2 established revokes, and I was called once when the players belatedly realised that declarer had played from the wrong hand on the previous trick.