Bridge of AngST

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.

So I am supposed to be directing Inter-house back at RJ this Wednesday. And these are a list of problems I am currently facing:
1) Board duplication (Supposed to be taken care of by the J2s)
2) Necessity of a triangle due to the swiss format and 15 teams
3) Scoring – VP Scale for 4 boards?
4) Scoring – Software to score and do the Swiss?
5) Do half the players there even know how to play contract bridge properly…

And of course, I am still waiting for Leonard to get back to me on the directing course by Dr Heng…