Singapore Open 1st Weekend Round up
This year’s Singapore Open sees me playing in a team alongside Jason(pinochio), Sophia, Dennis(Baboo), Yingdan and Xiaoming.
Turn out this year is pretty bad. I remembered seeing 2 groups of 8 teams last year. This year, we only have 11 teams in total, so the qualifiers are a round-robin. The field is pretty strong, with Friends of Sheep (featuring Poon Hua etc.), International (Dr Wong’s team with a new foreign addition) and X-Men.
So I arrive at SCBA on Saturday afternoon, and attended the captain’s meeting (since Jason was late) and our draw saw us facing Friends of Sheep in the first round. Jason and Sophia arrived about 10 minutes late, and so we had 1 VP deducted for this.
The match itself was very close as the final score was 10-14 in their favour, and we lost most of it on 1 board when there was a misdefence at the other table and 3NT made instead of going for a cold down. Nevetherless, this was a good result as no one would have expected to see 6 flat boards in a 10 board match against them.
It was a pretty hard fought battle at my table, though I was not involved in most of the action. There was this board on which I was dummy, and the play lasted nearly 20 minutes!
Round 1 board 8
On this other board, I picked up a swing when I decided to take a view and let my partner play in 1NT instead.
Round 1 board 10
Our second match was against Mokymouse. Suffice to say some that luck and decisions didn’t go our way and we lost 13-42.
The match against the Ladies Team was another low-scoring, this time we were on the right side with 13-10.
After much discussion, we reshuffled the team for our after dinner round against True2, which is actually the Argento team. I partnered Dennis. Having played with them for so many years, he probably had some inside information which I was not aware of when he decided to do this….
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Dennis found the bid of 3NT after I had supported clubs and opponents had interefered with their diamond fit. Opponents nearly died laughing when they saw the singleton K after the hand was over.
Again, a small pickup 32-28. At least we are getting some wins.
I sat out for the last round on Saturday, which was against LCY’s team. We lost by quite a fair margin.
Sunday morning was my pre-arranged sitout so I could go to church and such. I wasn’t feeling very well, but upon reaching and realising that we had lost the first 2 matches very badly, I had to psyche up and play. We were down to 4 people after Dennis left and Yingdan couldn’t play in the afternoon as well.
Well, before Dennis left, we had some fun against NUS.
So it was back to partnering Xiaoming after lunch. We had our sitout round right after lunch so we could afford a leisurely 2 hour break. We sat down against X-deer for the next round. I am familiar with Emmaline’s style of play, but I have never seen Ting Wei play before. Sitting in the south seat at the other table was Chen Lu.
It was a bad round. I missed 2 cold slams, one of which happened after a Michaels cuebid (which was undiscussed wrt strength), so I had no idea if I should push for the slam after 4S. The other was my fault for timidly stopping in game. The good thing was Xiaoming declared a whopping 7 contracts out of 10. I only declared once in a 4H contract which was cold down, but felt that I should have escaped for down 1 instead of down 2.
How would you bid on this hand after partner opens 1D and rebids 1NT?
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I chose 3NT, and this turned out to be a success when the other table played in 3S for 9 tricks as well.
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At the other table, no slams were bid as well(!) and we still made IMPs from overtricks from 1 board and Jason-Sophia managed to play in an undoubled sac in the other! 37-7 is a good result of course, but it could and should have been 25 VPs to us.
Last round was against X-men, and of course, we were playing for pride only. Could have easily been a draw to us, but again, some poor decisions by us cost us a bit.
So we finished second last in the qualifiers. There’s still much to play for in the consolations though.