Tuesday 5 February 2008

Monday Aggregate 4th February

Lucas Twos certainly enliven the bidding. The last pair of the evening consists of a lady who covets my tie which she thinks goes so well with her blouse and an ever genial male partner. The hands were:





'Blousy' (West) opens 2H, Mr. Geniality bids 2NT, then 3S shows a max with diamonds and so 4H is bid. I led a trump. When dummy went down the lady thought the bid was rather optimistic, the man considered it 'imaginitive'. Now that's what I call an imagination. We eventually found our diamond ruff for down 2.


How would I have bid this? Well if partner was East and opened 1NT, I would transfer to hearts and then with fingers crossed bid 2NT. Partner would convert to 3H and I would use my imagination and bid 4H!




The next and last board:



Only one third of the field found and made 4H on this, some went 1 off. I showed my long clubs in the bidding so when I won the Ace of clubs and switched to 8D it had singleton written all over it. If I hadn't bid and partner had led say a spade, then after winning the AH I switch to 8D it would have given declarer the chance to go off.



Anyway, it didn't make much difference to our score which was pretty awful. I failed to make a 3NT by trying to be clever (what a joke), 10 other declarers made 9 tricks. we failed to bid a game when a slam was on (although a few others did also, it all depends on the opening bid). That was that really that. There were though two very interesting distributional hands.




On this one after 1C - 1D came round to me I bid 1NT which shows at least 5-5 in the other two suits with limited points. Eventually our opponents managed to bid 6D which we doubled. As I got a club ruff this went 3 off. 4S is a comfortable make.



The other was this one:


I opened 1D and when this came round to West, he had a 2NT bid available. East made the interesting bid of 3S? but eventually they finished in 5C which was very easy on a KD lead (declarer just played 2 rounds of clubs and led the JD to my Queen, discarding a heart). Now 6C is obviously a good contract and deep finesse says it always makes 12, but it is difficult on a trump lead. As far as I can see you have to win the lead in dummy, ruff a diamond, cross ruff hearts and diamonds, ruff a 4th diamond, draw another trump, and go over to AS for 2 diamond winners.

One pair bid 6C (with a kiss) and made.

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