Welcome to the Hand of the Day. There are two ways to navigate this section. You can either right click here to save this file and play the hands (if you have a program that allows you to load and play .PBN files) without seeing any of my commentary or you can scroll down and see what I had to say about the hands. It is probably more interesting to scroll down and read but I always like to offer my partner a choice. If you are curious to see how Pam and I made out, then you can click here and here to see the tournament schedule and the games we played or here and here to see if we placed in anything.
Saturday in Yuma) The hardest box for Pam
to check off on our Bridge Bingo card is the one that says
"You squeeze someone". On the hand that you see below
Pam (mostly) and I executed a defensive squeeze. This is
something so rare for us that I didn't even think of putting
it on the Bingo card. Hopefully you can either read the card
diagram to the right or use link the
above so you can see how brilliant South's (Pam)
defense was.
Saturday Result) Our good defense got rewarded as we ended up setting 3NT by 3 for +150 and a nice top of 17/17 matchpoints. Unfortunately for Pam, "You squeeze someone" was not on her Bingo card for this tournament so she did not get to mark it off. As you can see below, it happened to be on my card so I enjoyed a nice chuckle as I thanked Pam while checking it off.
1) relay to 3C
2) forced
3) 0-11 HCP, 5+
diamonds
Saturday in Yuma
#2) Okay, I know this is one of those hands that
both suits the crazy system
that we are playing and might have a bit of luck involved.
Before I get to all of that though, you are welcome to try
the hands out using whatever bidding system that you prefer.
We were playing in a matchpoint game, nobody was vulnerable,
North gets to open and the opponents stayed out of the
auction.
What Happened) If you look carefully at the auction descriptions below then you will see that my 1C bid is a medium lie and my 4H bid is a small lie. The reason why I love this deal is because I can think of four different yet reasonable auctions that we could have had that would all have led us into the top contract of 6D. I have to assume that your auction ended up in the normal spot of 3NT.
1) 14+ HCP and an unbalanced hand or
22+ HCP
and a balanced hand
2) 3+ clubs, 7-9 HCP, denies a
4 card major
3) Artificial, Game Forcing
4) 3+ diamonds, shows lots of
keycards
5) Asking for keycards in
diamonds
6) 4 keycards in diamonds
7) My clubs are just as long as
my diamonds
What Happened) Although you probably
weren't wondering the other three auctions that we could
have had were:
1) 1C, 2D, 2H, 3D, 4H, 4S, 5C, 6C, 6D and 2) 1D, 2C, 2D, 3D, 4H, 4S, 5C,
6C, 6D and 3) 1D,
2D, 2H, 3D, 4H, 4S, 5C, 6C, 6D
1) 14+ HCP and
an unbalanced hand or
22+ HCP and a
balanced hand
2) ...
Saturday Result) This was
another 17/17 top and we were on our way to a nice 59% game
and a 6th place overall finish in the event.
You may be
wondering why I have started incorporating two tournaments
into each of the bridge entries in the Arizona section. Well,
during this trip my interest in collecting Hands of the Day
started to wane and I found that there were many days where I
played two sessions of bridge and had no hand that I wanted to
record. So instead of bridge hands you have to read my even
less interesting write up about the stickers that they were
handing out at the tournament.
Friday in Phoenix) Take a look at my score
card from the Friday morning matchpoint pairs game and see if
you notice anything unusual about it. I can see two strange
things but I have some specialist knowledge that you might not
have.
What happened) The
most unusual thing is that our lowest positive score is +400.
I haven't done any research to prove to you how unusual this
is but my gut tells me that this thing would happen perhaps
once a year. The second strange thing is more obscure. We once
attended a lecture by Jade Barrett where he presented the idea
that there is a strong relationship between your percent score
at matchpoints and the number of positive scores that you
have. By that measure our 8 pluses out of the 26 boards that
we played should have resulted in a score far lower then the
48.85% that we actually got.
Saturday in Phoenix) Pam prides herself on the quality of her leads. On the hand below she was faced with a very challenging one against the opponents 6NT contract. What choice would you make?
1) two keycards
in clubs without the trump Queen
What happened) Pam
went with the safe lead of the 10 of clubs and our opponent
had an easy road to twelve tricks. In order to set this
contract by 3 you had to be good enough to lead any one of
your spade cards. Every other lead gives the same result.
1) two keycards in
clubs without the trump Queen
Saturday Result)
6NT making 6 for -1440 was worth 0 out of 25 matchpoints. If
our opponents had stopped in the "proper" contract of 6C we
would have only improved our result by 1 matchpoint. Well done
opponents.
Sunday in Phoenix)
Well it's the last match of the day in the two session A-x
Swiss event and your team is on it's way to a 3 win - 3 loss
performance. Pam and I were not really watching this auction
as it occurred but afterwards I realized that our opponent had
an interesting bidding problem to consider. Assume your
partner is not crazy and see if you can figure out what his
5NT bid means.
1) 4+ spades, 12+ HCP, forcing 2) 5 diamonds
3) assume your partner is not crazy
What Happened)
After looking at all the hands it appears that North was
trying to show three keycards plus a void. I think it is much
more likely that South would have got to 7S if North had just
shown his 3 keycards.
1) 4+ spades, 12+ HCP, forcing
2) 5
diamonds
3) three keycards and a void?
Sunday Result) The contract was 6S making 7 at both tables so we were able to squeak out a 15 - 13 win in this match.
Aside: Notice that I smoothly passed my 5-5 hand in this
auction. You might not consider that remarkable but trust me I
may need to enter this hand as evidence at some future trial.
Monday in Phoenix)
I find this hand interesting from many different angles. I
find my North bidding an interesting case study in how many
lies I am prepared to tell during an auction when the mood
strikes me. From a bridge perspective South has an interesting
defensive problem and I am happy to report that Pam was good
enough to get her diamond rough because she had the courage to
underlead her Ace of Spades. (Remember she reasonably thinks
declarer has a singleton spade.) Finally this hand
expresses a rule that I discovered for myself but have not
named yet. Often in bridge, players who are getting better
will do the hard thing right and then do the easy thing wrong.
In this case, after Pam underled her Ace of spades and got the
rough back. Then she cashed the Ace of hearts, saw a
discouraging card from me and decided not to try taking her
Ace of Spades even though cashing it was the only remote
possibility left of taking another trick. Admittedly, I should
have lead the Jack of Diamonds back to send her this message
with suit preference but that might mean that this hand would
no longer fit into my simple rule.
1) 9-14 HCP, 4+ hearts, longer suit possible
2) 5+ HCP, 0-3 hearts, 4+ spades, forcing
3) maximum hand with 4+ spades
4) min hand with no singletons or voids
Monday Result)
Pam's small defensive slip did not matter as we still scored
+300 for 24 of the 25 matchpoints.
Monday) During the course of the
sectional I ended up playing against Ron Fisher and his
partner a few times. Although he is good player who very
nearly managed to win both of the large Monday pairs games the
most interesting part of our interaction was the book sales
pitches he kept giving to me. After a long ago summer as a
door to door vacuum cleaner salesman I have retained an
appreciation for a good spiel.
His was good enough that I ended up having to buy this book
and I made him the promise that if I ever finished it then I
would contact him and purchase the other two books that he was
also trying to sell me. Well, it is now a year later and even
though I have carried this book around in my bridge bag for
most of that time I have only read 36 of its 76 small pages. (1)
Why) At week long
bridge tournaments, Pam and I have been playing this game I
invented called Bridge Bingo. Essentially, I created a
list of 90 different things (ranging from likely to very
unlikely) that can happen during a week of bridge. Then
I randomly take different sets of 30 things to create unique
Bingo cards for me and Pam. Generally speaking, the
items in the top line are the easiest to get while the items
in the bottom row are the toughest. The first person to
complete a line (or complete the majority of the line by the
end of Sunday) wins the dollar amount designated for that
line. It is just another way to make bridge a bit more
exciting.
Below you can see my Bridge Bingo cards
from Yuma and Phoenix as well as the designated winner (a /
denotes a tie) for each line. In 16 games so far neither one
of us has got a blackout bingo.
Yuma
