Sectional in the clubs

I’ve not been playing much the last few weeks, but on Sunday we reunited our regional team to play in a sectional Swiss Teams – apparently, one of us needed some silver points. We still qualify for the B stratum, so we played at Honors bridge club in the B/C event. It’s a nice venue – Honors and the Manhattan are just about tied for being the best clubs in NYC. (For this sectional, MBC was hosting all the 299er events).

We got off to a rocky start. First, I overslept, and in a mad panic blew my entry fee cash on a cab to get there with less than five minutes to spare. (The alarm clock didn’t go off, or I shut it off in my sleep, or something). Then the tone of the first match was set by the very first board.

The ♥K was led, and this seemed like a very reasonable contract when the dummy came down. If spades are 2-2, the ruffing diamond finesse disposes of the heart loser even when the ♦K is offside. If spades are 3-1, I need the ruffing finesse to win, with enough of even breaks so that I can ruff one club loser while ditching the other two losers on diamonds. Not much to ask - I’d say the chances are somewhere up towards 70%. There are other lines, but I’d say that two trumps and the ruffing finesse must easily be best. Of course, ♠Qxx was offside and the ruffing finesse lost, so I finished up three down.

It turned out our West had opened a weak two on a five-card heart suit, and got caught for 800. If the slam makes, that’s a useful swing to us, but instead of +180 the swing was -950. We bid a couple of close games that went down when critical finesses lost, our teammates mis-defended a game, and when the smoke cleared, we had been blitzed 0-20 VPs – not an auspicious start. But it’s often a good way to start a Swiss, or so I’ve been told, and our next few matches took us to the top of the leader-board (17-3, 18-2, 18-2, 19-1).

The fifth match looked like a win all the way at our table. The opposing pair were snapping at each other when they sat down. Then on the first board, in what seemed like a safe part-score, at trick 12 declarer held the last trump and a winner in hand. He led a loser from dummy, and dropped the side-suit winner on it. Then he showed the last trump, and tried to claim. Elwood pointed out that the 12^th trick wasn’t his, and that was one down. I’ve seen (and committed) pulling the wrong card, of course, but rarely at trick 12. It turned out they were booked for a swing against anyway, since our teammates made game, but naturally dummy was not pleased by this result. The second board looked something like this:

At IMPs, you’re going to push for games, and so you’re going to get into these messes. Legitimately, you only make if spades are 2-2, but the way the cards had been running all afternoon, I would have put money on a 3-1 break. I won the opening diamond lead with the king in dummy, and ran the ♠7 to West. He tried a heart, and I captured the ♥J with the ♥K, and played another spade. East won this one as West discarded. Now East dithered a little before returning – a diamond. So I finessed the ♥9 and ditched both clubs before East could ruff in. East was really venomous by now. “I knew I shouldn’t return your suit, it’s always wrong when I do” was just the start, and by the time the third board started, they basically weren’t speaking to each other any more. The 19-1 result wasn’t a surprise.

The sixth match was against the second place team, only two VPs behind us. There were swings in both directions, roughly canceling out. But in the end, we eked out a 2 IMP victory, 11-9 in VPs. And so in the last match, still only leading by 4 VPs, we needed to win fairly convincingly. Fortunately, the opponents at our table were not having a good match, and our teammates didn’t cut their teammates any slack either. So 30-0 in IMPs translated to a 20-0 VP blitz, and our first place was assured.