Misadventures In Manhattan

Elwood resurfaced for his first game at the club since mid-January. Of course, I celebrated by playing eleven hands and only being dummy twice, but he didn't seem to mind. And it was a decent field for a club game, with at least half a dozen pretty good pairs in nine tables. The weak notrump seemed to be working well.



South's strategy of passing over 1NT and then doubling for takeout is standard practice. But on this hand, she is at the top limit for the initial pass – some might say over it – and the final result is below average.



North-South seem to have been paralysed by the bidding. To me, a bid of 2H from North over the transfer seems clear-cut. Even if you haven't discussed it with your partner (and even in a club duplicate I would expect that most pairs have), it should be pretty obviously for takeout, and North has the perfect shape for it. According to the computer, neither 2H nor 4S should make. To add insult to injury, half the field bid and made 4S, while I somehow scrambled 8 tricks the other way.

That last opening was a bit ugly. This one was even worse, and even more effective.



The opening was enough to keep out South, and the transfer bid shut out North. So we played quietly in clubs, and again I made a contract that should have failed. But this time, the North-South game was real, even though difficult to bid. A couple of pairs even made it doubled.

An odd occurrence was that board 24 of the set in use was mis-labelled. The dealer was shown as East rather than West. That made a big difference to the auction.



Not a very coherent auction, in my opinion. In the end, that worked in our favor, since nobody seemed sure of who could make anything. If the opponents double, they get a top. When they didn't, we got an almost-top.

Anyway, we finished up second on about 64%. Not bad for a come-back game.