Peebles Part III: Swiss Pairs session 1

I played the pairs at Peebles with Alex Wilkinson. Alex is Phil Stephens' regular partner, and I think can now reasonably be described as something of a regular in the Scottish Open team, so I was definitely the weaker half of our partnership. The pairs happens entirely on the Saturday, and was a Swiss, with 8 6-board matches in total. We did remarkably well overall, finishing 5th, without ever really seeming to do anything right. Most of our good results came from not doing crazy things, which I think was partly due to the fact that neither of us at played together before, so we were at least trying to do normal things (I was also at least trying to do normal things because I know Alex is better than me - I definitely play significantly better when I know my partner is better than me, which I'm sure says something interesting about me psychologically). 

Anyway, having said that, the only board I remember anything about really from the first session was one where our good result can't exactly be described as coming from our both playing sensibly: 

Yes, you read that auction correctly. Having opened 1 club in four seat, Alex decided he had to follow through with a psychic spade bid. I then correctly judged that my LHO looked like she was about to pass out 1 spade, and so didn't feel the need to raise. I'm not sure exactly what happened in the play - I wasn't even paying enough attention at the time to notice that Alex only had 3 spades, but they contrived to let it through, for +80 and a very good score.

There were several other gifts - our opponents let us play in 4HX when they were cold for grand in either minor or NT, and then another set of opponents played a perfectly normal 6S contract in 6NT - the rest of the field making +1460 vs. their +1440 giving us a whole lot of match points. I think we won all our matches in the first session, including a couple of big wins, and were sitting in something like 8th place going into the evening session, while we all retired to the Crown Hotel for dinner, and a relatively limited amount of alcohol, as we were still in with a shot...