Men's Competitions

This weekend was the Men's Pairs and the Men's Teams in Dundee. I was playing in the pairs with Jun Pinder and in the teams with Jake Corry (Robert Clow and Derek Peden were our team-mates). David Liggat and Roy Bennet won the pairs (I think repeating their victory from last year), and Jun and I finished just slightly below 50% - not a particularly impressive showing from either of us, I think, although Jun did warn me beforehand that matchpoints isn't his forte.

As I left the teams, about an hour or so ago, Ian Sime, John Matheson, Brian Short and Alan Goodman had been declared the winners by 1 VP. There was something odd going on with board 10:

This was the board (and the auction) at our table. I was sitting north, and led the ♠K. Jake dropped the T, and I fell from grace, switching to a ♥, which gives the contract away, as now declarer can just draw trumps. As Jake pointed out afterwards, I should almost certainly get this right. With Qx in ♦, I know declarer doesn't have a dummy entry, so even if he does have a stiff spade, setting up the ♠Q won't do any harm, and so if he has two heart losers, they're not going anywhere.

The reason this board is controversial is that by the time it reached out team-mates, the East-West hands had been switched, which obviously makes comparison impossible (they went off in 5♦) I think the decision the organisers made was to scrap the board altogether (although the impression I got was that it didn't actually make a difference to the final result). There was a suggestion they could scrap it only in the matches where it was fouled. I guess there's also the question of whether there should be penalties for the team that messed it up. In any case, our results were bad enough as it was, without re-introducing that one.

There were a few more hands that I might get round to writing up at some point, but overall I wasn't particularly happy with my performance over the weekend. I felt like I was mostly playing automatically - jut following suit and doing the thing that seemed "normal", rather than actually thinking about each hand. It's  a habit that it's easy to get into, and I had been getting better at actually playing each board rather than just going through the motions. Not sure what went wrong this weekend.

Anyway, Jess did end up coming out for Saturday night. In fact, she ended up coming out on Saturday afternoon (due to a misunderstanding), and spent about 3 hours trying and failing to buy food in various places around Dundee, before I finally met up with her and we headed out to Nando's for a not-particularly-thrilling-but-at-least-you-know-what-you're-getting meal. She then headed to Aberdeen for a rugby game in the morning, and is off to Inverness for an academic workshop tomorrow. With a government meeting in Edinburgh on Wednesday, that means she'll have visited 5 of Scotland's 7 cities in just 4 days (and passed through Stirling and Perth on the train), which I consider a much more impressive achievement than my finishing somewhat below average in a couple of bridge events.

Winter Pairs on Wednesday, then I'm off to Tenerife for a couple weeks - we have the final of the West District Pairs on the day I get back, and then I'm sure there'll be more bridge coming up...

ETA: added the hand from board 10 - which Jake had already posted in the comments below.