West District Pairs Final

After a strong showing in the semi-final, we went into the West District Pairs somewhat hopeful. Needless to say, our hopes were not fulfilled... well done John DiMambro and Hugh McCash, who won the competition, the only pair to score over 60%. They'll be accompanied by Shirish Chotai and Les Verth if they decide to make the trip up to the highlands to compete in the inter-district pairs (the Strang trophy, I think it's called). 

Although we only managed 50%, I felt like I was back to playing a reasonable standard of bridge - I knew what was going on a lot more often than I have over the past month or so. 

Here's one where we did well because the opponents made a classic mistake... what Hugh Kelsey referred to in How to Improve Your Bridge as "picking daisies". Let's start with a lead problem. Playing pairs, what do you lead from this hand, on this auction (1NT 12-14, if that matters).

I think it's close, but the majority choice in the room was the 7 of spades. I think I'd have picked the diamond 8, as the spades seems more likely to be giving away a trick (it's not even clear to me that the 7 is the right card to lead from that holding). However, you're pretty much leading blind. 

Now consider the same hand on this auction: 

2♠ was a transfer to ♣s, and 2NT showed 1 of the top 3 honours. What is the best lead now?

It might not be clear what to lead, but I figured that if the opponents were going to be able to run 6 club tricks, I might as well let them get that out of the way immediately, and then let them figure out how to make any other tricks themselves. Yes, there's a chance that we have 5 cashing tricks, but it doesn't look all that likely from my side, and its matchpoints, so I'm not necessarily aiming to beat this contract. Maybe my reasoning was wrong, but I certainly had more information to go on than the majority of other Wests in the room. 

The full hand was this: 

As you can see, the 2♠ bid really served no purpose - North was always just going to bid 3NT no matter what her partner responded, and so the extra information could only be helpful to the defence. 

Here's one more hand, where our opponents scored significantly above average for making 6♥, with 13 top tricks... would you and your partner be able to bid these cards to 7♥? (or, even better, 7NT?)

                                             

While in this instance 7♥ is pretty much 100% (7NT is actually 100% - there are 13 tricks on top, and no danger of a ruff), it's worth noting that in this field the grand would have had to be really, really good odds to be worth bidding. 6♥ + 1 was worth 9/12 matchpoints, so you're betting at 3:1 if you do contract for all 13 tricks.  Marginal grands really aren't worth bidding at matchpoints... 

I've no idea how so much of the field managed to stay out of slam. Perhaps they weren't given a helping hand by South bidding 2♠? Although I don't see how anyone could stay quiet with the South hand.