Played with Norman in the St Andrew Bridge Club last Friday (Jess was out playing rugby). It's a much stronger field that we usually get at the Buchanan, although obviously still quite mixed - Cliff Gillis and John Murdoch and the Outred's probably being the strongest pairs (that I know of - there's a good chance there are stronger pairs I don't recognise). For a pairs tournament, there were an unusual number of interesting slam hands...
There was one board where 7!d was cold, but our opponents collected a comfortable 75% of the matchpoints by cashing their 13 top tricks in 6NT (the latter was a bit lucky, but 13 tricks in diamonds pretty much only relies on a 3-1 break in trumps, with a couple of other chances).
Here's another one:
I opened the E hand 1!c, and when Norman bid 1!h, I decided a splinter in !d was the best way of describing my hand. I jumped to 4!d, which specifically shows a void (3!s would be a singleton in an unspecified suit). Norman's response is now "exclusion keycard". I realised at this point that I couldn't remember what we meant by that... apparently we just stick with the usual 1430 structure, including the trump suit in the responses. This clearly isn't optimal, as it means that on this auction we have to go past 4!h when Norman has 0 keycards, but it at least has the advantage of being easy to remember...
Anyway, as I wasn't really sure what Norman's response meant, I didn't quite have the confidence to raise his 6!h bid to 7. I think it's more likely than not that he has the 3 missing aces, but as 6!h+1 was worth 80% of the matchpoints, I was probably right not to take the gamble.
A competitive auction that we definitely got wrong:
I think the first two bids from both of us are fairly normal. However, something went wrong at some point, as we ended up pushing the opponents into a cold slam...
I bid 4!s because after Norman has shown lots of spades and very little defence, I was confident it would be a cheap save. I think Norman's 5!s is a little more suspect. It could be a cheap save over 5!h, or it could push the opponents one level higher - but if it does the latter, he has to be pretty confident they're not going to make it. I thought for a long time about my final bid. I think this is one of those situations in which it's almost certainly wrong to let the opponents play undoubled, but I couldn't really see how a double was going to make any difference to the score. In retrospect, this was wrong, as a double can gain us something on the hands where 5!h already wasn't making.
As the cards lie, the slam is a lucky make, and as I thought at the time, 6!s was not cheap against game, so after 6!h, we were stuck. not sure if this one was just unlucky, or if one of us could have done better
We bid the hands below sensibly to a very good 6!d contract, which was only managed by one other pair. A poor board for those who got greedy and decided to play in 6N, but a reasonably good one for the one pair that managed to stop in 3N... I think there are just too many points between the two hands for 5!d to be the right place at matchpoints - once you're past 3N and you know you're only missing one keycard, I think you just have to take the plunge...
Finally, there was one more "slam hand", on which I went for 1700 "saving" against the opponents' 650, but the less said about that one the better...
