JJ Final

Yesterday was the final match of the season for Hillhead, we played the final of the Jackie Josephson against Gilmorehill. Unfortunately, they were just too good for us - we lost by about 4000 points over the 32 boards, even taking into account the fact that we started with a 2000 point headstart. I thought we did well to play in what seems to be a clearly better slam on this board, although our auction was not particularly impressive.

After Norman bid 2♦ over my strong 2♣ opening, I pretty much just drove to slam, as I didn't really have any way of finding out if he had the only card I was interested in - the ♠K. 

Norman drew trumps and played a ♣ towards the K. When Jim went in with the ♣A, the hand was over. John Murdoch seemed to think that this was wrongly played, but I can't actually figure out why. You don't have two entries to hand to pitch the black suit losers on the ♥QJ, and you still have the chance of the ♠J dropping when you play it this way. Maybe you should run a lot of ♦s first? But this line has at least an 80% chance of success. There was also a discussion afterwards of how good 6NT is (on a ♥ lead). Basically, you need to be able to play this ♠ suit for no losers. Danny Kane and Jim came to the conclusion that this was 62% after the match (this was Jim's instinct, and Danny did some calculations).  

Using Richard Pavlicek's bridge calculator (I don't have a Windows machine at the moment, so can't run SuitPlay): you can pick up: void in either hand (1.5%); stiff J in either hand (2.5%); Jx in either hand (16.2%); Jxx in either hand (35.6%) and a small singleton onside (6.1%). This is a total of 61.9%, so they did pretty well... 

In addition, no defender can keep all of ♠Jxxx ♥K ♣A if you come down to a 5 card ending, so if you're willing to back yourself, and if the player with the long spades has one of the high cards in the other two suits then you have some chances of an endplay. 


We also won a Gold Cup Plate match on Wednesday, so will get a rematch against John Dick's team, who knocked us out of the Gold Cup proper in our very first match. No bridge this weekend, but next weekend is the Melville one day congress, I'm playing with Martin Stephens in the pairs and Adam Dickinson, with Martin and his dad, in the teams. 

Things are getting closer to being sorted for our National League team, a couple of people have some decisions to make, and it's possible there will end up being just two of us looking for team-mates, but I've spoken to a few people lately who don't have teams sorted yet, and I'm confident I'll be playing again, if not quite sure who with yet.