Cautious Bidding

In the Swiss Teams at Newport we were playing for the first time in a team with Sue Ingham and Gwynn Davis. Gwynn writes a blog entitled 'Cautious Bidder', which you can find on the East Wales web site. In the first match we took this caution to extremes, playing two potential grand slams in game and missing another small slam. The grands are too embarrassing to report, but the small slam was more interesting.

I think the bidding up to 3NT was fairly automatic, but my 4♠  was over cautious. I ran a quick simulation with the North hand opposite a hand with 15 to 17 points and at least six good clubs, and slam was making most of the time. On reflection a jump to 5♠  over 3NT would have been a better description of the power of my hand. The board was flat, and only seven pairs out of 36 bid and made slam, so maybe it was not that easy.

After an inauspicious start - not necessarily a bad thing at Swiss teams - we played rather better and finished a respectable fourth. Gwynn describes one of the later hands, where my partner's bidding is described as 'feisty' rather than cautious, in Cautious Bidder article 108.

Show Up Squeeze

In the last 16 of the Crockfords Plate we didn't make too many errors and had a comfortable win, though this grand was maybe a bit fortunate.

I must admit to a senior moment when I bid 7NT - for some reason I thought that we had 12 top tricks, so that the grand would be laydown at best or on a finesse at worst. Luckily Ann was kind enough to provide the queen of diamonds so that I did indeed have 12 top tricks and two chances for a thirteenth

West led a spade and I could see two lines of play - the heart finesse or a squeeze in the red suits. I ran all the clubs, discarding two hearts and two spades from dummy, while West threw two spades and a diamond. The diamond discard looks harmless but actually led to a position where I could not go wrong. On the last club East was forced to come down to two hearts and four diamonds. I cashed the ace of hearts and three top diamonds which revealed that it was East who still held the jack. Now when I led a heart towards my K J at trick 12 and East followed with a low card, I knew his last card was the jack of diamonds so it was clear to go up with the king and drop West's queen - a Show-Up Squeeze.

All this didn't really matter as I was always intending to play for the squeeze rather than the finesse. The  squeeze (which works when the same hand has both long diamonds and long hearts, or when the queen of hearts is singleton or doubleton) works about 60% of the time, compared with about 53% for cashing the ace of hearts and taking a finesse. When you include the chance of the diamonds playing for four tricks - about 10% - the grand has a 64% chance of making, well within the required odds at IMP scoring. So perhaps that 7NT bid was not so crazy after all.

Avoiding a Striped-Tailed Ape

The draw for the first round of the Hubert put us in a familiar position as cannon fodder for the Hughes-Huggett-Preston combo. After many losing matches to this group, we managed to scrape a very narrow win, helped by the opponents being below par and this outrageous slice of good fortune.

I was South, and failed to notice East's double on the second round, so thought that I had enough to raise to slam. West's double was intended as Lightner for a club lead, but as his partner had already doubled 5♥, a more likely explanation was just that the idiot sitting South had no idea what he was doing. Anyway, East led a diamond which Barrie ruffed and led a heart to the jack. With the fortunate positions in both black suits the slam rolled in for +1210.

In the other room North chose to open 1♠. and bid 5♥ over 5♦ on the next round. South converted to 5♠ but this went one down.

We won the match by around 100 points (aggregate scoring in the Hubert). Making an overtrick in 5♥ doubled - the most likely outcome if I had noticed East's double - would not have been enough to win the match.