Buckling up

Hi all

Sheer madness! All deals at Star pairs last night were just insane. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but there were so much nice and interesting deals last night I have enough material to write a book. Here we go, first game of the evening:

South
T
QT73
T864
T542

Not so interesting. Try to guess René’s hand from the bidding.

West
North
East
South
1
pass
2
pass
2
pass
3
pass
pass
double
4
pass
pass
4
a.p.
 

I was fairly sure he was trying to goof things up, looking for a penalty double because of the crazy bidding. But the opponents didn’t really cooperate. Have you tried to make sense of the bidding yet? René surely has some number of and very short . He certainly doesn’t have five , so maybe a 5-4-0-4?

No! He introduced a three card suit at the four-level! He did his math/algebra thing to figure out I had to hold at least four . I’m glad he does these things when it’s pairs and not teams.

West Dealer
– Vul
North
KQJ9875
J42
AK8
West
A6432
K8
73
QJ93
East
A965
AKQJ952
76
South
T
QT73
T864
T542

Nobody at the table had any clue what was happening and René scrambled 8 tricks together, undoubled, for 80something percent.

I think “What the hell??” comes close to North’s thoughts when West opens 1 (or Muiderberg) and then rebids . Why East doesn’t try for 3NT is still a mystery to me, but a lot of strange things happened on this deal. The scores ranged from +850 to -50 for EW. People doubling West’s 1 opening, or trying to introduce themselves in a later stage, all leading to different kinds of disasters.

After this game I knew I had to buckle up for an adventurous ride.