Month: June 2009

Hi all

I was playing a Piedmont pairs night with Elenalani about a week ago. This deal has been bugging me, like a fat fly on a very hot summer day.

I’m surprised by the jump to game by my LHO, and so is RHO I see from the corner of my eye. I figure there’s a lot of distribution involved, but that’s as far as I can get when assembling information. So I lead a top trump to prevent a complete crossruff. I certainly want to defend as passively as possible, right?

Wrong!

This was the complete deal.

Declarer had no problems establishing dummy’s suit to dispose of his . In the end East had only lost one trump and two . I can tell you +420 was a very, very lonely score on the score sheet.

The only effective defence is taking two top and then switch to a . Declarer can still develop the suit, but he lacks important tempo.

East can pitch only one loser on dummy’s winning , I get to ruff with my King and take the setting trick with my pointy Queen.

Could I foresee that West jumped to game on such a flat hand? Or should I just take take a deep breath, congratulate West with his insane bid and take my loss? I don’t know.

Hi all

Wednesday was my first day at school. With a packed lunch and my bag on my back I cycled down to Oakland. I’ve signed up to get Oracle Certified, and if there’s enough time I’ll add a Sun Programmer Certification to that. That must be worth something in the job market, because of the recent acquisition.

About the Sacramento regionals, I already mentioned we played the finals but we only scratched the surface there. It was an extremely tight match, and they beat us in the end by a skinny 3 imp margin. It was already close to midnight when we finished the last couple of boards.

This deal is from the semi finals. We played against very nice and humble opponents, but they gave us a good scare. They were on the right side of the score All… The… Time… In the end our experience, skills and longer breath toppled the match in our favor.

After the following auction I got to play 3.

1. Nebulous because of big

My flow was right. In mere seconds I visualized my path: take the lead… finesse in … if it loses then duck a to work towards an endplay.

So the finesse lost. I ducked the switch and took the second round. I drew the remaining trumps, eliminated and exited in , West gaining the lead. Without a moment’s thought she put the Jack on the table.

I think I’ve overanalyzed at the table. I asked for the Queen from dummy and suffered a one trick defeat when the Ten of proved to be on the unexpected side of the enemy spectrum.

What I did was with the odds, though. I knew East was holding a four card suit. My biggest mistake was projecting my flow on my opponents, regular opponents don’t play high cards smoothly if they don’t hold a sequence (at least not very often).

Hi all

Some random update: I’ve been thinking about going back to school. There’s a place nearby in Oakland where I can enter a program to become an OCP DBA. The idea that I’ll be learning new stuff and expand my Oracle skills is exciting, the crazy amount of money that’s involved gives me some gray hairs. Oh well, I have some other options as well, UCB Extension has some nice (and cheaper) summer programs I can sign up for.

Last week my team (Greg V, Mark M and Mike S) participated in the Sacramento regionals. Mental note to self, it really takes an hour and a half to get to Sacramento from Berkeley. We agreed to play in the top flight so Greg and I could use our relay tools. It’s funny, most people in the US are comfortable when you tell them you’re playing some exotic big system, but when you tell them you play a multi 2 they get confused. In Europe it’s the other way around.

Here’s a story from the finals. We played some darkhaired sponsor in tight pants, a guy with an army haircut and two Polish pro’s.

 
You’re red vs white. RHO opens 1 and you have an easy double. Slightly annoyed you double again when 4 comes back to you. Everybody is fine with that.

I started with a top and switched to my singleton trump, scared after seeing such a powerhouse come down.

We collect only +100 when Greg didn’t push in trumps twice more when he was on lead. So East has successfully psyched us out of our 4 game, even 5 has reasonable play.

What’s my problem, I hear you ask?

How would you like it if the opponents exchanged a couple of words in Polish between every board? For all you know they are informing each other about a pending psych. I cannot prove it, but there sure is a putrid smell to this deal.