Sunday, May 17, 2009

USBF Trials for Turkey - Saturday

Yesterday was the first of wo days of the USBF Trials to go to Turkey in August, I played with Cam Shunta. We had a shaky first session, and had a couple fixes... One where the opponents had a misunderstanding and wound up in 3NT +3, where everyone else was in 4H +2. Unfortunately the trials were Matchpoints, so we got some Zeros on boards like that. The first session we were at 10th, then we and a strong 2nd session, which felt like at least 65% or more... Turned out it was only 55%, so we are going in to today's final session in 6th place. They are sending 2 teams: The top 6 Qualifiers, so that's our goal today. We had a few good boards yesterday... One of them we fixed our opponents, on an amusing misunderstanding:
(Hands Rotated)
 
5
KT8
T3
AQ98743
K84
AJ9543
952
6
T7632
762
K874
K
AQJ9
Q
AQJ6
JT52

WestNorthEastSouth
   1
2334
p4p4
p5p6
ppp

1C was strong, 4C was intended as just to set trumps and initiate cuebidding... Cam took it as minorwood. I then took 4D as a cue, and "cued" 4H, which he took as a Queen Ask. He now "showed" the K-H and the Q-C which pushed us too high, since at this point I figured out what he was doing... I confidently bid 6C which I hoped was on a finesse. Well, I was somewhat happy when I saw dummy... I got the Ace of Heart lead, and a Diamond switch... So now all I needed to do was get the Club situation right. I figured that LHO had to have the King of Spades, otherwise he would have switched to a Spade, I also saw the King of Diamonds on my right at Trick 2. When I led the Jack fo Clubs from my hand, LHO hesitated for about 2/3 seconds... Not enough to judge the situation on, especially online. I also thought that LHO might have only bid 1H with Kx Axxxxx xxx Kx or something, so I decided to fly ace after about 4 minutes, and I think that was the first correct guess I have made in ages... But it was a good time to guess well, and I guess all's well that ends well... Even slams off 2 keycards.

1 comment:

  1. Very nice to get the singeleton King of trump offside right. Thanks for posting what your clues were. And ignoring the red herring of the "pause by LHO".
    By the way, should 4 Clubs be minorwood in that competitive sequence? What has your partnership agreed after that minor misunderstanding, no pun intended.

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