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:
| West | North | East | South |
| | | | 1♣ |
| 2♥ | 3♣ | 3♥ | 4♣ |
| p | 4♦ | p | 4♥ |
| p | 5♥ | p | 6♣ |
| p | p | p |
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.
