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Liz and Blair Fisher.

Last Qualifier comes First in Tauranga.

There were familiar names at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the Teams event of the Tauranga Mini-Congress Teams. The team of Liz and Blair Fisher and Jo and Sam Simpson made the top 4 from the qualifying Swiss in 4^th place by just 2.17 vps after scoring a near maximum 19.74 in the last round, qualifying the hard way as that was the first time in the 6 round Swiss they had reached a top 4 qualifying position.

They made very good use of that finishing position with three huge wins in the final, scoring a massive 53.17 vps out of a 60 total to win by 5.6vps from Jeremy Fraser Hoskin, Kevin Hu, Zachary Yan and Jack James.  

These were the 2 boards the pairs gave when asked for a memorable board from the final. This board proved very profitable for Jo and Sam Simpson. Let’s first look at it through the eyes of one of the defenders, North.

 

 

2 was a Weak 2 though promised 8-11 hcps. Your partner leads J. Plan the defence.

While you are thinking on that, Blair Fisher achieved a great result for his team on the following board. The scoresheet might not have reflected that though but for his action, the 5 imp loss on the board would have been far greater:

 

 Blair opened 1 as South with 3NT showing 4 card heart support, 10-14 hcp and a spade void. He wasted no time in bidding to slam. West did not find a diamond lead and Blair soon wrapped up all 13 tricks.

Yes, that reduced his team’s loss to just 5 imps! At the other table, South opened a Multi 2 but thereafter hearts were never mentioned! North bid clubs and when supported by South, more clubs and East-West bid spades up to the 5-level and then dobled North's 6 . Yet again, there was no diamond lead. Blair then was definitely to the rescue.

Back though to our defensive problem. The key to the defence was which card you played as North to trick 1. “What did it matter, the ace or the king” you might think? Too right it mattered, a lot. Take a look:

 

At the table, North played K and switched to J. Declarer, Sam Simpson, covered and South exited a trump. Sam won and drew the remaining trump. He had to avoid losing to the Q. Sam did well to start counting South’s high card points. Assuming South would not have underled A at trick 1, they had only 1 hcp in hearts, Q and A. The opening promised 8-11. Had South stolen a point for their opening or did they hold Q as well?

Sam trusted South to have more than 7 hcp and played AK to provide a discard for his spade loser. Had North played A at trick 1, denying K, it would have been very much harder for Sam to guess correctly. Indeed, the finesse was taken in the same contract at the other table and 5 failed, giving 10 very welcome imps to Sam’s team.

A successful weekend at the Tauranga Bridge Club, helped by great organisation, director and scorer Caroline Wiggins and Jan Spaans and some mainly foul weather. The other event winners were:

Waikato Bays Provincial Pairs    Pamela Pedersen and Alan Parkes. Just take a look at all the strong pairs they beat to see what a tremendous result this was.

Congress Restricted Open Pairs Pam Browne and Kevin Birch

Congress Consolation Pairs   Herman Yuan and Michael Neels

Provincial Teams: Plate    Wayne Burrows, Clair Miao, Russell Wison, Gary Chen.

Richard Solomon

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