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The start of 2018 hasn’t seen too many tournaments down South, with only the Invercargill 8B Pairs, the Oamaru 5A Pairs, the Taieri and Queenstown 8B Pairs since Moss last wrote to y’all.

The winners of these events were as follows:
Invercargill 8B – 18 pairs

1.	Anne Somerville and Lorraine Oliver	119.79
2.	Debbie Cooper and Tony Winters	117.45
3.	Geoff Eyles and Harry Shepherd	116.41

Oamaru 5A – 34 pairs

1.	Lorraine Peacock and Margaret Perley	121.82
2.	Frances Sheehy and Donna Ruwhiu	121.62
3.	Dennis Norman and Brian Papps	121.46

Taieri 8B – 30 pairs

1.	John Sheehy and Robert Cowan	132.14
2.	Annette Fea and Hamish Ryan	125.68
3.	Donna Ruwhiu and Kristen Collins	124.72

Queenstown 8B Open Pairs

1.	Des Baird and Joy Baird	124.70
2.	Marilyn Jackson and Anne  McGregor	123.04
3.	Hamish Ryan and Annette Fea	119.96

 

At the Taieri 8B,  local pair Robert Cowan (left) and John Sheehy(right) produced a massive 69.51% second session to close out the day.

 Another part of the results that drew my eye was that five pairs achieved over 120% in the two sessions, which is enough to win some tournaments. Commiserations to Lyn Clark and Christine Samson, and Ernie Sutton and Jean-Oliver Begouin for not even placing after a strong day’s bridge. Funnily enough there was also a three-way tie for 13^th on exactly 50%. It is bad luck this wasn’t the Babich Pairs, where such a score is always rewarded.

Also of note was the closeness of the top three at Oamaru. An over or under-trick proved pretty significant.

4^th placing in Gold Coast Teams

In terms of other matters, Dunedin player Vicki Bouton skilfully captained a 5-man (ex-)youth team of Dunedin and Sydney players over at the Gold Coast to place 4^th of the 226 teams trying to qualify. This result made her and your humble correspondent the only two New Zealand players to qualify for the Open knockouts – thanks for the captaincy,Vicki.

Lots of Teaching in Dunedin

Dean Eidler has been running a series of advanced seminars on topics such as transfers and reverses that have been well attended by local players and those from surrounding clubs. Phil Noye has kept up his excellent work with this year’s learners group, reporting that he has 54 people coming through the lessons and 51 of them for the first time. Hopefully some of them stick around!

Here was an instructive deal from the Christchurch Open Pairs on the weekend:

 

The name of the game was match-points. So, when the auction started 2 pass 4 to Tim Schumacher sitting West, he found a 4NT call (showing both minors). North passed and East erred here, as passing is completely free. Even if you managed to go 10 tricks off in 4NT, that would be 10 off not vulnerable – or 500 against their vulnerable game. When South doubles this, West will know to bid their better minor, and Tim would have reached a peaceful contract of 5x. Instead East decided to bid 5 directly – which South promptly doubled. 5 appears to be a hopeless contract, with 3 trump losers, a heart and a diamond loser and great potential to be tapped off and lose trump control.

 

South started with a spade. The ace won in dummy and a heart was played towards the closed hand. With no apparent losers to pitch from dummy, North won this and continued the attack with a high spade, ruffed in dummy. Declarer now came out the K, which ran around to South’s ace. Another spade here would have continued tapping dummy, but South chose instead to exit a heart – which gives East some reprieve as it ran around to their KJ. After cashing another high heart, declarer played a diamond to the queen and exited a diamond – hoping for something good to happen.

 Here North took the view to ruff in with the 10, allowing East to pitch their spade loser. Now a spade exit would allow declarer to score a ruff in the short hand, and then play a trump towards dummy. Knowing that North had opened a weak 2 in spades and already shown up with the K and the A, the odds were that the AK were with South. Instead North exited a trump, which meant that South could only score their two high trumps. Two trumps, a heart, a diamond and a diamond ruff spelt -3, or the same 500 that was available if the contract was 5x.

Oddly enough, to limit diamonds to only 500, declarer needs to find the  JT doubleton. Most of the declarers failed to do so. Thus, in practice, they went for 800. "Better to be lucky than good", as East was heard to say after leaving the table.

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