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2022 Youth Bridge Day.

Each year this century, New Zealand Bridge has run a Youth event during a weekend about this time of year. This is not aimed at our top Youth players but those coming into the game, maybe with a little experience. It is a time where they can meet up, socialize and play the game they all enjoy.

This year, Saturday August 6^th was the day. Here is a report of the event by its and NZ Bridge’s Youth Co-Ordinator, Paul Coleman. Rather conveniently, it also includes today’s Hand of the Day.

“In which event are you most likely to see a contract of 7NTxx making 7? It can only be a Youth Bridge Event and this wasn’t even during the Crazy Bridge session.

The unbroken record of running an annual NZ Youth Bridge Weekend continues. We were fortunate with our timing in 2020 and 2021. For this year, with fewer numbers, we kept it to a one-day event at Auckland Bridge Club for the 19 attendees, 16 locals, 2 from Wellington and 1 from Hamilton.

We started the day with Pairs which were won by the Auckland pair of Kathryn Holmes and Hamish Jelleyman (N/S) and Mike Cui and Aadhi Hariharan (E/W) freshly arrived from Wellington.

It was on Board 2 that Mike (West) and Aadhi found 7NT after a 2NT opener by Aadhi. Mike checked for aces (all present) and kings (one missing). James Ling (South) doubled which Mike confidently redoubled knowing his partner was playing it!

How would you play 7NTxx as East on the lead of 8 from South?

After an opening lead of 3, Aadhi had no problems taking 13 tricks as this was the full lay-out.

 

Not quite so easy on Q or a red-suit lead.

Declarer wins say the opening heart lead and must cash all 9 red suit winners but somewhere in the middle must cash A. After 5 rounds of diamonds and 3 rounds of hearts and that A, these cards remain.

 

South has no good discard when the last diamond is played and assuming a club is discarded by South, declarer would play clubs from the top.

 

James and his partner Joseph Tan were then playing in 1NT XX the following board for 3 off. They agreed to leave the double out for the rest of the event after going -3280 on consecutive boards. Things came right for them thanks to some impressive declarer play from Joseph helping them to claim the chocolates for closest to 50%.

 
Grant and his attentive audience

After lunch we were joined by Grant Jarvis who emphasised the need for Thinking and Planning when playing the hand. After sharing some war stories from the North Island Teams, he set them 4 challenging hands which paid dividends to the players that could identify cross ruffing opportunities, predict partner’s best suit when on lead and avoid setting up crucial tricks in dummy. It was nice to see the former Pukekohe High School teacher interact with the current students both from his schooling days (Auckland Grammar) and early teaching days (Macleans College). Thanks Grant for your support. Lance (Bowden) and I promise to teach some better opening leads to our students before next time!

Over the course of the afternoon, we ran a round robin Teams event of 6 board matches. This was taken out by Team Fire of Mike playing with Briar Coleman and Aadhi playing with Alex Shan. After 2 narrow wins in the opening 2 rounds versus the Psychedelic Snails and Aengus Beef, they needed a 3 IMP win over Mac ‘n Cheese to take the title. They were helped when Aengus Beef captain Aengus Moore repeatedly bid his clubs to put his partner, who had opened 1C on a 10 count, into an unlikely minor game to crush the Snails in the last round. Here is Aengus’s hand:

K73

 J954

 A

 JT965

 

We finished the evening with Crazy Bridge, a Youth Bridge tradition which generates some crazy bidding, crazy scores and heaps of laughing and entertainment. How would you bid a hand when 5s are wild or when you only see 9 of your cards to bid? The craziest scores went to Hamish and Kathryn (positive) and Josephine Sim and Elsa Ly (negative) who bemoaned that it was all going so well until we had that -2000.

My thanks for the event go to Tony Morcom for his dealing, playing, dish washing and always reliable support, to Lance Bowden for promoting learning bridge in schools and at the Papatoetoe club, and to Kevin Hu who turned up to help and ended up playing all day and sorting out a scoring mishap. Thanks also to Denise at Auckland Bridge Club and Richard from NZB for their admin support and to all the regional committees and clubs who subsidised their players’ fees.

We hope to see you all and more players in 2023 hopefully in Christchurch.

Schools represented at the 2022 Youth Bridge Event: Macleans College (5), Auckland Grammar School (4), Avondale College, Baradene College, Cardinal McKeefrey School, Hamilton Boys’ High School, Rangitoto College, Remuera Intermediate (all 1 each).”

 

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