All News

Semi- Final Spingold appearance for Michael Whibley.

Michael Whibley has been making a name for himself on the international bridge scene in recent years both playing for New Zealand and also individually. He further enhanced his and his teammates’ reputation this past week when in playing in one the USA’s major events, the Spingold, they performed hugely well to reach the semi-finals of this knock-out Teams events, considered to be one of the toughest in the world.

His teammates were all Australian. His partner was Nabil Edgtton and teammates Andy Hung and Sartaj Hans. They played as a team of four in a field consisting largely of 6 person top US and European teams.

Michael and Nabil 

Their opponents in the semi-final, a 4 set by 15 board matches, were the largely Swedish team, Bremark- Hult, Upmark-Nystrom and Wrang- Palma. The Swedes led 26-12 after the first 15 boards but the Australasians recovered well to win the second 39-16 to lead 51-42 at the half-way point.

This board contributed to the turnaround.

 

North-South started with a Precision style sequence to 3. This comparatively high-level bidding helped their opponents. After Michael Whibley’s heart overcall, Nabil showed a good raise to 4 (from a previously passed hand) with 4 though Michael was not interested beyond game.

South led a club. Michael won and played a spade towards his hand. When the king won, he exited a second spade. The defence continued clubs. Michael ruffed, played a trump to dummy and ruffed a spade high. He then drew trumps in two more rounds and lost just A and a diamond for + 650.

Clubs were barely mentioned at the other table:

 

 

The pace was much slower and by the time heart support had been shown, East felt he had done enough.

The lead was Q to the ace and a club switch. Declarer lost a low diamond trick and North switched to a trump. East cross-ruffed setting up his long diamond before drawing trumps and also made 11 imps but that was 10 imps to Hans.

However, fortunes changed in the third set with Bremark winning the set 51-8. That proved too big a deficit to recover with the Swedes winning the last set 38-27 and the match 122-88. Nevertheless, a fine performance by the four players in the Hans team in a major US event.

This is a level which our current Under 21 Youth Team can only aspire to at present. They will be competing in the World Youth Championships in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, from July 31^st until August 7^th. We have a team of 5 players, Alice Dravitzki, Leon Meier, Ramon Quennell, Ryan Song and Zachary Yan. We will tell you a little about them in the next few days. They are being captained by former NZ Youth player and now New Zealand Bridge Board Member, Sam Coutts.

All five players will also take part in the European Youth National Pairs at the same location this week leading up to the main event.

Richard Solomon

Go Back View All News Items