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Day 4 – The Reality Check

When you play 3 or 4 matches a day for 6 days against strong opposition, you are going to have a day that is tougher than others. Let’s hope that our Women’s and Mixed Teams have just experienced that day…and will survive.

The Women's Day

It looked good for our Women as they started with a 97-23 thrashing of bottom placed Tunisia to give them the maximum. Next up were Canada, a team which includes a name well known to many in New Zealand, Karen Cumpstone, who lived for many years in the Waikato and played several times for our National Women’s team. Karen sat this match out as her teammates beat the Kiwis 40-.37 (9.09 to New Zealand). The “downer” came in the last match of the day, a 28-59 loss to Chile (3.12) which left New Zealand in 6^th place. 8 qualify from the Women’s group (not the number quoted yesterday: sorry) and the good news is that New Zealand are still about 20 vps ahead of 9^th place with 5 matches still to play.

A Tough Day for our Mixed Team

However, there were no “mixed” fortunes for our Mixed Team. The day started badly and got worse with scores of 5.07 against the leaders, Netherlands, 3.63 against Russia (including a grand-slam bid by the Russians on a (successful) finesse, 2.76 against Sweden and 1.46 against Denmark. There are though two pieces of good news. Three of those losses were to teams in the top five while even though New Zealand dropped to 14^th place, with 16 qualifying, they are still 24 vps ahead of 17^th.

Seniors on the "up"

In contrast to the above, our Seniors had their best day yet and finished it with two wins, moving up to 21^st in the 24 team field.  They lost to Egypt 19-32 (6.03) and  to Pakistan 19-45 (3.27) but after that barely lost an imp as they beat Germany 23-6 (14.93) and China Hong Kong 16-4 (13.71). Here, also, 16 qualify and 16^th placed Germany are still 60 vps ahead, surely too much to catch up in 7 matches. However, at least there has been an improvement in performance.

Open Team..still Competitive

Finally to the Open Team. They have the hardest job to qualify as they need to finish in the top five (or be the highest placed 6^th) out of a 17 team group. Despite beating Canada in their first match 48-44 (11.20), the Kiwis dropped from 5^th to 7^th. Getting to the right slam was very important on this board:

 

If the diamond suit broke evenly, then one could either play 6 or 6NT. Maybe the Canadians bid 6NT to safeguard against a heart lead in 6 though this decision proved wrong when South had a diamond hold. A passive spade lead from South meant that East could take 11 top tricks including the club finesse but both defenders would and indeed did end up with two winners at that point. Meanwhile, Ware- Tislevoll bid to 6 which should make whether or not diamonds behave. Michael Ware (West) would have been delighted to receive the J lead and with no heart loser and the K falling early, made his contract comfortably to gain 17 very precious imps. For our Women, Newton – Wilkinson also bid to 6, gaining when their opponents stayed out of slam.

In the second match of the day, the NZ Open team’s winning margin got even smaller, 34-33 (10.31) over Hungary. In the last match of the day, they played China and lost 31-37 (8.24) and finished a hard day in 8^th place on 133.85 vps, with 5^th placed Denmark on 149.73.

What would you lead against 4 with the following hand:

 AQ983

 94

 A94

 AT9

You had opened 1, received a minimal spade raise from your partner with your right-hand opponent bidding 3 and left hand opponent 4 over your 3 bid.

Anyone for an ace? Only one of them will allow you to survive!

 

In our Women’s match against Chile, both West players including Jenny Wilkinson, led a trump and stoically withheld their A during the play. A flat board, down one, was the result. However, against Michael Cornell, the Chinese West  led a fateful A allowing one of Michael’s 3 club losers to be discarded on the K…+620. Matt Brown was not put to the test in the other room as, strangely, his partner was allowed to play the contract in 2 and made an overtrick for 13 imps to New Zealand.

Onwards…and we hope, upwards.

Richard Solomon

 

 

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