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Day 3 was a good one for Leibowitz , the team which includes Matt Brown-Michael Whibley and Michael Cornell- Ashley Bach. They had three wins which moved them up from 17^th to 3^rd place, 6.5vps ahead of the 9^th placed team (8 to qualify). The biggest by 60imps was against Fraser-Hoskin, the team which includes Andi Boughey, giving bragging rights to Matt Brown in particular.

The +300 Specialists

We talked yesterday of how light pre-empts do sometimes backfire but one worked quite well for our “+300” specialists, Matt Brown and Michael Whibley:

 

Shh, we will not tell anyone that there were 4 little spades in the East hand! North had too many hearts and too much potential for a making heart contract to pass the hand out. South, too, felt they were too strong to play in part-score.

So, Matt led his singleton to the A. A then a club back for a ruff, a diamond ruff, a second club ruff and a second diamond ruff added up to 6 tricks…yes, you’ve guessed it +300 again. Obviously, Michael did not really expect his partner to produce 2 tricks or else he would have doubled for 800. No worries, though, as at the other table the defence slipped a trick after the same lead….but Michael Cornell  was only in 2 and so Leibowitz scored +410 in total or 9 imps.

The Right King

In the same match, Michael Cornell held as North:

 Q3

 A753

 AQJ92

 J9

and took part in the following uninterrupted sequence:

North                                    South

Cornell                                  Bach

                                                1

2 (game forcing)                 3

4 (cue)                                4  (cue)

4NT                                        5  (0 or 3 keycards)

5NT                                        6 (K)

?

Michael knew that Ashley had a club control or else he would not have bid 4 (4 denied a club control). He could count on Ashley having 6 spades (6 tricks on most days) to go with 5 diamond tricks, A and the now known A…that equals 13. So, he bid 7NT..and there were no problems there:

 

Only 12 out of the 110 North-South pairs bid to any of the three cold grand-slams. Unfortunately, for Michael and Ashley, their opponents were also one of the 12. Indeed, 62 pairs failed to bid any kind of slam at all. However, it was the specific king response which was the big winner this time. If North knew their partner had only one side-suit king, they would not be confident in going to the 7 level if they did not know it was the K.

Other Kiwis in action

Meanwhile, this is the current position of other teams including Kiwis in the top half of the field:

 

4.	Don	120.69	Rose Don-Michael Courtney, Tania Lloyd-Hugh Grosvenor
9.	Jacob	117.20	Nick Jacob- GeO Tislevoll, Ella Jacob- Simon Hinge, Jamie Thompson – Matt Smith
20.	Williams	105.93	Stephen Williams- Andi Boughey, Sam Coutts- Brad Johnston
21.	Fraser- Hoskin	105.33	Jeremy Fraser-Hoskin- Jack James, Chris Ackerley- John Yoon
32.	Crichton	99.92	Ross and Pam Crichton, Graham Wakefield- Michael Pemberton
37.	Genc	95.84	Murat Genc- Mindy Wu, Eva Samuel- Serhat Ozenir

We will be back with the final qualifying scores tomorrow.

Richard Solomon

 

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