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Well, well, well. In my last missive I was crowing about how lucky we were to be able to play live bridge in New Zealand. Sadly, the evil Bridge Gods exacted swift and savage revenge for my temerity by visiting the plague upon us once more, shutting down clubs again in the Auckland region for much of August and into September. Hence not a great deal from me this issue. My humble apologies – I won’t do it again. Still, we did manage to sneak in a few events during late July and early August.

At the Howick 8B in July, generously sponsored by Ryman’s Bruce McLaren Retirement Village, William Liu and James Yang just held off Tracey Lewis and Yours Truly with a storming second set. James and William had to settle for second place the following Thursday at Auckland, where Barry Palmer and Fuxia Wen had a comfortable win.

Of course, one plus side of the shut down has been the huge surge in online competitions – not bad if you want to play good competitive bridge without leaving the comfort of your own man cave, whatever. Especially active in this area have been the Auckland Club, spearheaded by Anthony Hopkins and superbly run by Patrick Carter, Sylvester Riddell, Julie Atkinson and others. Many thanks folks!

 In the month-long August Teams event, 48 teams competed in 7 divisions, completing all 141 matches with barely a hitch. The top division was a close-run thing, with the (almost) all international team of Mike and Viv Cornell, Ash Bach and Arlene Dalley, and Peter Newell and Martin Reid just heading out Cartner (Linda, Glenis Palmer, Jonathan Westoby and Andy Braithwaite).

The Auckland Club did host two more events over this heavily curtailed period. At the beginning of the month, 8 squads comprising teams in the Open, Intermediate and Junior categories converged to compete for the Regional Club Teams Championship for the year. Congratulations to Arch Jelley and the Mt Albert Club, whose Junior team finished 5^th, Intermediate 2^nd, and spearheading the win was their Open Team with a resounding 1^st place.

Wise Old Heads

Sybil Cornell

In one recent session of On-line Bridge run by Patrick Carter, the not so young but still very alert Arch Jelley (see above) came first while in the other session run concurrently, Sybil Cornell came second. Watch out you younger players!

Just before Lockdown, the annual NZ Bridge sponsored Youth Weekend was held at the Auckland Bridge Club, run by Richard Solomon and Paul Coleman. 33 came along for all or part of the Weekend which included an Individual, a session on some basic techniques hosted by Mike Dunn, a Play with an Expert Pairs session, Swiss Teams, Crazy Bridge and Speedball…oh and Matt Brown explained to these new young players, aged 9 upwards, the route to international stardom.

Finally, the teams to represent the Auckland Northland Region in the Interprovincial Championships have been announced. This will (fingers crossed!) be run in Wellington in late November. Congratulations and best wishes to:

Intermediate: Andrew Durrans, Linda Phillips, Barbara Imlach and Annette Martin

Senior:             Bob Grover, Eileen Horsman, Grant Jarvis and Malcolm Mayer

Women:          Andi Boughey, Carol Richardson, Linda Cartner and Glenis Palmer

Open:              Nick Jacob, GeO Tislevoll, Tom Jacob and Michael Ware

 

Biritch at Play

 

And what news of Biritch the Russian Blue from this period? Not a great deal, but here is a hand that he made sure I knew about, from one of the many on-line Pairs sessions from the Auckland Club.

 As usual, Biritch managed to engineer things so that he was declarer in 3NT from the South hand. West, well known to Our Hirsute Hero as an experienced player, led the 10. The dummy duly appeared and was cursorily acknowledged, and East produced 9.

Unusually for him, Biritch gave the matter some thought, and enquired what the lead of a 10 might imply. He was informed that it could show either 0 or 2 higher cards, and from East’s failure to play the ace at trick 1, he deduced it was the latter.

He could therefore count (hopefully!) 5 club tricks, the AK, and just one heart, and needed to bring home at least one extra diamond trick.  

It seemed unlikely that West held A, since he would just clear the heart suit and wait to get back in with that card. Also, surely West would have overcalled with both major aces and length in hearts? However, the danger was that if Biritch took the first heart, tried a diamond finesse through West and it failed, a heart would come back giving the defence at least 5 tricks. With only one entry to dummy (Q), he could not finesse through East and take three diamond tricks.

So, prompted by some irritated electronic coughs, he eventually ducked the first heart, and that left West without resource and paved the way to 9 tricks. Had West switched to J, Biritch would have had no problem in ducking the second spade after a spade switch to the king and ace and a second round of hearts...naturally! (oh, five rounds of clubs squeezes East out of a fifth defensive trick, in case you wondered!)

 

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