Archive of Previous Poor Bridge

Brighton Bridge Memoirs: The Adventures of 500 Guy

By Chris Simpson

I'm sure you all know the situation: it's the last session of the Swiss Pairs at the EBU National Congress in Brighton and you're floating around near the middle of the field, frustrated by your (lack of) performance and cursing the daftness of matchpoints as a form of scoring. Unfortunately, however many times you say "this year will be different", it never is. A poor second session had seen Geraint and I relegated to the Muppet Chamber but we'd just about engineered an escape into the main room for Sunday afternoon and were hoping for a good final four matches to bring us up to the sort of respectable score we always feel we deserve but somehow never manage to achieve. The session had started well -- although we didn't have our results from the first match, we hadn't troubled ourselved with any negative scores and felt certain of a 20-0 victory. We confidently took our seats for the second set of eight boards.

We introduced ourselves and announced our basic system of 5-card majors with three weak twos, which elicited a mutter of disgust from West. "Weak Twos are a terrible invention," he proclaimed. "They just cause you to get bad scores." As we were to discover, he already had his own system for getting bad scores and had no need of any modern bidding methods.

The match was going unspectacularly when the following board arose.

Even playing 5-card majors I didn't feel I quite had the offence for 3 but was prepared to bid game should partner show any interest, and was pleasantly surprised when he bid it himself. West, having made a timid single raise of partner's suit, then decided to sacrifice in 5 which was promptly doubled. With a balanced defensive hand I barely considered 5.

Andrew Robson's column in The Times of September 3 addresses whether 4 should make on this hand. The short answer is no, as it requires delcarer being able to reach dummy in order to take the trump finesse, and East can prevent this provided he takes his A at the correct time. But this defence will not always be found (especially if declarer simply leads a small spade to dummy early) and so -300 will collect quite a few matchpoints for East/West and certainly be a better score than letting the game through. However, making 9 tricks in clubs requires careful play on the spades again as declarer must duck the A once to cut defensive communications. This prevents South getting on lead to cash a second defensive spade trick before declarer can establish a discard on a diamond. When East failed to do this (and so presumably would not have found the correct defence to 4), the defence scored 5 tricks and it was -500 for East/West and zero matchpoints.

Perhaps that was a little unlucky, and 500 Guy could pass some of the blame to his partner's sub-optimal declarer play. But the final board of the session was all his own work.

Concerned about the likely development of the auction, I opened my shorter diamond suit and, after an informative bidding sequence, it looked as if we would settle in 3. But 500 Guy had obviously slept through this auction which showed we had the majority of the points and that heart values were sitting over him. Instead of letting us quietly make +110 or +130, he awoke with an urgent need to show his ropey 6-card heart suit as a save against a minor-suit partscore. The play is unimportant: even a dummy with 3-card support and an 11-count couldn't provide more than 6 tricks and it was -500 again. Perhaps the worst balance ever seen, yet somehow this was worth 5% of the matchpoints.

Possibly there were 3 tables where South made 4X for +510, but I'd like to think that somewhere in that room 500 Guy had some spiritual brothers and sisters. I hope to play against them soon.