BRIDGE (3)

I played in another bridge tournament today, with the same format as in the first one. We came third in our group in the morning session, which meant that we were in the top division when it came to the afternoon session.

We started dreadfully, scoring -10 on the first three hands (scoring is from -15 to +15, so our opponents in this round got +10). But we bounced back immediately with a +13 in the next round; and after 4 rounds out of 11, we were lying second. I then made a complete blunder. Finding myself in a 3 no trump contract with lots of misfitting suits, I ended up in dummy with 8 tricks in the bag and the winning king of hearts on the table. All I had to do was cash it, and make my game. But I was greedy, and misremembered the distribution. I thought I could end-play my opponent in clubs, so he would then give me two tricks in hearts to my king-jack instead of one. But he switched to a spade I was "sure" he didn't have and I went down. My partner raised his eyes in horror, since that single mistake cost us 7 points (-4 instead of +3).

After the afternoon coffee break (complete with very nice jam tart) we kept on nudging upwards, and by the beginning of the last round were lying fourth. The second and third placed pairs had to play each other, so there was a chance that they could cancel each other out and we could leapfrog up to second place. In fact, it was +2 to the second placed team, who ended on 26 points; we got +5 but that only took us up to 23.

What nobody expected was that the leading pair (they who had beaten us in round 1) had a complete meltdown and scored -13 on the round, dropping to fourth. Which meant that we ended up second overall, thereby winning three very nice bottles of wine.

I was left to rue the fact that if I had cashed my king of hearts, then we would have won the whole tournament by 4 points. Grrr!

Walter Blotscher