Saturday 19 December 2015

Resulting

The school bridge club that I look after has come on leaps and bounds, as we've been meeting twice a week this term. The focus has been on play and defence and I've left the bidding to be natural, only emphasising the value of the game bonus.

We've had a couple of three-board Team's Matches, which is the first time I've been able to get anyone interested in scoring. More importantly, I was able to introduce the notion of resulting, which is when you decide what people should have done based on unknowable factors. For example, saying "I should have bid 4♥" just because 4♥ happens to make on a lucky layout.

In our match I was impressed that on all three boards reasonable contracts were reached on both tables, despite the lack of bidding sophistication. This was the one that decided the match:

Board 3
Dealer: S

North
♠ 7
♥ J974
♦ T
♣ AK96432
West
♠ 4
♥ Q32
♦ K9862
♣ QJT5
8
811
13
East
♠ KQT965
♥ T85
♦ AQ74
South
♠ AJ832
♥ AK6
♦ J53
♣ 87

On one table South opened 1♠, West made a 2♦ overcall, North bid Clubs and after a good competitive auction ended up in 5♣. When this came round to West she doubled. The kids love doubling, and tend to do it far too often, but I think this time she had her bid.

In 5♣x declarer ended up losing two trump tricks, along with a Diamond and a Heart. It is possible to avoid losing two Clubs with an early finesse, and you might avoid a Heart loser with some fancy footwork, but that's beyond us at the moment and the result was 5♣x-2. On the other table North played a sedate 3♣= for a big gain on the hand.

Afterwards North was roundly blamed for overbidding in getting to 5♣. However, if the trumps had split 2-2 he would have made it. So that was my lesson for the day - just because a contract fails it doesn't mean it's a bad contract.

1 comment:

  1. The next lesson should be that Deep Finesse can make contracts that no-one will ever make in real life. Something that most tournament players have yet to learn.

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