Murder in the Red Barn

It is the first round of the Dodds Cup – Business Houses league KO. We are the holders and play a 3^rd Division Team. At the half we are +30 Imps so our aim is to stay out of trouble. Opponents do not give up and with two boards to play are dealt:

      Dealer      S.AQ103                      S.K72

                       H.AQ62.                       H.7

                       D.93                              D.AK10762

                       C.KQ7                           C.852  

They bid 1S – 2D – 3NT- 6S clearly the Nelson bidding system “go right at em”. N leads the AC and another. Declarer draws trumps in three rounds, and plays diamonds dropping N doubleton QJ and claims. That was a loss of 10 imps (not bid in room 2!) and we scramble home by just 6 imps.

Better to be lucky than good!

MCC Mixed Teams.

The MCC holds its mixed teams event in October. It is Swiss teams and each team must contain a lady player and at least one MCC member. It played over 6x7 Board Matches. The last three matches play duplicated Boards for the top six teams. Dominic Flint, Michael Bailey and Tony Scouller all entered teams this year.

Tony sent this report after just missing out yet again.

My team after a slow start had 44 VPs (out of 60) after three matches leaving us in third place behind the leaders astonishing 56VPS. We met them in round 5 after another win and beat them 11-9 to give us a chance of victory. We were now in second place

The weakness of Swiss teams is that one board usually decides a match and this encounter was no exception. At game all they held:

S KQ9653                              S A                     Dealer

H 7                                         H AKJ863

D J97                                      D A103

C AQJ                                     C 982

They bid (no comment from me) 1H -2S – 3D – 3NT -6H. I lead the 6C (3&5^th leads) and Declarer agonised. Nobody likes to begin a slam with a losing finesse, (it wins) and he took the Ace hoping that with trumps behaving he would be able to enjoy the QC as an entry for the S. However although the H finesse won they broke 4-2 and he had to lose to QH and KC in practice to KD also. N-S +200. Our partners stayed in game. We won 19-1. However the leaders won 15-5 so we lost by7 2VP. As we went up to collect our prize Dominic said   “You will win it one day!”  I now have 2 second prizes and a third. Ah well! Great fun and no RAC team did badly.