Report by John Auld

The first match of the new year featured the latest instalment of the game hunt the venue  whereby 24 players struggle through fog roadworks and diversions to eventually find a hidden entrance to a Loughborough tennis club. Once there we joined battle wth some strong Leicestershire players.

The teams with Butler imps scores were -

  Dawes: Irene & John Auld  +42

             Gordon Fullerton & Frank Ball +1

              Keith Rodgers & Lloyd Eagling +5

              William & Daniel Crook -6

 Porter: Pravin Tailor & Bill Whalley +15

             Gerry Franklin & John Rolph +6

             Ian Dovey & Shirley Ashtari -40

            Graham Lee & Dick Milne +16

Markham: Tim Anderson & Bernard Scanlon -18

               Frank Turton & David Landon -12

               Fay Staton & Diane Abbot -39

              Nick Clarke & Wendy Walker -18

It was the turn of Irene and me to get a good butler score. As everyone knows this is mainly about accepting opponents errors such as on board 11:

I was North and was allowed to play game depite the opponents having 5C easily made. West should have doubled to tell partner not to sell out and East was surely wrong to ignore the double fit advertised. Of course 4S can go down on heart ruffs; if the opponents can diagnose my 6/5 shape they might find the ruff. Perhaps  East cashes his Aces. Now West can envisage the singleton heart and discourage on the Aces to get a heart switch. Not so easy.

Interestingly hearts is  the best denomination and that leads to the question-how can they ever be worse than spades? So on reflection I think one should suppress the spades and even open 4H.

Board 22 was another missed game for Leicestershire:

As often happens the weak 2S drove East West to a  thin game. As North I led a diamond establishing four tricks. Declarer looks to hava no chance but miraculously if spades are played I have no safe discards; diamonds must be kept, clubs must be kept and heart discards set up the whole suit if declarer does some basic card reading. Our declarer was not alone in missing all that and going one off.

A final hand board 4 shows the Crooks as the only pair to assess their assets correctly:

This is another hand illustrating the huge importance of Aces in distributional hands. Here Daniel made a full value raise to 3S  and William cue bid 4C. Now the 4D cue  bid transformed the value of the DK and the slam was bid. A couple of extra cue bids might theoretically be appropriate but noone could say that the slam was marginal. The grand slam was a fair bet yet nobody else got beyond game. 

The Dawes team narrowly won,the Porter drew and the Markham team lost (not so narrowly). A moderate performance again.