Mid-morning matters

Today I had the rare pleasure of being able to play in the 1030 am Bucnahan pairs, with Ted.

Here's a couple of blunders I made:

I thought Ted's double showed a maximum of four Hearts so bid my Clubs again. He boldly raised me to game.

The opening lead was a Heart. Instinctively, I played low from dummy. Now I had to cross over to the ♠A to finesse trumps. When that worked I had 11 tricks, but when the Hearts didn't split that was the limit.

I should win the first Heart in dummy and finesse trumps. That keeps the ♠A as an entry to dummy if the Hearts are 4-2 and one needs to be ruffed, as is the case here. Getting that right would have meant 5♣+1 instead of of 5♣=, and I would have caught up with everyone bidding and making 4♥.

That was a relatively small error. The next one was more costly:

3♠ promised five Spades and 4♣ was a cuebid (not alerted). I lead my singleton ♥J which declarer won and drew trumps. The crunch came when she lead the ♣T from hand. I thought "what does it matter?" and covered with my Queen. Turned out it did matter, as dummy played the ♣A and partner's ♣K came crashing down. This meant no Club losers and declarer made 6♠+1 instead of 6♠=.

I didn't think many pairs would be in the slam anyway, but they were (several in 6NT). So my blunder turned a 50% board into a 0% board. To make it worse there was then a lengthy delay between rounds for me to ponder my no-win play.

Despite these bodges we finished on a winning 65.2%, earning me another 0.70 BBO matchpoints (whatever they are).