Stretching

Last night Anna played our Saturday night SBU cross-IMPs game. We thought it was match-points for the first round, but don't think that affected our play much.

It was a good standard, and in 25 boards I don't think we got any gifts from our opponents at all. The closest was when they went down in 3NT, on a reasonable line that didn't work.

Anna had lots of high-level decisions, about whether to sacrifice, and judged well throughout. I had a tricky decision below:

I have a nice South hand, which was my first good one in ages. I was happy with my 1♠ overcall, but not so happy bidding 3♠ over 3♣ when vulnerable.

West lead a Heart, and I counted my tricks. Just for once, Anna had a decent dummy for me. I was still thinking about matchpoints and fancied that one off would be fine, losing two Spades, one Heart, one Diamond and one Club. But actually trumps split 2-2 so I had only four losers and made it.

This gained 3.4 IMPs. I thought it might be a better score, as East-West can make game. 4♥ needs careful play. Since you can afford one Club loser you should give up on the miracle of ♣KJ onside, and cash the ♣A first. This gains here, but was hard to find and lots of people went down in 4♥.

In the end we finished 19th out of 52, with +8 IMPs (28 in our plus column, 20 in our minus column).

The winners (Roy Bennet and Harry Smith) finished on +65 IMPs. They actually had 21 in their minus column, but 86 in the plus column. We simply don't generate enough IMPs to do really well in these tournaments, and always seem to finish around average. Anna actually said at the end "I prefer matchpoints, but I never thought I'd say that".