Taking gifts

Last night Anna and I played in EBU evening tournament. There were plenty of gifts from our opponents. On the first board they had a Gerber auction, discovered they had all 4 Aces between them, then signed off in 5♠. How many Aces were they hoping for?

On the hand below Anna opened 1NT and I had a rubbish hand with short Clubs. I started Stayman (best to get out of 1NT) and we found our 4-3 Heart fit. As expected the opposition had points and got into the auction too, surprisingly ending up in 3♥. This actually nearly made:

Anna did well to start with her two top trumps. When she switched to a Spade I had to be careful. Declarer does actually have enough tricks to make the contract (just losing three Hearts and one Club), but needs to unblock the Diamonds. If I covered this Spade switch with the Queen declarer can later unblock the Diamonds and has a Spade entry back to dummy to discard Clubs.

As soon as the first Spade trick was completed the hand timed out. The score was recorded as A==, then a few minutes later the director adjusted it to 3♥-1. This is quite a big call, as there was still the chance for us to misdfended and let the contract make, but felt justified to me as they had bid and played it very slowly.

After the adjustment we scored 88% on the board. In fact, even conceding 3♥= would have scored 70%, as there were lots of North-South pairs making 3NT, or beating 1NT doubled.

Overall we played fairly well, with just one bidding misjudgement and me playing foolishly for a second overtrick (and not getting my first overtrick). We finished on 60.64% for 7th out of 74 and a trickle more EBU masterpoints.