European Youth Teams Championship - Match 13/14/15 vs Poland/Ireland/Turkey

In our first match we were soundly beaten by Poland, the scorecard a barrage of Polish scores against nothing our side. A couple of times Poland bid a good minor slam, more often we were missing game. 

A constant theme has been our players undervaluing distributional hands, and being strict point-counters rather than trick-counters. But we are getting better. In the last match before I left I was delighted to see Tamsin upgrade her hand with ♣AKxxxx and get straight to 3NT. We need more judgement like that.

Our East opened a weak NT. East transferred to a minor and played 3♦. Not much can go wrong in the play and declarer took 11 tricks.

On the other table of course Poland were in 5♦, making the same 11 tricks.

On another day West taking the low-road might have been a winning choice, but I think on balance the hand is worth at least an invite to game. The key thing is to count tricks, not points. Or, to put it another way, if East has just a couple of good cards then game is good, and when you need so little from partner to make game you should probably bid it. We've not discussed it but I think the way to do it would be for West to transfer with 2♠, then when East bids 3♣ you jump to 4♦. This must be both minors, as with just one you could make an immediate strong 3♣/3♦ bid over 1NT.

Well done to table-topping France who got to the top spot of 6♣.

Round 13 Victory Points: 0

Total VPS so far: 32.58 (17th place)

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Next up was the big one - our match against Ireland. The 20 Victory Points on offer was sure to provide a bumper haul for one team, or maybe both of us if it was 10-10.

Ireland raced into the lead when we played 4H on a 4-3 fit, then we got some back with this good effort from Jack and Lydia.

West (Jack) opened a weak 2S and East (Lydia) bid an immediate 4H. This was passed out (well done Jack not bidding 4S). On their card it says that a new suit from East is game-forcing, but when you know the final contract is going to be 4H, why bid anything else? (They don't play splinters, so 4H must be natural).

4H went very nicely for 11 tricks. The Irish East-West, and many other pairs, played 3S.

Most of the action was in the Open Room. Jack and Lydia bid not one but two grand slams. 

I didn't say they made two grand slams, It's easy to find several places where this auction could have gone better. East could begin with a game forcing strong 2D response, then it would be clear when she bids 6D it's to play. Bidding RKCB after the 2H bid means Hearts are trumps, so is a bad idea. Better would be fourth suit forcing, or a forcing jump to 4D. West could have passed 6D, which was surely natural since they didn't have any other meaning for it. Finally East could have bid 6NT instead of 7D (knowing that partner had the Ace of Clubs).

I agree with the rest of the bids though :)

The Irish had a more straight-forward auction where East leapt to 6D earlier on. This is exactly the sort of hand you should jump to slam with, as partner is never going to support you with all those Diamonds, although maybe it's worth doing Blackwood to see if you can play 7D.

Sweden joined us in this hand on 7D-1, showing it can happen to anyone.

Next, came a happier outcome:

East (Lydia) opened a game-forcing 2C. This seems reasonable to me, in that partner only needs the King of Diamonds to make game good. On the other hand, when you have such a distributional hand like this it's very unlikely that a 1C opening will be passed out, so that would probably be my choice.

I'm not sure what West (Jack) thought when partner opened 2C. He made a positive response of 2S, then when East bid 3C jumped to 7NT. If that was his plan he might as well have bid 7NT the first time, which would have been even more stylish.

There are exactly 13 top tricks (without requiring Spades to split or the Diamond finesse). That's my kind of grand slam. Well done you two!

The Irish played 2C+5. Just kidding. They played 6C, along with the majority of pairs.

In this high-scoring encounter Ireland prevailed 50-44, with the result in the balance even on the final board (a further 6S slam was available to Jack and Lydia). Well played to the Irish four of Isabel Walsh & Sheila Burke and Aileen Armstrong & Andrew Newbold.

This is our highest scoring game, but feels like a loss (which it was). We now slip behind our biggest rivals.

Round 14 Victory Points: 8.33

Total VPS so far: 40.91 (18th place, by 1.5 VPs)

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We now need to gain a few more VPs than Ireland in the last three matches to overtake them. It didn't happen here though, as we were trounced by Turkey by an astonishing 133-10 VPs.

Whenever our East-West pair made a game Turkey made a slam. When our North-South pair went one off in game Turkey made it. This was the most surprising:

North opened Our East overcalled 2C. The bid is obviously far too weak for an overcall, especially vulnerable. It's costly if you get doubled, but can also cost in another way, as I expect happened. Getting two level overcalls up to strength still needs more work!

The Turkish South got to 5D. A low Heart was led from East. I don't have the play records but assume West took two Hearts. After this declarer can place the King of Diamonds with East, to make up his vulnerable two-level overcall (East can't have KQJ of Clubs else he would have led one). So he played for the drop. The alternative possibility is that West for some reason didn't take his top Hearts, after which the natural line for declarer would be to play the Ace of Diamonds then try and set up the Spades, also leading to success.

Well done Donald and Jamie getting to 5D, which goes down on the normal line of finessing Diamonds.

So a 20-0 loss but Ireland didn't get any victory points either so we remain 1.5 VPs behind going into the final day.

Round 15 Victory Points: 0

Total VPS so far: 40.91 (18th place, by 1.5 VPs)

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