Hello from Dallas

Success at the bridge table has been hard to come by, but it’s been an interesting week in Dallas for the NABC. Jonathan (and possibly others) has been wondering why I keep meeting different women for lunch or drinks or whatever, whether it’s Meg or Cristal or one of the others. They’re all taken or otherwise off limits, though. This is a problem that exists in my real life as well, and I don’t dislike that problem, but it would be nice to befriend some lady who isn’t off limits.

Anyway, we missed making the first cut in the Platinum Pairs by about 1/3 board. At least we did better than Capp and Meck. Then we had plenty of opportunity to knock off the 15 seed Schwartz in the Vanderbilt. Neither pro pair (Boye Brogeland and his partner, Lotan Fisher and Ron Schwartz) had a good day, Jonathan and I took care of business but teammates let us down a lot in the first and fourth quarters. Oh well. Here are a couple of interesting boards.

AQJx, AKxxx, AJxx, -
At my table the Israelis had a cute auction:
P-P-P-1H;
1S-2H-2S-3D natural game try
4D natural raise promising 5 diamonds
5C exclusion for diamonds
5H 1 key card
7D

Apfelbaum and Shuster had a less scientific auction: 2D-5NT; 7D. The hand with long diamonds was -, xxx, KQTxxx, xxxx

There are two legitimate lines:
a) cross ruff, cashing the 3 major suit tricks on the way, needs the hand behind the long diamonds to have 4+ spades (quite likely)
b) take a ruffing finesse in spades, then draw trumps, and ruff out a heart to come to 2 spades, 6 diamonds, 1 club ruff, 4 hearts.
Both lines require 3-2 hearts and they both work in this case. I have no idea how they went down at the other table.

Another hand I liked was when I held 7 solid clubs and a side K and found myself on lead against Lotan’s 3NT after a 1D-1S; 3NT auction.

Well, I guess that’s all for now. Good night.