Sometimes bridge is an easy game. That’s kind of how it felt last weekend. We made a couple of defensive errors but every bid worked out well and kept taking extra tricks as declarer. Perhaps some of it was a superior bidding system but perhaps more importantly, we were paying attention to everything a little more because we were playing a new bidding system.

Sean and I played only 2 out of the 4 days of the Charlotte sectional, didn’t win an event but got over 26 points – 2^nd in each of the Saturday pair games and 2^nd in the Sunday Swiss. Very few Fantunes-relevant things came up except for the 2 bids, which were fairly frequent. I must say, we had a lot of good auctions.

On one of the more exciting deals, I held Q, Jx, AKQxxxx, AKQT and see my partner, with both sides vulnerable, open 2S, showing 10-13 points, an unbalanced hand with 5+ spades and fewer than 4 hearts. Thankfully my long suit was diamonds and not clubs else I probably would have forgotten than 3C is an invitational or better spade raise. 3D, however, is natural and forcing so I tried that, intending to follow it up with 6C as there doesn’t seem to be a reasonable way to find out if partner has a heart control but odds seem to be with me that he does. LHO bid 3H, passed back to me. Perhaps I should hit this but that would be a poor result if LHO has at least 7 heart tricks, especially if we have a slam. I try 4H, which is doubled back to me. So it sounds like partner has no heart control so I bid 5C and got to play it there opposite the awesome dummy: AKJxx, xxx, J, Jxxx.

I guess I was wrong about there being no exciting football games last weekend. Tech now has a pretty good chance to win the coastal division with a record of 6-6 overall, 5-3 in the ACC. They definitely have to beat Duke this Saturday. Then they need Duke to beat Miami, which would put GT alone on top or tied with ineligible UNC. If Miami beats Duke, GT needs UNC to win its last 2 games against Virginia and Maryland to force a 3 way tie, and then they need Virginia to beat Virginia Tech so that GT will win the 2^nd tie-breaker of record against the next top team in the division.

Florida squeaked by lowly Louisiana-Lafayette but went up to #2 in my computer rankings. That’s strange. Alabama slipped from a virtual tie for 1^st to 3^rd. K-State is 4^th and Oregon is a very distant 5^th. Notre Dame is a clear #1 while my computer still rates UGA, LSU, and South Carolina much lower than the polls – they’re 12-14. Georgia Tech is #62, right in the middle, and Duke is #58, but my computer has Tech by 9 this Saturday. My picks against the spread took a hit, going only 7.5-12.5 in the top 25 games.