Bridge Big Squeeze

So, I’ve been playing on bridgebig.com a good bit lately – that new site where you play anonymously for money and the website takes 10% or so of the entry fees. It doesn’t seem to be gaining much popularity, especially not in the US. It’s a good idea in theory and I wish it would gain popularity. It seems that at most there are maybe 30 players online and it pretty much all ends around 7pm because most of the players on there are European.

One of the main problems with the setup is that there is a lack of agreements. I mean, there’s a convention card but it is missing a lot of detail that would even be on a regular ACBL convention card, like whether systems are on when they overcall over a 1NT opening and what continuations are over the 1M-2NT as a limit+ raise.

On this deal from a short matchpoint game, I had couldn’t figure out what my partner was doing after I opened 1NT. He has just a standard transfer and bid 3NT hand. Then if I correct to 4♥, you might consider making a slam try. However, he transferred to hearts and then bid 2♠. When I raised spades, he bid 3NT. When I corrected that to 4♥, he bid 4NT. Did he misclick and intend to Stayman instead of transfer? Did he misclick and intend to bit 2NT instead of 2♠? Did he decide his hand is worth a slam try with a 5-3 heart fit but not with a 4-4 spade fit? I didn’t know what he was doing so I passed 4NT. It’s matchpoints anyway, so I can just play it well and get a top that way. By the way, even though the tournaments are small, the “field” still has 20-30 results. I’m not sure where they get the deals and results to matchpoint against – maybe from other tournaments or from computer simulations.

Dealer: S Vul: NS	North ♠ A62 ♥ K7643 ♦ K95 ♣ AT
West ♠ J73 ♥ QJ98 ♦ QJ6 ♣ 864		East ♠ 84 ♥ T ♦ 87432 ♣ KJ932
	South ♠ KQT95 ♥ A52 ♦ AT ♣ Q75

North	East	South	West
1♣	1♥	1NT	2♥
3NT	Pass	Pass	Pass

Since hearts split badly, 5 was the limit is hearts so I needed to make only 5NT to get a near top. However, I didn’t find out the heart split until trick 12 so I put a lot of effort into making 6. It turns out there’s a pretty simple squeeze against west. West led a club, east won the K and returned a club. I won that, ran spades, pitching 2 spades from dummy. I played the ♦K, ♦A, ♣Q, pitching another heart. I was down to ♥A52 in hand and ♥K7 ♦9. West could not hold both a diamond and heart stopper so I made 6 for 97% of the matchpoints. The only higher score was 5♦X -5.