Lucknow Bridge Association conducts bridge regular bridge tournaments in Lucknow.There are two regular pair events every week, on Tuesdays and Fridays.On Tuesday matchpoint pair event takes place and on Friday IMP pair event takes place. The entry fee is nominal Rs. 15 per person or Rs. 30 per pair for members. All bridge enthusiast all welcome. The membership of Lucknow Bridge Association is nominal Rs. 350 per annum and all regular players are expected to become members of the association. The venue for these tournaments is Oudh Gymkhana The address is: Oudh Gymkhana,Kaiserbagh, Lucknow.The timings are 6:30 pm onwards in the evening.
Lucknow club where the event used to take place earlier has closed down. Lucknow club was an old building which couldn't sustain the rains this year and the roof of its Badminton court, which was adjacent to the lobby where bridge used to take place, fell. Oudh Gymakhana charges Rs. 2000/- per month for making its hall available for bridge, part of which is being paid by raising the entry fee and by increasing the annual subscription.
A convention card editor fills, edits and prints convention cards on computer. Lee Edwards of Lawrenceville, Georgia, USA has designed this very convenient convention card editor for various convention cards. The convention cards which can be filled by this editor are ACBL, SAYC, WBF, WBF(England), EBU, BBL, French, Dutch, Belgian, Sweedish, Italian, Austrian, Ireland, Israeli, Indian & Australian. You can download this software which is freeware from the link mentioned above. Those of you who want to send your comments to Lee Edwards can do so at ledwards@bellsouth.net
For Indian bridge players,lovers & enthusiasts the good news is that the convention card designed by Bridge Federation of India (BFI) appears on this convention card editor. So for those of you who have computers the convention card filling in India is a lot more easier job now.
Lee has been constantly updating the software. The latest version he informs is 6.0.1 with enhanced printing features.The software now supports 21 formats and the convention cards of Germany and South Africa are in offing.
In this section I would cover tournaments happening in India and more so the tournaments happening in Northern part of India and in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
The 1998 World Bridge Championship just concluded at Lille, France. Indian performance wasn't up to the mark. Only one Indian team ,Poddar, qualified to the round of 64 in Rosenblum Cup.Similarly only one Indian Pair of Alok Sadhu and Vinay Sharma made it to the finals of Open Pairs event. Poddar team was knocked out in the round of 64 and the lone Indian pair finished 58th.One must say that pair event was very gruelling with only 10% of the 700 odd participants making it to the finals. However we must have higher achieving standards, lauding 58th rank would lead us nowhere. Jaggy Shivdasani pairing with C. Goldberg of US finished best amongst the Indian finalist in the mixed pairs event. It is very sad that there were no Indian participant in the junior event.This year's winners were from Italy ,Angelini in open team and in mixed pairs, and from Poland in open pairs though Michel Rosenberg of USA won $35000 for winning the PAR event.One feels happy at the performance of Larry Cohen who finished runners up in the open pairs alongwith David Berkowitz for his excellent book on law of total tricks has enhanced the bridge pleasure for many.
The Rajendra Golcha memorial bridge tournament is being held at Jaipur from October 9-11. It carries a prize money of Rs. 50000/-. The UP State Championship is being held at Lucknow from October 23-25.The winner of duplicate event of this championship gets HINDALCO sponsorship for Winter Nationals.
In this section I would cover one good deal which appeared in the Weekly Bridge Tournaments at Lucknow or in a recent tournament with explanations.
This week's deal is very innocuous.
Dealer: East
Vul : NS
Lead : H J
| S | J 9 8 7 | |||||||||||
| H | K 4 2 | |||||||||||
| D | J 6 4 | |||||||||||
| C | J 8 5 | |||||||||||
| S | 4 2 | S | K Q 10 3 | |||||||||
| H | Q 7 6 | H | A 9 5 | |||||||||
| D | K Q 7 5 3 | D | A 9 2 | |||||||||
| C | K 10 4 | C | Q 7 6 | |||||||||
| S | A 5 6 | |||||||||||
| H | J 10 8 3 | |||||||||||
| D | 10 8 | |||||||||||
| C | A 9 3 2 |
Bidding
| East | South | West | North |
| 1 NT | Pass | 3 NT | Pass |
| Pass | Pass | ||
East is playing in 3 NT in a matchpoint pairs event and you are defending as a south. How would you defend ?
East has opened strong NT 15-16 HCP which West has raised to 3 NT and you have chosen to lead Heart Jack.
East ducks your Heart Jack. The first question arises is where is heart 9? If East holds heart 9 he should win the trick with Heart Ace as for him the lead could be from J 10 or from K J 10 and in both cases heart suit can not be cleared. Is it possible that declarer wants to give an impression that he doesn't hold Heart 9 to set up two tricks in Heart suit ? Possibly yes. If he is doing this then he should be sure of Diamond suit as then he would be trying to make the remaining tricks to make his NT contract for he doesn't have top tricks as you hold both Club and Spade Ace. Another thing is that leads from bare J 10 suits are bad, so partner in all probability should expect heart 8 with you and should throw heart 9 immediately.So Hearts should not be continued.
Looking at dummy the only way to defeat this contract seems to be partner holding J to four cards of Diamond and Club Queen. The dummy entry ,Club King, must be attacked immediately.However, if in matchpoint pairs partner doesn't hold Club Queen then there would be two tricks available to the declarer in the Club suit. So this is to done when there is a fair certainity of the lie of cards.
So if Clubs are not to be switched then the best way to handle this contract is a passive switch of Diamonds.At some point in time declarer would have to come across the guess in Spade suit and the making of the contract would depend upon how well declarer tackles Spade suit.
But is the Club switch that bad ? The declarer doesn't know that you have shifted from Club Ace. So there is a Club guess involved as well which can defeat the contract. If declarer assumes Club Ace to be with North he must finnese Club 10 the next time you continue Clubs and then with three tricks in Club suit the contract is down.
Playing matchpoint pairs perhaps a passive option would be choice of majority but declarer's life is most difficult only with a Club switch which sadly concedes an overtrick.
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