Shantanu Rastogi's Bridge Page

issue 80 (May 1, 2000)

First Bridge Web Page From India

For your comments please e-mail to srastogi@lw1.vsnl.net.in Page updated on:May 1, 2000

Bridge Facilities in India

In this section I would be putting together all the information regarding bridge facilities in the various cities in India.The information may be sketchy at present but would be made comprehensive in future.

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Tournament News

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.

UP State selection trials took place at Kanpur. Following pairs have qualified for summer nationals at Sanawar:Kr Vijayanand Singh & Pradeep Singh (Varanasi), CL Arora & Manoj Garg (Dehradun), NP Srivastava & NN Rastogi (Lucknow). MM Nangia & G Rodericks (Lucknow) are reserve one.Maheshwari (Allahabad) won the duplicate event and would be represnting UP at summer nationals. Indresh Agarwal, Sushil Agarwal, Govind Agarwal, A K sinha & B N Rastogi were playing for Maheshwari team.

The UP team did well at summer nationals by reaching semi finals where they lost to Railways despite leading till 3 sessions of the four.

Rossel Tea bridge tournament concluded at Delhi Gymkhana on 26th March, 2000. Vijay Jolly, Delhi (Vijay Jolly, A Bedi, R Chakravorty, R Nanda, BS Gupta, V Pandey) won the duplicate event amongst 24 teams defeating Delhi Gymkhana. Formidables which has won Indian selection trials for Olympiad at Mastricht was the notable loser in the semi finals.Formidables was playing without Rajesh Dalal, Rajeshwar Tewari & Mrs Kiran Nadar. NK Gupta & B Satyanarayna won the pairs event.

WBF World Wide Simultaneous Pairs event (formerly known as EPSON) would take place on June 2 & June 3 , 2000. The scoring of this event would be done on internet.

WBF is organising Mind Sports Organization's Worldwide Simultaneous Pairs on August 22 and August 23, 2000. It would be on the lines of Fifth Friday Championship organised by Herman De Wael. The magnitude of the championship would be higher with about 10000 tables results being compiled together.

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Deal of the Week

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 not supposed to be an eye opener.

Dealer:West Vul:Both Lead:5	NORTH Q 10 8 Q 9 Q 10 5 3 K Q 10 2
WEST A 9 7 K J 6 5 2 J 8 6 4 9		EAST 5 4 3 2 A 4 3 A 9 A 7 6 4
	SOUTH K J 6 10 8 7 K 7 2 J 8 5 3

Bidding

West	North	East	South
Pass	1	Pass	1 NT
Pass	Pass	X	Pass
Pass	Pass

This week's deal is from 5th Generali Masters Individual Championship which took place at Athens, Greece from 13-15 April, 2000. 52 men & 28 women from 28 countries were invited to take part in the world's premier individual event. Dipak Poddar was only Indian representative in the field. Men played 112 boards and women 84 boards with a common bidding system. The men event was won by Antonio Sementa & Benedict Cronier won the women event.

Light openings have become popular.This week's deal shows perils of opening light.

Justin Hackett passed as West and Bocchi opened 1 with 11 HCP and half a trick in second seat. He took considerable risk as even habitual light openers may also pass in his position. Michal Kwiecien passed as East and Martens - Bocchi's partner - came in with 1 NT. This got passed around to Kwiecien who doubled and that is where the contract was played.

It went three down as defenders got five s , two s and two other Aces.

Its not even if defenders had a game. 4 by defenders is very diffcult to reach and even more difficult to make and no wonder EW got maximum matchpoints (24) for this bid by Bocchi.

I think Bocchi was taking considreable risk as he shouldn't be opening with these values. To add that since he was not playing with his regular partner as this is an individual event, is more of a reason to pass. With regular partner perhaps someone may have come in with a bid of 2 which would have not given as big a penalty but in matchpoints would have been as bad a score.

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