The Dutch women’s team is doing quite badly in the Venice Cup. After 9 rounds in the qualifier, they are in 12th position, 4 places behind qualifying. Kees Tammens describes a nice hand played against the US, where the American women misdefended 5♠x for a 15 imp pick-up. What he forgot was that on the next hand, the Dutch gave the points back with a very simple misunderstanding, see diagram.
1♦-1♥, 2NT-Pass? Apparently 2NT is forcing and, when followed by 4♥, the way to show 4♥ in a balanced 18-19. That is a good method in itself. What happened here though looks like a beginners mistake: overbid slightly with the 1♥ response and then pass a forcing bid. Really, if you decide overbid once and respond to 1♦, continue to overbid like a man. In the other room, the American women had no problem bidding this game for a 10 imp pickup. A former world champion once told that bridge at this level is a matter of not making simple mistakes and once a day do something brilliant. That clearly failed here. Still, the Dutch women have 12 rounds left to play, so plenty of time to climb 4 places in the the rankings and qualify for the play-offs.
In the meantime, I’m spending most of my time looking at the Italians on BBO. It is interesting to see that all 3 pairs have reserved a special opening bid for a balanced 18-19 count only. True, it frees up a lot of space for other hands if 1X-1Y,2N can be used as conventional but I still wonder if this is really worth it, as one now will always end up playing in at least 2NT with 18-19 opposite a bad hand and the options to bid really strong hands become less. Well, not always, Bocchi-Madala managed to reach the top spot on this hand in 1 bid. Bocchi opened 2♣, 18-19 or 22-23 balanced. Madala holding the hand on the right decided that this was enough. Making comfortably for a few imp pick-up when the other table could not reach a makable part-score.
Lauria (east) had this interesting hand to play. First look at the south hand. East started off with 2♦, 18-19 balanced only, west showed both majors in a game going hand, east bid 4♥. At most tables, south led a club, declarer put up the J and had his 10 tricks. Martin Reid from New Zealand found a more interesting lead: ♠7, systematically 3rd and 5th. Small, 10, queen, now what?
Lorenzo decided to play the ♠9 and south contributed the ♠J. That is technically wrong, going up with the ♠A and playing trumps leads to down 1, but declarer was still certain that south had not underled his ♠A and decided to play him for something like J8732. That would mean that north started with ♠A10 and set up the ♠K. That didn’t quite work out, south’s ♠J won the trick and Lauria was back to down 1.
Nice lead from south, one of the few that gives declarer a problem, though I think it is a bit naive from declarer to play south for ♠J8732 and assume that he would lead 3rd instead of 5th from that holding. 10 imp’s to New Zealand, but Italy won the match in comfort.
As for the title of this blog: Well, look at the Dutch lineup for this match, where do you think where Kees would spend the night if he put this hand in the paper.