Ken is another semi-regular pard of mine from BBO. He's certainly not my strongest partner, but he's got 2 very good attributes:
1) He is always friendly and polite, acknowledging his own mistakes.
2) He does all the legwork to set up team matches and almost invariably arranges for competent competition.
I picked up in 2nd all white.
T9732 / KQ5 / 4 / J874
Righty passed. Ok, not a real problem, but in the old days this would be a 2 Spade opener (5-4 all white.) That treatment might have actually worked better on the hand.
I passed. Lefty opened 1 Diamond. Pard doubled. Righty bid 1NT.
2 Spades looks normal. I hate to encourage a Spade lead if they end up in Diamonds, but I'm closer to a 3 Spade bid than to a pass (some might even consider this an automatic 3 Spade bid with Diamond shortness.)
2 Spades was passed around to Righty, who bid 3 Diamonds.
Now I should probably bid 3 Spades and would do so without hesitation at matchpoints. Surely the opponents are at least on a 9 card Diamond fit and so at a minimum I'd expect 17 tricks on the hand and possibly more. Something about that 1NT bid made me chicken out, though. I passed in tempo.
Pard balanced back in with 3 Spades, whipped by Righty. Float.
Lefty led the 8 of Spades.
AQ65 / T73 / K87 / KT9
T9732 / KQ5 / 4 / J874
The Spade situation looks ugly, but there's a small chance this was led from a doubleton. I need to get to my hand to play a Diamond up so I can get rid of one of my Heart losers but there's no way I can do that right away. Playing the Ace and another spade is a possibility. I chose to stick the Queen in, though, knowing it stood almost no chance of winning.
Righty won the King and the 4 of Hearts came back. Now what?
Finding Jacks has always been an Achilles heel of mine. If Righty has the Jack, I need to duck this. If Lefty has the Jack, I need to pop. If I guess wrong, I can't stop the opponents from taking 2 Hearts before I pitch a Heart on the Diamond.
I popped King of Hearts and Lefty won the Ace and returned the 6.
Now do I play the Ten or do I play low and hope that Righty has J8 and goes wrong?
Didn't matter. Righty had led from J94 and wasn't getting this wrong.
Spades were, as expected, 3-1 offside and I ended up losing 2 Spades, 2 Hearts, and 2 minor bullets for down, you guessed it, 2. -300 was lose 5 instead of win 1. It didn't quite decide the match, but it would have been nice to win every board in the 2nd half (which would have happened if I had held this to down 1.)
http://online.bridgebase.com/myhands/fetchlin.php?id=1395738&when_played=1192321667
