Peebles Part V: Swiss Teams Session 2

The second session of the Swiss Teams was Sunday morning. I was much more rested than I had been on Friday evening, and looking forward to another couple of sessions playing with Jun, who is very nice to play with, as well as definitely being a better player than me. Our most eventful match was definitely the middle one. There was a fire alarm halfway through the match, and it came after we'd finished the auction on the board below, but before we'd played the hand. Everyone sort of milled around near the doorway, and then we came back inside, while everyone who had actually gone outside in the rain complained that those who'd stayed inside were acting irresponsibly.

Jun's double is understandable, but I'm not sure about the tactics - it's pretty clear the opponents aren't going to play in 1NX, whereas you might be able to set them a lot in 1N, for 100 points a time. After the transfer sequence, his second double is definitely takeout, and I'm not really sure why I didn't bid 4S... facing a partner who's shown a 15 count, and takeout of hearts, I think I should expect to be a favourite to make it. I don't know what I was thinking about at the time, and I'm slightly worried now that I may have taken some illegal UI into account (maybe Jun was showing some discomfort?), however, I don't think our opponents were damaged...

The defence was, suboptimal, to say the least, and we managed to let 2 hearts through. We both managed to to fail to give each other a ruff when it would have promoted the setting trick in trumps - I could have given Jun a spade ruff for the uppercut, and he could have given me a diamond ruff for a straightforward trump promotion. I'd like to blame the interruption from the fire alarm, but I think we both just made silly mistakes. 

Luckily, as it turned out, that board was fairly irrelevant, as the opponents managed to lose the match entirely on the next board, where they had a huge bidding mix-up. 

4C was alerted, I asked what it meant, and LHO explained it as meaning a good heart pre-empt. With this UI, RHO is now pretty clearly banned from pulling the double - from their point of view, their partner has bid hearts, and they have KJx in partner's suit. They could hardly have a better hand (it's somewhat tempting to redouble...). Note that while E is allowed to forget the system, she's not allowed to remember it because her partner told her what her bid meant. (ie, if I hadn't asked for the explanation, or if there'd been no alert, 6C might have been allowed).

We didn't call the director at the time, but after a quick discussion afterward, we realised that we should have, and Jun went off to get a ruling. It was decided that we'd asked for the ruling in time, and the result was rolled back to 5HX -7 (the directors had some fun trying to work out how many tricks EW would make playing in 5H...  it's hard to see them getting anything other than 2 trumps and two aces, and that's what they went for in the end). 

Now, this was obviously a difficult situation. The opponents thought they'd won their match, and this ruling was enough for a swing of 9 VPs (we went from a 14-6 defeat to a 15-5 win. The other team decided to appeal the ruling - this was the first appeal I've ever been involved in, and it's all very official. We had to fill in forms and then the room was cleared while the appeal was held, and we were sent out for the panel to make their verdict. As it happens in this case, the appeal had no merit - the director's ruling was pretty clearly correct, and there weren't really any grounds for the appeal - I think the majority of the discussion in the panel was about whether they could find a reason to give the appellants their deposit back. 

As an aside - the directors went to our opponents from that match while they were playing the next match to tell them about the ruling. This is understandable, as they were no doubt caught up in the excitement of actually having to make a ruling. However, I think it might have been better to wait until the end of the match, and tell them in the break (assuming protocol allows this) - it's pretty disturbing news to hear that you just lost 9VPs on one board, and I think our opponents were understandably put out.

Anyway, with that victory, and a couple of other good results, we were firmly in the top part of the room going into the final session, and in with a good chance of yet more M&S vouchers.

I'm going to try and finish my Peebles accounts this week, as well as an account of the SIM pairs I played on Wednesday, as we're playing the Winter Fours next weekend (me and Norman with Jake and Martin), and I'll hopefully have another whole weekend of bridge to right about.