Harold Poster Swiss Pairs Article 1

Michael Byrne has written a bulletin of the hands for the Harold Poster Swiss Pairs from Friday evening. You can read it below.

The Harold Poster Swiss Pairs started on Friday night with 3 matches of 8 boards. 160 pairs lined up to play a total of 14 matches of 8 boards spread over 3 days, and as usual the hands were pretty wild.

This board from the first set saw a lot of players going minus.

Board 8

Dlr W
Love All
KJ104
J86
KJ109
J9
98762 A53
A5 Q732
AQ873 62
5 KQ87
Q
K1094
54
A106432

For the majority of players it was merely a question of how many off they would go in a spade contract, in fact getting out for two down was actually above average, worth 61/112 match points (54%).
Passing out the board was worth a phenomenal 95/112 ( 85%) to those few lucky EW pairs that did it, not something my partnership was able to achieve since I couldn't resist the temptation to open 1C 3rd in seat and my partner had to subsequently go down in 2S.

Several exciting auctions were:

2S P P X
P P P

Former English International Gary Hyett opened a heavy lucas 2 and Ros Wolfarth judged well to pass, expecting partner to hold spades and diamonds and holding a lot of defence to the other suits.
On the JH lead to the ace he led a club to the king and ace and finessed the queen of diamonds on the return. A heart continuation is best for the defence but they continued with a club allowing a heart discard. Now when he ruffed a diamond in dummy South over-ruffed and that was one down, the defence coming to 4 spade tricks, the ace of clubs and the king diamonds.

One of the former holders of this event gained a good score by lying in wait until the end:

1S P 3C* X
3D P 4S P
P X P P
P

West (Jeremy Willans) opened 1S and East (Ian Draper) bid 3C to show a 3 card limit raise. Rhona Goldenfield doubled to show clubs (do you and your regular partner play this as lead directing or a take-out double of spades?) and West made a game try of 3D.

Whilst a 5-5 hand contains good playing strength, this West hand is barely worth an opening bid with a poor anchor suit, and making a game try was very pushy.
Having said that East's jump to 4S was also wild given that he had only 4 of his 11 points in partner's suits, and the club holding has gone downhill with the double since partner is more likely to be short, meaning your KQ won't pull their full value.

Kath Nelson (winner of this event 20 years ago) had no trouble doubling it for +500 and 106/112 match-points.

The top EW score was achieved by Andrew "Tosh" McIntosh and Andrew "Bertie" Black who made 3SX as East on the Ace of clubs lead. Details of how this happened are not available at this time, but neither switching to a heart at trick two as South nor splitting your honours as North seem that unreasonable to me.

One of the good features of this event (this year) was that the players could choose whether to play matches 1-3 starting at 6.45 or matches 2-4 starting at 7.45
The advantage of course was that I could play matches 1-3 and watch match 4, where the early leaders of the section were Mike Bell playing with junior International Ben Norton (recently back from the Junior European Championships where he helped his team qualify for the U25 World Championships).

One of the hands impressed me quite a lot, as normally one of the necessary skills of being a non playing captain is to watch the hands and then come up with sparkling comments in the post mortems that give the impression you would have done better had you been playing.

Hand 26

Dlr E
Game all
KQ984
65
A32
A87
AJ10653 72
A932 10874
10 Q654
64 K93
Void
KQJ
KJ987
QJ1052

N E S W
P 1D 1S
P P 2C 2H
X P P P

South (Mike Bell) opened 1D and the 1S overcall was passed round to him. Not liking his void trump (or the fact he had aceless rubbish) for a reopening double he reopened instead with 2C and West tried 2H. North's double suggested a penalty pass of spades with some interest in defending hearts and South passed.

North led a trump (automatic on this auction where dummy is going to be short in spades) and the jack lost to the ace. Declarer tried the Ace of Spades and South discarded.
The point was his trumps were much more valuable for drawing the opponents trumps and stopping them ruffing. North won the next spade and played his remaining trump and South drew two rounds and then switched to the Queen of clubs. There was nothing declarer could do and he ended 3 off for -800.

If instead South ruffs the ace of spades? He can draw one more trump leaving EW with two each, both of which will score tricks to go with the ace of trumps and the king of clubs, the contract would only go one down.

With the majority of the field playing in game +500 would only be worth 13 matches points out of 58 (22%) +800 was worth the full 56/58, a shared top with Norman Selway and Will Roper, who took 800 out of 2SX when declarer slightly mistimed the play.

Tomorrow (Saturday, which will be today by the time you read this) will be 7 more matches and a chance for the pairs who have started badly to climb up the field.

At table one Mike Bell/Ben Norton will take on Anna Onishuk and Cian Holland from Ireland who are the leading pair on 56 out of a possible 60 victory points.

The first few matches in a long Swiss event are normally not critical, but those that have started well will surely go to bed a lot happier than those that have 3 losses in the bag and are hoping for better things tomorrow.

August 3, 2019