Drive by blogging

Yesterday was our long trip to Columbus...fairly uneventful, listened to Harry Potter 6 the whole way. We've already ordered our copies of 7 at a bookstore in Nashville. At about 5PM, we checked into our smelly Rodeway, which was actually fine once we got to our room. There's no internet here, but there's unsecured wireless at the nearby Motel 6 so I'm going to (literally) do a drive-by-blogging. "Are we in range Bit?" "Get closer, get closer!"

We played in the open night session at the Columbus Bridge Center, which was a pretty pathological field. In several hands which game is making, one or no pairs bid it, yet some of our best boards were setting stupid games that we pushed them into. Lovey and I hadn't played bridge in a couple months, so we made our own healthy share of gross errors. In my favorite disaster of the night, Lovey and I have a somewhat sensible 2/1 auction:

1S - 2D - 2NT - 3NT - 4NT
2NT for us shows either 12-14 or 18-19 with all suits stopped. 3NT is to play, 4NT reveals 18-19. Lovey has:

S J9
H AQ2
D J9742
C AJ5

What would you do? Lovey passed ("I see a max of 32 and no long suit to run"), which turned out to be wrong but seems perfectly reasonable. I have

S AQT43
H KT7
D AK8
C K2

and the spade finesse is on and the Q of D is dropping, so everyone is making 7. However, this is my first hand in two months, so genius that I am, I FAIL TO TAKE the spade finesse and duck my AK of diamonds when they win the king of spades, and making 5 is a bottom of course. And worst of all, only one pair is in slam, so if I'd just played it half intelligently we'd have been fine.

Despite having a weird half-conservative half-bidding-unmakeable-games field, we had lots of gifts too. On one hand, I open 1C with A8 A973 J94 K764, lefty bids 1S, Lovey negative doubles, and righty bids 2S. I make a questionable 3H bid (we have no agreement as to the strength of this) they advance to 3S, Lovey bids 4H, all float. They lead a spade and lovey comes down with K64 JT8654 T8 A3. I win it on the board, and play the J of hearts. Righty thinks for a moment and plays Q from Qx, virtually guaranteeing that her honor will crash with partners, no matter what cards I have. 4H+1 is worth 90%, so shockingly she wasn't the only one to do it.

On the whole, a very fun night of bridge. It's good to be back. All this added up to a 51%, we're hoping to kick it into gear today. There's also this weird guy... he won both sessions yesterday, and claims to have invented several conventions that other people stole, and to be a published songwriter. I'm sure we'll have more to say about him tonight, so more on that next post.