Penalty card finesse

The last two days of bridge have been "pretty joker." Our foray into an NABC+ event on Thursday (the fast pairs) was fun but unsuccessful, insofar as we stayed below 50% the whole time. We did have some spectacular boards: on one board, we bid to 6NT with 10 solid tricks outside spades and a a spade suit that is Jxxx in dummy across from KTx in my hand. They lead the Ace(!), which I figure can not possibly be from AQ, so I happily take my winners starting with diamonds, pitching clubs, when lefty renegs and gets a spade penalty card. The finesse is now 100% of course, since she must play the spade, but at the end I discover she lead A from AQxxx! 6NT making is of course worth all the match points, and the next hand against the same pair was 24 out of 25 too because we're in 1S+1 when they have several of a minor.

After losing that, we headed to a sweet mini-golf place with Mike, Owen, Eric Sieg, Zack, with lots of water traps, steep grades, and multi-level courses. We scored the golf with matchpoints, because hey - we're bridge players. In the Thursday midnights, we played the Phantom NT to good effect but didn't manage to win.

Friday we played a compact KO with Shane and Andy, who are two excellent junior players. We told them that we were pretty bad, which is true by their standard, and they decided to make it fun for them by joking around, psyching 1NT, et cetera. This was not good for business, so we lost the second match and ended up watching Eric and Mike in the mini-Spingold final on Vugraph. They eventually lost, and were not happy with the way they played, but most of their bad boards seemed reasonable to me. Then at night we played in a loser swiss with Andrew Dubay (sorry for previous spelling error) and his friend Peter, which was mediocre for all of us.

In the last match of the one-session swiss, we busted out the Phantom again, and our opponents got a big kick out of it. The only(?) problem with it is that it's almost too reasonable to be funny. It's sort of an unhappy medium: not quite insane enough to be a joke and not quite useful enough to be worth it. But it's still fun for us, because we invented it. We also made 2C opener show the majors and 2D show diamonds, and then created this 1C open with rebid 2C to show 6+ clubs and 11-16.

Life is good, we just got off a great game of creights with lots of fun juniors. Tomorrow, we play with Bob again and his partner Ellie(sp?) in a KO. Probably our last event... will this blog continue?