Dear friends,
On Sunday the team of Kampala faced the team of HMS Valiant, representing ACOL. Overall, it was, indeed, a challenging match. In spite of some mistakes (most serious made by myself), we managed to beat the ACOL team by 16 IMPs.
In the first half, our most serious mistake (a gross misclick) was on board 4, where I failed to bid on the forcing double of my partner. However, I feel that there are also 2 boards where we failed to make the difference, these are board 1 and board 7. On board 1, the 4 spades bid was defendable by bidding 5 clubs. Subsequently, board 7 was, make no mistake, a slam bidding board. Thankfully, our opponents also failed to spot them.
In the second half, on board 5, I made a gross playing mistake ruffing on the 4th trick, instead of discarding one card of the doubleton in clubs; and on board 8 I didn’t use the K of hearts (3rd trick), in order to play diamonds and gain an extra trick. However, on the 9th board, we were saved by the superiority of the medium-strong 1nt that we were using and made the game in hearts contract, using stayman, while our opponents played it from the “wrong” side and failed.
I think that the score margin could’ve been much higher and that I could’ve played better. I hope that my new partner, Marcello, will forgive me, as this is the first time we’re playing together.
You may download the boards here , or watch them for a limited amount of time here and here . I will send you the detailed results of the November challenge, once Sanya makes them available.
The KO stage of the ICL tournament will start on Wednesday, 16 of Novemeber.
Best regards,
Jack (antepa on BBO)
The Kampala Team's School of Bridge 