It's official. The old adage is true as I have discovered this week. I have pretty much concentrated on nothing else this week. You have a life, then you get involved with bridge; bridge takes over your life. It might also be evidenced by the fact that I haven't managed to post anything on here in almost a month. I just haven't been able to.
And there has been PLENTY to blog about had I got round to it. Cue the roller-coaster run through.
Bridge Club Tartan v Phoenix Rising
We won this match 17-3. And I am a gracious winner; I am saying no more. End of.
Sybil Hay District Teams of Four
There was too much to do, in the end. We started the final night in fourth, and with the top teams playing each other, there MIGHT have been a chance. But no. Jim HAY and his team left us no chance; he beat the teams in 2nd and 3rd place to score 34 on the night, enough to win the tournament by a comfortable margin.
Congratulations to Jim Hay, Jun Nakamaru-Pinder, Lindsay Herbert, Bill Innes and their twice substitute Steve Pomeroy for another successful campaign. Their unbeaten record was taken from them this year; losing to McGUIRE, my team and the plucky WATSON team from Ellon. But when they're good, they're very good and their victories were more than enough to compensate.
My team did well on the final night, an 18 and a 15 giving us 33 and seeing us finish in 2nd - a best-ever finish in this competition for everyone in my team, as far as I am aware. It didn't help that I was Convener of the final night; I'm pretty sure that cost us 1 VP.
Phoenix Perfect Teams
Or "Pivot" teams if you prefer. The format: Multiple Teams twice over, where you partner each of your team mates for a certain amount of boards on each night. Three board matches made the scores pretty wild, but I think we played solid throughout. We won the first night, but Jim Hay (him again!) and his team beat everyone in their path (except us) on Night 2, to overtake us and win by two VPs.
An interesting system point arose early on, on the second night.
LHO Partner RHO You
Pass 1 Club X 1 Heart
2D Pass Pass 3 Clubs
3D Double Pass ?
What do I do? Is the Double (from a non-regular partner) take-out or penalty?
I have not posted my hand, which is not to make things harder. The answer, as far as I am concerned, should be pretty straight-forward.
I have shown hearts on the first round; I should have at least 5 of them. Second time round, I re-opened with Three Clubs. So I have support for partner's suit.
If partner does not want the opposition to play in 3 Diamonds, he will choose a suit now. He knows which two we can play in, and he is the one with the information to decide. Spades are not an option. Neither of us have suggested we have spades; they are pretty well marked with RHO. I pass. +200.
One board can make all the difference. We should have had 500 from that and our team-mates could've done better their way, and that would've won us the Perfect Teams.
Am I disappointed? Me? Well, maybe just a little bit.
But I always say it never rests on just one board. So from that point of view, it is encouraging that we are just one board worse than Jim's team in these big events. With just a bit more concentration, work and discipline, we can go one better.
The thing was, in both the Sybil Hay and Phoenix Perfect Teams (both rounds), we beat Jim. So getting the wins isn't the difficult part, as barmy as that sounds. It is winning over and over again; consistency is the key. That's what separates winners from - well, us.
Aberdeen did not do so well in various junior competitions this year. I'm going to say that's because Aberdeen puts up so much of the entry, the Aberdeen teams knock each other out of the running. Certainly that was the case in the Frischmann, where more than half of the players were based in Aberdeen, so they were all taking points off each other left, right and centre. Especially given most of the boards had doubled and/or redoubled contracts flying around, your opponents really had to go the extra mile to give you a top.
Still, an Aberdeen team did win the schools' MiniBridge Championship (again), so we still have tangible success.
WHITE HOUSE JUNIORS 2012
And so we come to the big event. The White House Juniors. This has been dominating my time and my plans for the last month. I have spent the last five years or so striving to improve my game and hopefully get on to the Scotland Under 25 team. Somewhere, sometime, I did something right because I have at the twilight of my junior days managed to achieve that ambition. I am part of the Scotland team that will be going to Amsterdam in... yikes! Less than 3 days!!
So, cue a whole load of things to see to: Practice, sorting out insurance, practice, child protection etc, practice, plane tickets, practice, hotel, practice, convention cards, practice, sort out Euros and expenses, practice, other bridge stuff and practice! It's a marathon and we haven't even got there yet. I will be playing with someone that I have played against online for years, but never met in the flesh. We have been working on our system and agreements whenever we can. Will it be enough? I hope so.
In addition to the workload playing for Scotland produces, we have unfortunately lost our NPC (Jim yet again, getting some recognition it seems), as he is unfortunately unable to travel. His presence will be missed, but undoubtedly will still be felt as he gives us all the help he can from sunny Aberdeen.
So, how do we make a tough job even tougher? How about giving us THIS group to start with:
Pool A
Israel
Denmark
Bulgaria Red
Czech Republic
Scotland
Netherlands Orange
On the plus side, we know who we are getting beaten by on Monday.
Of course, the preferable answer to that is: Nobody. We are a learning team with everything to gain, nothing to lose and a good team spirit. We have received good wishes from so many quarters that we want to bring back some VPs in return. Where there's a will, there's a way and all that...
However, starting off in a group including the reigning Champions (Israel), a host team (almost inevitable, there are 5 of them) and a host of household Junior names beside that is not what you'd call an easy start.
Anyway, our Dutch hosts have asked that we publicise the event as much as possible; I will certainly oblige:
White House Blog
I also have to remind anyone reading this that the event will be covered on BBO and you can find out when the various matches are played by looking at the Vugraph schedule. I don't expect we will be on Vugraph, something that I'm quite happy about, but at least if we are it will probably be because we are doing rather well at the time.
Normally I try and cover via this blog interesting International events. Since I'm actually getting to play in one, that might not happen this time, but our hotel has wireless facilities so I'll see what I can do.
And, back to the preparation...
