The 46th World Bridge Championships got underway in Marḥba, Marrakesh on the 20th of August.
BridgeFromHome will attempt to cover them in an overall manner. We would welcome reports of hands, or detailed matches from anybody. Will try and post them in the day's coverage.
For India, the day appeared to be a mixed bag. On the plus side, it is so nice to see the Indian Ladies so high up on the table in the Venice Cup. In the d' Orsi Trophy, our loss to Australia in the opening round would have been devastating given the performance of the past two Indian teams here. The open team has started steadily in the Bermudal Bowl. In the Wuhan Cup, our performance appears to have been disappointing.
Do follow our mini bulletins. And all contributions are welcome.
The Indian Team got off to a pretty shaky start in the event conceding 27 imps in 3 boards before a wild 'game-slam' swing saw them pull back 19 in this board.
In the Closed Room, Sandeep Thakral brought home a 6 Diamond Slam. Not much is known about the line of play. It probably first involved drawing of trumps, followed by a heart finesse, further followed by establishing the last heart for a club pitch. (We would love to know specifics).
In the Open Room, Rajeshwar Tiwari was allowed to play this hand in 4 Spades Doubled! And, to add insult to injury, he brought it home making 11 tricks.
Many more imps were exchanged over the rest of the match but eventually, we lost the match by just 9 imps by 45 to 54
In the next two rounds, India played steadily, first winning 32-20 against a strong Swiss team and then pushing past the UAE 54-41 to finish the day in 9th position.
India's scorecard, as well as their upcoming matches can be seen by clicking here.
We remember the start of the APBF tournament, where Indian teams were invited to participate. After losing the first two rounds pretty badly, one wag commented on how India continues to compete for the wooden spoon. At that time, Alka Kshirsagar had otly responded that they expected better support from their countrymen for the team.
The team went on to perform decently at that event. But nothing could have prepared us for their performance yesterday!
In their first match against Argentina, young Vidhya Patel played the following hand well to bring home 10 imps for India.
To make this hand, you either require the defenders to open up the club suit or finesse the spade 10 early in the game. We don't know what happened, but we will take the 10 imps, thank you very much! Well done Vidhya.
We won this match handsomely by 35 imps to 11.
The second match was against China which we lost narrowly by 14 imps to 15. As the overall exchange shows, it was a tight match with nothing much either way.
The last match was against New Zealand, which again we won comfortably 36-29.
At the end of the day, they were lying 7th. Hope they rise higher!
Ladies, you have really won our hearts and we are cheering hard for you to qualify.
India's scorecard, as well as their upcoming matches can be seen by clicking here.
India's campaign in this event began even more disastrously than the Open team. In the first 6 boards of their opening match against Australia, they lost a whopping 62 imps. A deficit like this is almost impossible to recover and they eventually lost this match by 50 imps.
As an aside, it was quite nice to see an Indian, Avi Kanetkar playing for Australia against us. He has represented the country fairly often and actually hails from Matunga, Mumbai!
To the credit of the Indian Seniors, however, they did not let their disastrous start pull them down and they went on to register facile wins over Italy (38-19) and the Netherlands (41-31)
In the board below Subrata Saha was the only declarer to make 12 tricks in no trumps. Given that they had bid the slam, it fetched India 13 imps.
Curiously enough, the other table could make only 9 tricks in 3NT. Their declarer would probably have received a club lead after which declarer would have cashed his 9 tricks and gone home.
Would love to hear how Baba Da, as he is fondly known, made his contract.
They finished the day in 14th position. We hope they continue to improve and qualify!
India's scorecard, as well as their upcoming matches can be seen by clicking here.
The mixed team's performance on day 1 was, to say the least, disappointing.
They started their campaign losing narrowly to UAE (33-39). This was followed by an even narrower loss (21-24) to Denmark. In the last round, they lost massively (33-62) to Chinese Taipei.
The team is currently lying 19th at the end of day one.
To quote another chronicler, this team needs to really pull up it's socks if they hope to qualify.
India's scorecard, as well as their upcoming matches can be seen by clicking here.
Disclaimer : All opinions are entirely those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the BridgeFromHome Team.