The 65th Winter Nationals got underway yesterday. BridgeFromHome will attempt to cover the same for you, dear readers, to the extent it can. Please bear in mind that this is a one man effort done remotely and excuse all errors and omissions.
The Venue
A lot of us (yours truly included), were bemoaning the fact the accessibility to the venue in terms of flight was a bit difficult. But, as the video below shows, the venue itself is pretty grand. Thanks to SRC Sekhar for allowing us to use his video.
Ashok Ruia Gold Cup
The sensational news, even before the event started was that Sandeep Thakral was not playing the event with the Mavericks and Jaggy Shivdasani, his regular partner for the past few years. From the information available to us, it appears that this was due to some contractual reasons. It did not appear prudent to pursue the issue till the end of the event so we will let things resolve themselves as time progresses.
At any rate, Sandeep joined Team Monica Jajoo for this event. It is unclear who he will partner in the pairs. We shall only come to know about this at a later point in time.
At the end of day 1, Team Monica Jajoo (Monica Jajoo, Somesh Bhattacharjee, Sandeep Thakral, Sukamal Das, Binod Shaw and Sanjit Dey) were leading the league, over 15 VPs ahead of the second placed, Indian Railways A (Sumit Mukherjee, Debabrata Majumder, Gopinath Manna, Sandeep Datta, Sagnik Roy and Sayantan Kushari). Team Mavericks (Subodh Maskara, Subhash Gupta, Keyzad Anklesaria, Padmanabhan Shridharan, Jaggy Shivdasani, Sapan Desai) was in 3rd place.
The 8th place contender, Dhampur Sugar Mills (Ashok Goel, Anal Shah, K R Venkataraman, Swarnendu Banerjee, Ajay Khare and Raju Tolani) had secured 44.90 VPs, an average of just over 11.
A team to acknowledge is Team Carpe Diem (Amarnath Banerjee, Baneet Malhotra, Kavita Ajmera, Raghunath Tripathi, Joyrup Mukherjee and Sabyasachi Sadhukan) which was lying in 5th place. Apart from Amarnath Banerjee, who is fighting a tough battle with cancer, none of the other players are 'stars' as such.
Ashok Ruia Silver Cup
At the end of day one, Team Deepadhar (Deepa Jacob, Prosenjit Manna, Babhrubahan Bose, Abhirum Ghosh and Pradip Dey) were leading from Team HBA (Sutanu Behuria, Rajesh Thakur, Hatindar Panwar, Mithun Biswas and Pradip Ghosh. Borivali Sports Club (Stanley Nazareth, Asvin Ganger, Sriram Khanolkar, S. G. Surve and N. B. Shinde) was lying in third place.
The 8th place contender Team K2 (Tanmoy Majumder, Sagar Bhuiya, Rajendra Ray, Bholanath Ghosh, Umesh Singh and Rakesh Sharma) had a score of 71.59 VPs, a shade under an average of 12.
One has to doff one's hat to Deepa Jacob, the sponsor of team Deepadhar. She was first spotted performing well during an online ladies championship event conducted during the Covid era. Her first strong foray in open bridge was one of the top spots in the IMP pairs event at the Goa Bridge Festival, 2022. Her team has been delivering a string of strong performances in the last few months and we hope to see her feature as a leading contender, not just in ladies and mixed events, but in open events as well.
Monica Jajoo versus Mavericks (Round 4)
This match appealed to me not only because it was between the top two contenders at the end of Round 3, but also because it was between Sandeep's current team and his previous team.
I am just featuring the boards. It is not possible to provide the bidding and play sequences.
On this board, Sandeep and Somesh bid and comfortably made 3NT. In the other room, Jaggy and Sapan reached 5♦ which was just unmakeable (presumably after the lead of the spade king).
To add insult to injury, they were doubled and ended up conceding 13 imps to Team MJ
The board has listed 4♣ x N -500 as the optimal result. As I mentioned earlier, it is not possible to know what happened
Keyzad and Shridhar bid this hand impeccably to reach a contract of 7♦. Given that it is dependent on a finesse, I do not possess the expertise to say whether it should be bid or not.
Suffice to say that only one other paid in field bid it. Both pairs guessed the spade queen correctly to make the contract.
+13 Imps to the Mavericks.
This, unfortunately was the only bright spot in a match that went disastrously for them.
On this board, both teams played in a 4♠ contract.
Somesh, received a club lead which probably allowed him to pitch his heart loser on the ♣Q. With that momentum, he proceeded to make 11 tricks, being the only declarer to make the contract.
In the other room, Sukamal Das led from his doubleton heart queen and then there were just too many places to misguess (I guess).
Jaggy went two down to give Team MJ 13 more IMPs
On this board, once again, both teams played in 3NT. In the open room, Shridhar, sitting South, led a small heart, setting up 3 heart tricks for the declarer and 9 tricks in total.
In the other room, Sanjit Dey led his 4th best spade after which Sapan had next to no chance of making the contract.
13 more IMPs to Team MJ
MJ proceeded to win the match handsomely by 51 imps to 14 giving them 18.04 VPs.
For details scores of the match, click here
Today's schedule
Today, the Gold Cup teams play 4 more rounds to determine the 8 qualifiers for the knock outs.
The Silver teams play 2 more rounds to determine the 8 qualifiers for the knockout.
The qualifying teams will play the quarter finals today, 3 sets of 10 boards each.
The non qualifiers will play a Swiss pairs event subject to a minimum of 24 pairs participating. This would be of 5 or 6 rounds (our guess). The format will be announced at the venue.
In Conclusion
We will attempt to continue this through the duration. We would welcome contributions in the form of any good hands or incidents that occur there. Those submitting hands are requested to submit details and not send me on a treasure hunt please.
We hope you have enjoyed our coverage.
Please do share your comments in the space below.
Disclaimer : All opinions are entirely those of the author and are no reflection of the views of the BridgeFromHome Team.
Thanks for a nice and useful coverage. Your contribution is unparallel to our bridge community
Thank you so much for your kind words.
It is comments like these that spur us on!
Board 20 in 7D East finds the pressure too great and is squeezed so getting the position right is highly probable.
Good update
Thanks for the input as well as your compliment
in the 7D hand, knowing dummy had H void, I underled HA. Keyzad read the hand brilliantly. He decided that H is logical lead for me only if I held the Ace, and discarded a spade at trick 1. Hats off to him.
in 3NT lead was a spade on both tables. But I was able to engineer an endplay in c + h. perhaps it could be defeated with a different line of defence. I haven’t analysed.
In 4S after CA and a high d return, somesh took the superb decision to go up with DA. DK dropping was a huge bonus.
Thanks for your inputs.
Very insightful for the readers as well.
Awesome play and counterplay on 7D.
The 3NT showed a heart lead in the scoring SW. The H3, which the leader didn’t have at that.
I put it down to a small heart being led and people forgetting the pip.
Brilliantly played.
Well played indeed by Somesh. It is difficult covering matches remotely and inputs like your make a huge difference to the coverage!