Daily News 28-Dec-20

Union Club Swiss League

Formidables win Swiss Teams Championship

In an extremely exciting final, Formidables stamped their superiority over Poddar Housing to become Union Club Swiss Teams Champions.

After taking an early lead, they reeled under a 50 imp onslaught by Poddar in the second session to trail by 36 imps at the half way stage. But they determinedly fought back to first narrow the lead down to 11 by the end of the third session and then win the last session handsomely by 27 imps.

The complete results of the finals can be seen here

One deal from the finals was reported by team mate, Sandeep Thakral, who was not playing the session.

South led the 2 of Clubs which looked suspiciously like a singleton. It looks like declarer is going to lose the Heart Ace and Club King. Therefore, he needs to limit his diamond losers to one. How does one play the hand?

For starters, Laltu went up with the Club Ace. Note that trumps cannot be drawn at this stage, else declarer will not have entries to take the diamond finesse. So Laltu led a small diamond out of dummy immediately!

South won the first diamond but was forced to give declarer a second entry into dummy with a spade. Declarer pitched a diamond from hand and repeated the finesse. Now it was a simple matter of drawing trumps and conceding the club king

A wonderful display of timing by Laltu indeed.

Arnab Ghosh and Babhrubahan Bose clinch the Master Point Pairs

Arnab and Babhru performed solidly throughout the event to emerge deserving winners way ahead of the rest of the field. In second place were Bandyo and Namit Sharma with Sumit Saha and Swapan Sardar finishing in a close third place.

Click Here for the full result

An adjustment had to be made to scores because two pairs irresponsibly did not re-seat themselves in their proper seats post lunch. This constrained the officials to impose a severe penalty on them. Such behavior only goes to skew the results and unnecessarily spoil the experience for the rest of the field.

Swapan Some and Baneet Malhotra win IMP Pairs

Swapan and Baneet comfortably won the IMP Pairs event finishing clearly in front of second placed Bhudhar Chandra Kayal and Anupam Ghosh. R P Tripathi and Pijush Kanti Baroi were in third place.