The third set of the UNN Rao Memorial Bridge Tournament saw a total of 125 participants.
Swarnendu Banerjee and Rana Roy won this set ahead of the star players but scratch combo of Subrata Saha and R Krishnan (Kista). The Indonesian pair of Paul David Pitna and Denis Kristanda were third.
The results of yesterday's game can be seen here.
Special Prizes
The organizers seem to have worked out a system with RealBridge to not award special prizes. Once again, no pair managed to bid and make 2 slams. For this session the special prize will be to the first pair to bid and make a hat trick of games i.e. three games in 3 boards.
Greenhorn Prizes
The first prize for the Newcomer Class Pair has been lifted by Ashok Kedia and G L Reddy. This is the second time they are featuring in the honors list. The second prize goes to Viswanathan and Shyam Sundar. The third prize has been won by Debraj and Tirtharaj Chowdhury (also a second timer to this honors list). It is indeed commendable that all of them finished in the top 32 in the session.
Interesting Hand
In distributional hands, there can be a number of twists and turns that provide the most excitement at the bridge table and become the topic of conversation (says Kista, our expert). This is an interesting one from yesterday's UNN Day 3 match.
The auction employed by EW in the diagram above was fairly simple and replicated at a couple of other tables as well.
With your hand, you can sense a slam making for you in either of the red suits for a minimum of 1370+. You can also sense that NS probably have 7 tricks in a Spade contract which makes 6S a cheap save at -800 or even, at the worst, -1100.
East, therefore, should tactically aim to win the auction at the 6 level in a manner such that NS miss their save either in hopes of taking EW down, or fear that they get pushed into a grand slam. Most partnerships lack clear methods to handle this situation. In general, a slow auction helps to achieve the desired result.
You can see below some alternative actions at various tables with annotations by Kista.
Here is the full board . As you can see, EW can make 6H or 6D and NS can bid 6SX for a cheap save 0f -800.
As the distributional deals revolve around the context of vulnerability, these considerations become crucial to the outcome. Look at the same hand with the vulnerability reversed say NS Vul.
Then 6H would be 980 whereas 6S X would be -1100. In the context of this hand, this is the only vulnerability that works against NS.
Today's Game
Today's game is the last of the 'individual' games in the qualification rounds. If you have played two of the earlier sessions, you automatically qualify for a 'final'. Even if you haven't, today's set will be as competitive as the other three.
Today's game starts at 1830 IST / 1300 GST / 0500 PST / 0800 EST.
Click here to sign up for today.
And come and have fun