UNN Rao Memorial – Day 1 Report

The UNN Rao Memorial Bridge Tournament got under way yesterday. More than 130 participants had registered for the first session. The sponsors and the organizers thank you for the overwhelming response.

Tapan Kumar Roy and Sailen Das took first place in the event ahead of Raju Tolani and Ajay Khare. JP Das and Debabrata Mukhopadhyay got the third place.

The results of yesterday's game can be seen here.It is early days yet and everybody still has a chance to qualify for the gold finals.

Special Prizes

Yesterday, we had announced a special prize for the first Grand Slam bid and made. Unfortunately nobody could claim this prize.

Today's special prize is for the first Redoubled Contract that is made. While this may provide an incentive to redouble, please do take care about the same!

Greenhorn Prizes

The first prize for the Newcomer Class Pair has been lifted by Debraj Choudury and his 10 year old son Tirtharaj.  The second prize goes to Ashok Kedia and L S Reddy. The third prize is being held in abeyance of now. If Vinod Podar (partner of Mr. Sethuraman) or secondly S. S. Gupta (partner of Prasanna Kumar Hota) can provide their BFI Master Point number and we can verify they have less than 100 Master Points, either of them (in that order, will be eligible for the third place). If there is any other pair ranked higher than 56, who satisfies this critera, they may please approach us.

These prizes shall only be given to pairs holding a valid BFI Master Point number. We are of the opinion that these prizes are here to stay in future events. So do make it a point to register with the BFI as soon as possible.

To reiterate, the value of the prizes are

1.  Rs.800
2. Rs. 600
3. Rs. 400

Interesting Hand

Board 12 yesterday provided many insights into high level competitive bidding, especially at varying vulnerability, says R. Krishnan aka Kista. Look at the auction alongside. This is the only table that was allowed to play a making slam and doubled at that. While the auction does not appear too scientific, 4NT was showing the minors and North upgraded his hand to bid the slam. East doubled with his two aces, but had to concede as the play was fairly straightforward. It needs to be stressed that NS are both experts and a long standing partnership to boot.

But this hand had quite a few interesting results. Once again the auction doesn't appear to have much science from the NS angle. Bidding 6 Spades effectively means that he expects his partner to have two of the non heart aces, a believe which is more a fond hope than anything else. Here, had East with the AJ of spades and the heart ace chosen to double, her partner may not have been tempted to bid 7 hearts. The old rule that the preemptor does not bid again have long gone.

(As bulletin editors, we do not presume to comment on any expert's bidding).

This was appropriately put into practice by Mr. Niranjan, a well known bridge player from Chennai and 8 other Easts. Their double ended the auction and earned them a welled deserved 9 IMPs

Thank you Kista for the insights into this hand.

Today's Game

Today's game starts at 1830 IST / 1300 GST / 0500 PST / 0800 EST.

For those of you who did not join yesterday, you can still start playing from today and still be eligible to participate in the finals if you play all the remaining days.

Click here to sign up for today.

And come and have fun