On the 3rd day of the 65th Winter Bridge Nationals, the Gold teams played the quarter finals while the Silver teams played the semi finals. The IMP Pairs eliminations were also completed.
Read about all this and more as BridgeFromHome continues to bring you coverage of the event.
But first, a look at the participants today as SRC Sekhar again provides a nice long video of the atmosphere there
Ashok Ruia Gold Cup
The quarter finals provided no great surprises with the usual suspects landing in the semi finals
Team Mavericks outclassed Team Mohota by 29.5 imps though one has to say that the four member team gave the winners a good fight.
Team Monica Jajoo whizzed passed Team Arun Jain by a huge margin of 58.5 imps. While the losers did perform creditably to win two sessions out of 4, the margin of defeat in the other two sessions was way too large to overcome.
Team Indian Railways A had a tough match Team Tornatae and held a slender lead of 3 imps at the half way stage. They won the third session narrowly by 12 imps. However, they completed dominated the fourth session to win by 79 imps.
Team Shree Cements had a runaway start winning the first two sessions by 34 and 60 imps respectively. Team Ruia Blazers won the next two sessions but it was too little too late as they could couldn't even cover the losses of the first session.
Borivali Sports Clubwho had a very narrow win in the quarter finals, won the semi finals against Team K2 comprehensively. After losing the first session narrowly by 3 imps, they had another tight session which they won by 1 imp. The third session was a tremendous one for the winners as they laid on 55 imps. Any hopes of a comeback were effectively ruled out by the winners as they proceeded to win the 4th session by
Amanora, on the other hand had a ding dong battle with Team Deepadhar winning by 4 imps in the end. They too had a brilliant third session, where their margin of victory of 30 imps was enough to stave off their losses in the other three sessions.
A total of 97 Pairs played in the elimination round of the IMP Pairs which was played over 9 rounds of 10 boards each. At the end of the day, Raprosad Das and Subrata Chakraborty led the qualifiers into the finals with Koushik Mukherjee and Priyaranjan Sinha in second place. Pritam Das and Wrik Chakraborty were in 3rd place.
The top 39 pairs qualify for the finals where they will be joined by losing quarter finalists from the Gold event.
Some Interesting Boards
The IMP Pairs Elimination had 2 Grand Slam boards out of the 50 (technically 60) boards on play.
The first board arose in the third elimination. While 7NT actually makes due to a friendly of the cards, only a trump lead will force declarer to do anything out of the ordinary in 7 Diamonds.
A heart lead gives the contract away, but on a black suit lead, declarer merely ruffs 3 clubs in hand (2 of them high to take full precautions) to pitch his losing heart on the 5th.
On a trump lead, he is forced to resort to the club finesse which is working.
Almost everybody was in slam on this board with 3 pairs bidding 7NT. This contract needs the club finesse. One pair bid 5♦ and three pairs actually languished in 3♦.
The fourth session too saw a potential grand slam. This one, though, clearly depends on the diamond finesse (that the diamond king drops is merely fortuitous).
Both 7♦ and 7NT make once that happens, but only one pair each bid those grand slams. Over a third of the field contented themselves with 3NT and one of these actually succeeded in making only 12 tricks!!!!
It should have been fairly simple to reach 6♦ playing either 2/1 or a strong club system. However, once you know that a key card is missing, it cannot make sense to bid the grand slam.
Today's schedule
Today, the Gold Cup teams play the semi finals, 4 sets of 14 boards each.
The Silver teams play the finals and play offs. While the finalists will play 4 sets of 14 boards each, the losing semi finalists
The IMP Pairs will be conducted, like the eliminations over 5 sets of 10 boards each.
The consolation pairs will most probably comprise of 2 sets of 20 boards each
In Conclusion
We present below some photographs clicked by Mr. Rajeev Deo. Any body else who would like to share photographs, or incidents or interesting hands, is most welcome to contact me.
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.
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very well covered
Thank you kind sir!