The 4th day of the 65th Winter Bridge Nationals crowned Borivali Sports Club as the winner of the Ashok Ruia Silver Cup. Shambhu Ghosh and Biswajit Poddar won the IMP pairs event and Mavericks and Indian Railways A entered the finals of the Ashok Ruia Gold Cup.
Along with this, we also had the elections for the interim BFI committee and the results are still a subject of hot debate.
Read about all this and more as BridgeFromHome continues to bring you coverage of the event.
Ashok Ruia Gold Cup
Team Mavericks continued to impress with their form, beating Team Shree Cement by 26 imps. While they won each session, the victory in each session was narrow. Full credit to the losers for giving such a tough fight.
Team Indian Railways A, on the other hand, simply walloped Team Monica Jajoo. After racking up a lead of 61 imps in 3 sets, the losers conceded the match, presumably to save their eneergy for the play offs today.
Team Borivali Sports Club (From L to R) S.G. Surve, Asvin Ganger, Stanley Nazareth, Shriram Khanolkar, N.B. Shinde
Borivali Sports Clubregistered a comprehensive victory over their opponents Amanora, winning the final by a margin of over 100 imps. More than 75% of this margin was carved out in the last session alone as nothing that the losers tried could work out.
Full credit to Amanora for their entire performance. The event is always strenuous and to play with a four member team is particularly stressful.
The team comprised of (L to R in the photograph) Aditi Sahasrabuddhe, Abhay Todankar, B.G. Daxindas (the popular director) and Anant Golwalkar. Once again, very well done.
Team Deepadhar won the play off for third place over Team K2 by a slender margin of 20 imps. While it looks comfortable, the match actually went down to the wire with 44 imps exchanged over the last 5 boards.
Shambhunath Ghosh and Biswajit Poddar, winners of the IMP pairs along with Sudhir Agarwal, Sanjay Chakraborty and Prasad Keni
After 5 more rounds of 10 boards each, Shambhunath Ghosh and Biswajit Poddar won the Late Shri V. G. Quenin Memorial IMP pairs with Koushik Mukherjee and Priyaranjan Sinha in second place. Pankaj Chaudhari and Pintu Sao were in an impressive 3rd place, just 2 imps behind the runners up.
In the Strata II event, Sukanta Das and Bhaskar Sarkar emerged winners with Rabindra Kumar Pradhan and Sankarsan Behera in second place. Youngsters, Soham Sarkar and Subashree Basu turned in another impressive performance, finishing just 1 imp behind the runners up.
An Interesting Boards
We have pulled out two boards from the IMP pairs finals yesterday. Do see if you, with your favorite partner can reach slam on the boards.
The first board arose in the third elimination.
A 27 HCP slam in hearts makes on the club finesse. In modern day bridge any 50% slam is an acceptable risk to take.
9 tables (out of 25) bid this slam of which only one pair managed to go down.
But the key, in our opinion is smelling the slam and bidding it. Do try it.
On this board, which arose in Session 4, there arose a slam which may end up depending on two finesses (if a ♦ is led). This slam too makes on a combined 26 HCP in the East - West hands.
It is interesting to note that in this field, 8 out of 25 pairs bid the club slam, while nobody bid the slam in hearts.
If a diamond is not led, then once trumps are drawn and the heart finesse works, declarer can pitch his losing diamond on the hearts and is indifferent to the outcome of the club finesse.
Today's schedule
Today, the Gold Cup teams play the finals, 4 sets of 14 boards each.
The Shree Cements eliminations will be over 5 sets of 10 boards each.
BFI Elections
Elections to the Executive Committee of the BFI were held yesterday. The unofficial results (as they are not available on the website are as below:
President : Subodh Maskara
Secretary : Debasish Ray (He sent a personal message about the election and requested for support during his tenure)
The composition of the rest of the committee is not available. There has been a huge imbroglio about the election of the President but that will be the subject of a separate post.
In Conclusion
We present below a few photographs of today's final in progress courtesy SRC Sekhar
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 nice
Thank you sir!