Janee & Gordon - Brighton (2007)

Janeeand Gordon played in the Tuesday Pairs Championship, and finished 38th out of 74 with a score of just below 50%, in a fairly high-quality field. The event was won by two young players: Tom Rainforth and David Collier, with a score of 64.7%.

On the above deal, Janee and Gordon were East-West, opposing very good players, and defended an aggressive 3NT contract played by South.  Janee led the 3 of Clubs to the 4, 10 and Ace.  Declarer led a small Spade to the King, which Gordon ducked.  Two successful Diamond finesses followed with the aid of the Ace of Hearts entry, resulting in 7 certain tricks, but that was all Declarer managed to take, and +100 meant a complete top (68) for our heroes.

Then a quickly-bid and successful 6S contract on the next board brought in an above-average score.

The Bulletin Editor, Brian Senior, was on the look-out for contributions, he was duly supplied with the deal shown above and it appeared in Bulletin No. 6 - Thursday 16th August, which is available online; the short article starts near the foot of Page 4.

Janee and Gordon finished their evening against the well-known English International player, David Gold, and Sarah Dunn, and scored an enormous 120 out of 136 match points, thus pushing their opponents down to 8th place; fortune favoured our heroes, although a skilfully-engineered ruff during the play of the second deal brought in 10 extra match points.  If only good fortune had been a bit more on their side during the rest of the event!

In the Friday evening (well, actually early Saturday morning) speedball – which is just a bit of very-high-speed fun, Gordon partnered Irene Robinson of Bristol, and (according to him) thanks to his partner and their generous opponents, Scooby-Doo included, they were placed first out of 26 pairs with a score of 60.25%.  If you don’t believe the Scooby-Doo reference, just look it up on the website - the English Bridge Union should be congratulated, since many details of the results are available on its website – including personal scorecards, and the archives go back as far as 2001.