European Championships Pau
The European Championships are now under way in Pau, France. There are three tournaments; the Open, Women and Seniors. Previously each was decided by an all-play-all event but European countries have proliferated in recent years - the European Bridge League recently admitted its 48th member. Consequently this championship sees the open initially seeded into two sections with nine teams to qualify from each. The eighteen teams contest a second all-play-all which will produce the European Champion.
The first target therefore is to be ninth or better in your section. England find themselves in the same group as defending champions Italy and having already played them, are slightly off the pace after one third of the rounds. For those with other British allegiances, Scotland are in the same group and are slightly below England, in the other group, Ireland (second at the last Europeans) are currently tenth and Wales languish.
The website devoted to the championships has excellent coverage of the event as a sporting contest as well as in the bulletins especially, marvellous bridge content. All this is free to download from http://www.eurobridge1.org/competitions/08Pau/Information.htm (if you have trouble carrying that long string to the computer, try http://tinyurl.com/3zcrks).
The Italian team suffered an early exit at the last world championships and have had a selection upheaval of the leave-the-top-striker-on-the-bench type that would do credit to a premiership spat. Designed to dispel complacency and "bring back that hunger for winning", they are currently leading group A so the initiative is holding up so far. This is a deal from the match with England. Consider your line in three no-trumps against silent opposition, north leads the heart three, south plays the king.
| ♠ 63 | ♠ AK1097 | ||
| ♥ AJ76 | ♥ 4 | ||
| ♦ K8 | ♦ 109653 | ||
| ♣ KQJ73 | ♣ A6 |
The first question is whether to duck the opening lead to south. As that player seems to have king-ten/nine-low (in dangerous cases when north has led from a five-card suit). That's reasonable; at least then you can play for south to hold the diamond ace. In practical play, which after all, is what we're interested in, you can try a number of other approaches.
a) Win immediately, cross to dummy, lead a diamond
b) Win, run the club suit and force discards from the defence
c) Win or duck, play on spades, taking a finesse
d) Win or duck, play top spades, hope the suit establishes and north wins
The advantage of (a) is that south may duck when it is not clear where your tricks are coming from and if north wins the ace, he may not know enough to continue accurately. If north has five hearts and spade length, he may struggle not to reveal the situation - that is the attraction of (b). A spade finesse surely requires holding up in hearts to be sensible. I think I favour holding up, cashing first clubs then spades, finally leading to the diamond king. How did you do?
| ♠ 8542 | |||
| ♥ Q9832 | |||
| ♦ AQ | |||
| ♣ 104 | |||
| ♠ 63 | ♠ AK1097 | ||
| ♥ AJ76 | ♥ 4 | ||
| ♦ K8 | ♦ 109653 | ||
| ♣ KQJ73 | ♣ A6 | ||
| ♠ QJ | |||
| ♥ K105 | |||
| ♦ J742 | |||
| ♣ 9852 | |||
Far more declarers won immediately than ducked the lead, and more played clubs before committing themselves than not. This throws back the problem to the defence to avoid giving anything away and the Italians Versace-Lauria are experts at that. The England declarer failed, the Italian in the other room succeeded. This deal caused a game swing about three-quarters of the matches - you can study almost all these approaches by looking through the results and the bulletins.
Published Saturday 21.Jun.2008