Greetings from sunny São Paulo

It would be traditional for a first post to set the stage, introduce myself, and so on. However, I was never much of one for tradition and I'm anxious to try out Fred Gitelman's "Handviewer" software for laying out bridge bidding and play diagrams on a web page.

I will say that I'm playing in the World Bridge Championships and that, though it's Winter in São Paulo, today the temperature is 86°F.

Our team is not doing well. Doug and I have more bad results than good, but I'll start with one of our better efforts. This is from our fifth round robin match against Bulgaria. I was South. Doug and I play weak notrumps, so 1NT showed 15-17 HCP. East's double called for a heart lead.



The ♥2 lead went to the 5, 7, and A. I ran the ♦7, then played a diamond to West's king as East pitched the ♥4. West tried the ♠J. I thought about this for some time and eventually decided to win since I did not want a club shift. A third diamond went to the ace as East threw the ♣2 and West continued with the ♠4 to East's queen. If East was 3-4 in the black suits, as seemed likely, I could set up nine tricks by ducking a club, but the defense would get five first. I ducked the spade and East shifted to the ♥Q. Ducking to rectify the count for a round suit squeeze against East was not necessary, since if East had the club queen I could always squeeze him out of a heart winner and throw him in to lead away from the club. Accordingly I won the heart and played a club to my ace. I led ♦J and discarded a heart from dummy in this position:



East pitched a club smoothly. I'd taken long enough in the play that he'd had plenty of time to plan his defense. Keeping the queen guarded would essentially be giving up on setting the contract. I cashed the ♠A and everyone followed. West played the ten, the card he was known to hold. Now I had to guess who held the ♣Q. I took my time about it, knowing that it was a hugely important decision, but I had two indications to go right. One was that East seemed to have started with four clubs to West's three. The other was that East's double would be awfully thin without the ♣Q. I'm not sure how good an inference this is. The double was thin as it is. East knows that game will be close because of our invitational sequence. He might double simply to get a heart lead in, along with the chance of increasing the score since he suspects the hand will break poorly for us.

In any case I played a club to the king and scored up 950. At the other table my hand opened a strong notrump, North used Stayman and then invited with 2NT which North naturally accepted. On this auction West had an easy diamond lead, and eventually declarer guessed to squeeze East and scored 9 tricks, so we won 8 IMPs.

Double-dummy West could have beaten me. He needs to win the first diamond and switch to a low spade. This would be difficult to find even looking at all four hands.

This deal made up for one from the Team Trials in June where we lost 300 on the same sequence.