Another poor start

Big losses against Germany and Israel put a damper on our hopes. We've fallen to 14th, 27 VPs out of 6th. New goal: make it into the top 10.

How we stand

Our carryover puts us 11th of 18 teams in the final, 8 points out of 6th. The top 6 teams will qualify for next year's world.championship in Bali. We'll play two matches on Wednesday, three each on Thursday and Friday, and finish with two on Saturday. Fernando and I will sit out the first match today.

Next stop: The finals

We defeated Romania 25-5 and are now mathematically certain to qualify with one match remaining. The finals begin tomorrow morning. We'll play nine matches, one each against the qualifiers from the other bracket. We won't know where we stand in the finals until the end of the current match. Finalists get full carryover from the matches against the teams that qualified, and the matches against teams that did not qualify become irrelevant in retrospect.

With two qualifying matches remaining...

We were credited with 18 for our Bye match, lost to Russia 23-7, and beat Iceland 16-14. That leaves us 13 points ahead of 10th place. Two qualifying matches remain -- today we play Romania and Wales.

So far, so good

An 18-12 victory over Austria leaves us tied for the 5th qualifying spot, seven points ahead of 10th, with four matches plus a bye match to go.

Saturday - we move up to 7th

Only two matches today. We blitzed Cypress 25-1 and defeated Denmark 20-10. Tomorrow we have a single match, against Austria.

Today we scored 15, 16, and 14, average for the day. That's a good result since we played two of the strongest teams in the field, Netherlands and Monaco.

We defeated Finland 21-9. Thursday was a big improvement over Wednesday, but we still lie well out of qualifying position. This morning we play Estonia -- Fernando and I are sitting out.

We won our first match today, against Croatia, 19-11.

I'm out the second match and headed for a swim, as usual.

Here's the tournament web site:

http://www.eurobridge1.org/competitions/12Dublin/microSite/Dublin.htm

Switzerland is in Group B. Thanks to the Running Scores section I can see that my teammates are down by a small amount to England after 2 of 20 boards.

The field is divided into two groups. Our first goal is to finish in the top half of our group. The top nine teams in each group qualify for the second week of play.

Breakfast at the hotel is served in the Grosvenor Suite -- how apropos!

I'm in Dublin for the European Bridge Championships, where I'll be representing Switzerland. Play starts tomorrow morning.