The Donplayer offers me advice

Good morning folks

Its nearly time for bed but Declan the Donplayer gave me a lecture in the pub. Told me Xmas week was his. Told me he would own me. Also told me "don't care about those BJs and Cashens " just want to own you.
So while having my post guinnessial cup of tea I done the Bridge Now robots like seabiscuit.

There was also Kieran in the pub who brings his chessboard to the pub ...we gave him seabiscuit as well. He even had Tomas coaching him a little but Galligan still done him 3 times in 25 minutes.

http://bridge-now.com

A real fine website to play the bridge on ..you get a score for every board out of 100.

However for the real students of the game ... go to
http:/rpbridge.net

Oh I nearly forgot .. Happy Christmas .. to all

Even Mesbur Fitzgibbon need a push sometimes

Good morning folks
Here is hand 31 from the fantastic Jim Cahill Invitational Pairs. Well the organisation was fantastic and the venue and venue supremo Declan Byrne and the prizes were fantastic.
However some of the bridge players needed a push from time to time.

Here are possibly Irelands most lauded pair Adam Mesbur and Nick Fitzgibbon getting the hard push into a cold slam. Despite near 100 years of shared bridge experience they still required a whisper from one of the best individual players in Ireland Michael O'Briain. The actuary had not done his sums correctly on this occasion as Fitzgibbon having for various reasons been unable to advertise his HEART void along with the ATx of trumps so far was very happy to punt 6S now.

Note Fitzgibbon and Mesbur had already stopped in 4S so the auction was dead until Michael O'Briain revived it. Older bridge players have recalled the O'Briain brothers needing cushions to see the table in a bridge club many years ago.

Normally one would offer a solution when criticizing a bidding sequence but who am I to suggest some bidding to Adam Mesbur and Nick Fitzgibbon. One would think an expert pairing like themselves would be able to advertise a useful VOID and ATx of trumps in their hand.
Maybe the 4H bid floods the auction.

Meanwhile I am not proud and I am happy to advertise my own miserable performance so far. 

Board 25 Jim Cahill Invitational Pairs and a Passed hand from another club

Folks
Here is a board I came across this morning while struggling with the Jim Cahill Pairs event.

All our fantastic pairs seem to be reaching for the hopeless skies. I personally passed 3D and then when 3H came along I now bid 3S and the opponents bid 4H which I left go for 3 down.
How come the "best " pairs in Ireland are ALL gone past the hopeless 4H. Something is wrong with the thinking on this board but about 5  of these pairs are sure fire invitees for the free money event sponsored by Jim Cahill.
Enormous prizes are available here for the participants but this board begs belief.
How come all NS pairs are roaring past 4H on the NS side and even reaching 4H on the EW side.
4H is surely minus 200 or 500 or more. I have not looked at the double dummy.

Meanwhile over in Fitzwilliam Tennis club I have a guy coming to explain that all the hands on hand 1 have 11 points or less.

Game is available for both sides in Spades and Hearts respectively but my man arrives up with I thought all hands should have an opening bid. I knew about the hand as I had watched the dealing machine dealing the boards and chose to leave it in the set. Same hand was also in the set on the same night in Malahide Regional. Generally when dealing sets I will watch out for a possible passed out balanced hand and delete it but this one is not for deleting.

I am happy to report that after a few decent boards ..2C doubled and made on 26 and 3NT downed on 27 that I am gaining some traction in this event. I finally got off the deck by overtaking MacCormac McMaugh. Long way to go though.

The Magical BJ O'Brien wins Senior Trials 2019 & Peter Pigot Bridge

This afternoon the fancied O'Brien squad held off a lacklustre challenge from the Keaveney squad in the deciding match of the Telscher Trials. The boards just did not have the imps in them for Keaveney to mount a decent challenge and the O'Brien squad was never under pressure.
They should have got Galligan to shuffle up the boards. The Galligan dealing program is a little more robust than the boring Brightman dealer.

We note the presence of Paul Delaney near the base of the scoring table. Paul has continued his career as a well known bridge coach.
His website has some classes ..I think he gears himself towards the Area Masters and beyond.
Paul being a former Irish chess champion has a good idea about training .

His website is
https://www.bridgewebs.com/coachteach/

Meanwhile for the intermediate and below players we have the mercurial Peter Pigot. Peter is active out past the Strand Road. Sometimes Glenageary sometimes Wanders Rugby place.
His website is
https://www.bridgewebs.com/peterpigotbridge/

Senior Camrose Trials December 14th 2019 Templogue

Meanwhile down in Templogue 6 hardy aging teams take on the Senior Camrose Trials.

5 ultra fit teams go with 4 person teams whereas the older wilier BJ O'Brien has selected 5 team mates to share the playing burden. At first glance one would expect the BJ O'Brien team to battle it out with the Connacht team of Keaveney and company. However Team Delaney could strike on a good day with Delaney Roche McAuliffe and O'Lubaigh all being capable players. Also present is the Porteus team of Porteus Barry Jackson and the mercurial Michael McGloughlin who is a fine player but by the time the thoughtful Jackson ends the bidding the man could have fallen asleep.
The 5th team is led by Wooden Spoons Kenny but she will be okay this weekend probably contesting 3rd 4th place. Currently bottom of the pile at the moment is the all ladies team of Eileen O'Donovan and I cannot see them taking down a 20 board match against any of the forementioned teams.
Their best chance will be to take down Porteus.

However they started by getting a hiding from Team BJ 'Brien

Hands 11-17 from the Jum Cahill invitational pairs and Paul Delaney Bridge Coach

Greetings from a cold but slightly sunny Swords. This morning  I tried a few more hands from the Jim Cahill Invitational pairs event. This event was held in the Regent Bridge Club on the weekend of the 22nd to 24th of November. 12 invited pairs but there might have been 20 pairs asked before the final 12 took the floor. For next year the top 10 pairs are automatically extended invitations.

So I played a few boards and got badly mauled. There is a long way to go but its been a long time since I had figures in the 30% range.

There I am ... 29% after board 18 of 176.

I am going to change my system to something that Jack knows well and see if it helps.

Here is the sad video of boards 11 to 18 or maybe it is 12 to 18.
https://youtu.be/L-BMek_1ijs

However I will be back and expect to climb the leaderboard next time.
.................................
Meanwhile if you want to attend some classes of the Area Master type level and higher you could try Paul Delaney who operates just South of the Liffey.

Paul Delaney .. The Bridge Coach

https://www.bridgewebs.com/coachteach/Declarer%20Play%20Worksheet.pdf

https://www.bridgewebs.com/coachteach/Defence%20Worksheet.pdf

Some links from Paul Delaneys Bridge Coach page .. I learned lots of my bidding from Paul Delaney when we used to play together. Then he realised he taught me too well.

Playing the Jim Cahill invitational with Jack and 5NT from Malahide

About 1 week ago I got down to creating a pbn file of the Jim Cahill invitational. 176 boards played by 12 top Celtic Pairs. 2 Welsh and one English type slipped into the event. Using some scripts provided by Dave the Snake from Wicklow off we went. PBN is short for portable bridge notation and is one of the best known file types these days for storing bridge games with bidding and play and names and many other tags.
So having made up our 176 board file with 6 plays in almost every board we fired up our Jack program and started to play. Now one expects to finish somewhere near the bottom of this event as there are some good players involved.
Putting it bluntly Eddie Fitzgerald and Michael McDonagh would be termed very dangerous opponents anywhere in Ireland and on some boards anywhere in the world. This multi titled pair were the lowest placed in this years renewal of the James Cahill Invitational. So the comparisons will be tough.
So it took 8 boards before I found any traction. Before that I had a 7/12 as my best score along with 4 below average and 2 averages.

Finally on board 8 I secured a top .. Better than all the rest. Just like playing on
http://bridge-now.com
Speaking of which I failed to finish my 70 boards this week due to the local barman locking his doors a little too early. I was standing in the cold ringing him. I was nearly firing up my tablet in the car to get the boards played.
Now it was not his fault really. I got the bridge finished about 1105pm. The lady at table 8 finally played her final card at 1105pm. However it was not over .. the folk had to have their postmortems and I was locking up. Result I land at my local at about 1140pm so its kind of late. Anyway all was well apart from missing the 70 hands target by 3.

Meanwhile a nice hand popped up in Malahide and someone mentioned it.

Now our player landed in 5NT after exploring a slam. Problem was now he needed to make 11 tricks in NO TRUMP and was at the 5 level. 

So under severe pressure. Adding to the issue East poked out the toughest and best lead. 

CLUB NINE lead and our player won the CLUB ACE and started to think. The thinking did not work and our player got a minus score. He later mentioned that he got to 5NT and failed to make it despite the sheet saying 5NT is cold. Later that night having finally achieved entry to my local and played as many hands as possible on Bridge Now before end of week at 12 bells Wed I decided to have a look at our players hand. I could see a good shot at making the hand given I could see all the cards and sent a text indicating only a very strong declarer might roll that one home. 

12 hours later our player is still examining the hand and the sheet and bridgewebs but no success even seeing all the cards. So I gave him a good clue about throw in and taking all his winners first. 

A while later he agreed it could be made and expressed thanks. 

I said ... next problem is for you to make 6D 6H and 6S with the same cards and lead. 

4 lessons in one ...

Not bad for one hand ...