The 1960 is Back!

No, that isn’t a typo in the title. Read on and find out why.

So, Christmas brought me its usual gifts of extra kilos and less money. I hope you were equally rewarded.

The club continues to do well and seems to do better the less I have to do with it, so at the start of January, Mike (and pretty much everyone else) suggested that I go away. I headed off towards Orange to go camping but found myself in Canberra staying in a nice hotel.

One morning I spotted some fashionably dressed men in the lift who had those distinctive pieces of paper in their shirt pockets.

“Are those hand records?” I asked.

“No. Go away (again).”

It was Mike and it turns out I had managed to stumble on the only hotel in Australia that was running a bridge congress.

“Are we in the Gold Coast?” I asked enthusiastically.

“Well, I’m not, but I can never be sure what planet you are on.”

So later that day I found myself playing in the Canberra Summer Festival of Bridge, although playing might be something of an over bid. Since I spent no time at all concentrating on cards, I ended up writing a piece for the wonder bulletins that Stephen Lester puts together, and in a moment of unusually bad judgement, he published it.

So, without any permission from the congress, or even Stephen himself, here it is:

I was having my usual afternoon nap on Monday, dreaming that I was on a boat sailing out of a harbour and sipping on a cocktail. Suddenly, I was rudely awakened by a swift kick in the shin. I opened my eyes to find myself at the bridge table, holding this hand:

♠543
♥K82
♦A8652
♣92

We play standard kicks, so I knew straight away what one kick under table was asking for and led the ♠5.

“The auction hasn’t finished yet. It’s your bid.” my right-hand opponent informed me. I surmised that they may have been the kicker, something I suspect is both illegal and also very difficult to prove.

I looked down at the auction which had started with 2♣ on my left, pass by partner and 2♦ by the kicker. Both bids had been alerted and I asked for a repeat of the explanation in case this part of the proceedings had already been covered during my slumber. Clearly it hadn’t but I was a long way passed pretending not to have slept through the entire thing, so it didn’t really matter.

2♣ was “wide ranging” and I nearly ended up back on my boat with the cocktail before we got to the end of all of the possibilities. My main take away was that it could be anything from a pair of twos with a get out of jail free card, all the way up to two hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane.

2♦ seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever, and since nobody knew any more about the hand than we did before we took the cards out of the board, I decided that we needed to hurry things along. I doubled the artificial 2♦and waited for further developments.

There weren’t any.

Opener, clearly terrified by my double, redoubled for rescue and the kicker forgot what to do and passed.

Kicker then asked my partner about my double. “Lead directing”.

He looked at me with a big Cheshire cat smile and said, “Well at least you’ve told yourself what to lead.”

I mumbled something about the 5♠ being a penalty card but kicker seemed unperturbed.

Moments later I had two face-down cards in portrait mode and eleven in landscape.

Here was the full hand:

I put my hand up to my mouth so kicker couldn’t hear me and whispered to my partner “Suckers! They could probably have made 3NT here!”

After some complicated mathematics we got to the magic number of 1960.

For the rest of the round nobody bothered to wake me at all, certainly not my partner.