AMERICA LEADS THE WAY

The title of this post isn’t my own, but something they decided to put up in the bulletin today, which you can find here.

The team played passably yesterday, the majority of the mistakes made by myself, but we were still able to nab an early lead at 66 Victory Points, 5 clear of the field. For those of you who don’t know what Victory points are, there are several types of scoring that are important in bridge. Initially, hands played give an output of a total point score for a team. Since contracts are regularly worth 500, 1000, and even 2000 points, these raw scores are converted into International Match Points (IMPs), which is basically a way to prevent one hand from deciding an entire match. Rather than having to make up a deficit of, say, 2000 total points, a team would only have to cover its IMP conversion, 19 IMPs. This takes about two good hands to do, rather than 4. At the end of a match IMPs are converted into Victory Points (VPs), a parallel idea that prevents one match from deciding the winner of a tournament.

So, after the opening ceremonies yesterday—which included a hilarious montage of world culture through the decades, 90% being US-centric—play was under way. We were lucky to draw the Irish in the 1^st match who, although having some excellent Open players back home, were really atrocious. Jason and I sat out, possibly because Howie knows how I’d probably give out free points to cute Irish girls. Our teammates, however, totally flattened them, picking up the maximum score possible. They were not a great team, and frankly we were lucky enough to play them in the first round. Here is a hand in which Justin Lall converted on some poor defense to execute a rare and elegant type of squeeze. You can click ‘Next’ on the movie to flip through the play and bidding. The GIB button gives you computer analysis on whether the contract can be made or not at each trick, based on which card is played.

Final score: USA Blue 25-5 Ireland

Jason and I were in for the 2^nd set against France, which included 3 world-champion players from last year’s World Mind Sport Games in Beijing. The set got out to a fast start:

Well, we know partner only holds 2 hearts since if he held 3 he’d bid game himself.If he doesn’t hold any heart honors this game rates to be fair at least since all finesses will work against W and E is likely to hold any outstanding hearts. I didn’t come to Istanbul to pussy-foot around, so I raised.

I definitely made an error by not inserting the heart Q on the lead of the 9, which pays off to North having the singleton Jack of hearts. South is virtually certain to hold KJxx of hearts, but technically best is still best. Luck was on my side when the 8 was smothered and the rest was easy. That was 9 IMPs to the good guys en route to victory despite my poor judgment just 3 hands later when I held:

I bid 2C, showing the majors and after the dust had settled -1100 was duly chalked up, which is as bad as it sounds.

Oh well, I'll take 1st after day 1. Today, however, is moving day!!!