Challenge the Champs

Jason and I haven't been playing many hands lately. However, we have had the opportunity to bid a few Challenge the Champs hands, which are good practice to help straighten out the few areas that need straightening in a simplistic system such as ours.

Some time ago I was lucky enough to come into possession of a collection of old Bridge Worlds. I had some duplicates and sent them along to Jason.  The current batch of hands we've been working on come from 1978. Contestants include Becker-Rubin, Hayden-Kasle, the couple Capplletti, Woolsey-Robinson, Hamman-Wolff and Kemp-Rapaport (who had a nice run this year). This is from the period where the champs actually stayed on until they were defeated. The Master Solvers' Club panel was comprised of Billy Eisenberg, Edwin Kantar, Theodore Lightner, Marshall Miles, Richard Pavlicek, Alvin Roth, Ira Rubin and stalwart Carl Hudecek, amongst others.

Here are a few of kf00's travails from May '78.



Here is a hand where I need to have better judgment to make up for our partnership's lack of bidding agreements. The hand is centered around one card, the queen of spades. The top spot is 7S (which will succeed against no diamond ruff and spades 4-2 or better), but Jason and I arrived in 6D like both the contestant pairs, which was worth 5/10 Matchpoints. To make a long story short, if Jason doesn't have the spade queen we might very well be too high already. The contract's prospects most likely hinge upon whether he is 3163 or 2164. As such, I should probably bid either 6NT--in which I can count 12 tricks slightly more than 50% with the former distribution--or 6S, looking for grand if Jason does have the spade queen. I argued that perhaps Jason should have bid more, since I know he doesn't have the king of clubs by his failure to bid 4C when afforded the opportunity. I'm sure he knows the queen of spades is a very key card, but it may not be enough in his eyes to go higher.