Online bridge update 33

The two-hour Monday morning seminar tomorrow (December 7th) will be a mixture of a single topic and another Play These Hands With Me session. I am happy to say that the technical problems that blighted the seminar two weeks ago were temporary (apparently caused by problems with Virgin Media’s network) and last week’s went ahead successfully without incident. To sign up for this and Tuesday bridge there are Paypal payment buttons in this post and also in the sidebar of most pages on the website.

There will be the normal Tuesday morning supervised play session again this week (8th December), starting at 9.30am. Please let me know as early possible that you intend to join, ideally by early Monday event as it makes it so much easier to arrange the tables and reduce the risk of having to turn one of you away. Annabel will be back this week, so we should be able to run the full four-table session as normal.

The ten group sessions also continue as normal this week. Looking ahead, some of you will be taking breaks in the run up to Christmas, so it would be helpful if you could give me some notice if you know you are going to miss one of those sessions, so I can arrange substitutes, if necessary. My current plan is to offer some sessions in the week after Christmas, but reduce those in the week immediately running up to Christmas Day, which is on a Friday this year.

I am playing in the final of the Portland Club annual member and guest pairs competition tomorrow – a fun event involving a lot of untried partnerships – and if there are any interesting hands I will bring them up on Monday. This was a hand from a match last week. Do you think the West hand, with three points, should bid after his partner opened 2 No Trumps? My partner did not, but our opponents did and there was no way to prevent nine tricks being made, with hearts friendly – the defence cannot stop the fourth heart winning – and the diamond finesse also working.

Happy bridging….

Jonathan