Wild swings of luck
Luck in a bridge hand can swing wildly.
Witness this hand from the ACBL-wide charity game of Monday evening November 26.
All vul, as dealer I opened 12-14 1NT. My LHO overcalled 2♥, showing hearts and spades. My partner should employ lebensohl here (Rubensohl [transfer lebensohl] might be better, but we are not playing that) in order to sign off in 3♣. However, he chose to bid 3♣, which is forcing. RHO passed and I signed off in 3NT. Thanks to my being maximum, we have all of 21 HCP.
LHO, a Flight C player, leads the ♥K, and then switches to a spade, won in my hand. I lead a club toward dummy and LHO plays the ♣J. With the defense having arranged to leave me with a remaining stopper in each major, I duck this trick, leaving me with an assured five tricks in clubs. Unless LHO leads a diamond now, I am likely going to be able to develop a ninth trick in hearts. And so it comes to be, and I score up nine tricks, making my game contract.
To explore the first line of this post, about (at least apparent) luck in a bridge hand swinging wildly, allow me to show the entire hand.
(There will soon be an explanation of the change in dealer and vulnerability, from what I explained in the auction paragraph to what is shown above.)
1. Lucky in that South did not open a weak 2♦, thus not inducing against a notrump contract what appears to be the most favorable lead for the opponents. Or, even worse, possibly stealing the contract.
2. Lucky that partner overbid his hand, thus leading me to bid a game on very few HCP.
3. Lucky that opening leader did not lead fourth best, thus making me scramble for tricks with the heart suit ready to run, and transportation between the opponents’ hands easy.
4. Lucky that opening leader chose not to continue hearts but rather chose to switch to a suit that I had doubly stopped.
5. Unlucky in that to avoid risking my having only two club tricks, I played to assure my having five club tricks, only to later discover that I had six club tricks had I played more aggressively.
6. Unlucky in that I could have shut out the diamond suit had they attacked that suit.
7. Finally, unlucky that the board was fouled. It was supposed to be Board 19, but the cards were errantly placed in Board 20 (thus explaining why I was the dealer) and so some fouled board scoring was awarded giving us only 65% score on the board when bidding and making 3NT seems much better result than 65%.
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An amusing story. Victor Mollo would have enjoyed writing about this hand.
I’m extremely curious about the 65% score. That seems an unlikely factored score. So, I looked up the board in question and it seems to me that you actually got a 55% score. I will have to revisit the formula for factoring but that seems odd – that on a top of 7, when only two pairs have played the board under the same circumstances – that the split should be only 55-45.
Had you played it at the proper with the proper conditions and had again scored 600, you would have received approximately 62% (there were two other 600s and a 630). So, you were a bit unlucky, and lucky, but then that is the whole point of your story.
The way it was explained to me … For fouled boards played twice before being corrected, we get 55% for a bottom, 60% for an average, and 65% for a top. That formula would seem to be quite favorable. Alas, for partner and me each of the first two rounds our results were terrific, and, per my estimate of a full-field score for those fouled boards, the formula worked substantially against us.