A Polish Feast

Isabelle and I played  Piotr Klimowicz and his partner last night.  They were playing Polish Club and we all had some fun.  I have to say I was bad a few times when I made a couple of undisciplined bids (I even commented in the bidding explanations that "I was bad").   But by and large we had a very good set and some interesting hands.  There always seems to be something new, no matter how long you have played the game.  One hand was quite amusing for our side anyway.  Here it is.  I will give it to you from my point of view.Noone vulnerable, I sat South and  held S 73 H AKQ10853 D 105 C J8.  Piotr passed.  What do you bid?  I didn’t think this was much of a problem.  I opened 4H.  I am helped by the fact that we play Namyats so Isabelle will know that I can’t have more than 7 tricks.  Isabelle bid 4NT and I showed my keycards and hear 7H from her.  Now it went pass, pass, 7S and a loud double.  Well it would have been loud if you could do that on BBO.

This went for an even 2000 when we took all our tricks, including a club ruff.  As it turned out this little adventure didn’t cost him all that much since only two pairs of the remaining 15 who played this hand even got to the 6 level and none bid a grand.  The most interesting thing is how people handled my hand.  Noone opened my hand 4H.  Most of the field opened the South hand 3H which resulted in a quick 4H contract, although one or two north’s made the inferior (in my thinking) bid of 3NT over 3H.  A couple of South’s opened my hand 1H which I think is a perfectly reasonable bid and one of them even ended up in 6NT when North got very aggressive and basically just bid slam.  One north got to the strange contract of 6D after a pass by the South hand.  (You don’t want to know how).  Is 4H such a strange bid on this hand.  It seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

How do you handle this hand.  I confess I had no idea what to do.  I held

S AQ H A1086 D AKJ73 C K6

At unfavourable vulnerability, Isabelle passes and Piotr opens 2C, Precision style showing 6C+ and 11-14.  Here is the first problem.  What do  you bid?  I could jump to 3NT but was that really the right place to play this hand?  I decided to double and see if I could get hearts into play.  If Isabelle bid spades I could bid notrump then.  West bid 3C and it was soon back to me.  What now?  I didn’t want to double again since I was sure I was going to hear spades.  I thought maybe wrongly that I was too good to pass it out.  I hated bidding 3D.  Well I don’t know what is right but I bid 3NT.  Isabelle was wonderful here helping me right out.  She held S J8765 H 9743 D 96 C 52 and bid 4C which I could convert to 4H.  I suppose I was lucky she held four hearts.  The boys took the dive again in 5C doubled which did not have a happy ending especially because 4H was not going to make since the hand lay very badly for our side. 

While these hands show us winning a bunch of imps, our opponents played well and just got on the wrong side of these results.