The Bridge Web and a Canada Master Point Press Women practice

I logged on for a few moments yesterday and I chanced on a practice match for the Canada Master Point Press Women who will be going to Brazil in a few weeks.  The hands were set up so they were quite interesting and most of them are worth comment.  I picked this one out because it seems to have an interesting bidding point.

West

♠ AKQ63

♥ Q532

♦ K

♣ J32

Pamela and Karen at Penticton 2009

Playing 2/1 you open 1♠and partner bids 2♣.  You bid 2♥ and partner now bids 2♠.  Pamela now made the key bid.  She bid 3♣.  It seems to me that the whole point of playing 2/1 is for hands like these.  You can show your support for partner’s club suit in a game forcing auction with spades set as trump.  Once you make this bid you are on your way to slam.  Partner has

East

♠ J87

♥ 6

♦ A743

♣AKQ107

After the club bid she was off to the races.  At the table Karen continued with a diamond cuebid and Pamela Nisbet made another nice quiet bid of 3♠.  I am still interested in slam partner but I don’t have a heart control.  Karen then just asked for aces.  Simple, elegant.  At the other table Pamela’s hand cuebid 3D instead of showing club support.  East cooperated with a heart cuebid and later a club cuebid but they drifted into 4♠.  Maybe they could have got there anyway but I like the Pamela-Karen auction.

I often want to include pictures of one sort or another on my blog.  Besides the usual sources like www.worldbridge.World Bridge Federation and of course Claire Bridge there are some others which I haven’t discussed yet.  Jonathan Steinberg has an amazing collection of bridge albums Jonathan’s albums.  The picture above for Canada Master Point Press team members, Karen and Pamela are from one of Jonathan’s albums.  The earliest on this site go back to October of 2005.

Piglet (Michael Roche)   MPP Author Paul Thurston

If you go to his District 2 website (he resigned a while back as District 2 director).  There are hundreds of photo albums dating back to as early as 1996.

1995 Hall of Fame inductee Bobby Wolff with District 2 Director Jonathan Steinberg

Norman Kay, Alfred Sheinwold, and Eddie Kantar at Hall of Fame induction February 29, 1996 in Philadelphia

It is wonderful to look at but just one more and then I am done.  After that you can mosey on over and look yourself.

Here is Ray as CBF president with Marilyn White the Charity Coordinator presenting a check to the Daily Bread Food Bank some years ago.

Which all got me thinking about the history of our game.  If you are going to Brazil you might like these

playing cards.  The illustrated is the Sao Paulo Bridge playing cards.  You can find looks of beautiful decks at the House of Cards. They also had a list of online sites were you could play everything from hearts to euchre or canasta.  I notice that the bridge sites listed did not include BBO.  Bridge is well represented too.  One of the strangest things was tournament solitaire.  It just doesn’t seem right.   For lots of tournament games go to tournament games.  There were over 13,500 entries in today’s tournament solitaire!  (I confess I particularly like spades.

Play Bridge Free had a small amount stuff.  Unfortunately there seemed to be a lot of blinking ads which I hate.  But amid all of the nonsense are a few gems.  First there is a funny story by Eddie Kantar about Lew Mather and his wife Janie.  The links are funny because many of them are links to bridges like big structures across bodies of water.  The glossary is quite idosyncratic with entries like eldest hand, cat, Chernoff defense, Hartman’s Law 4 doubled always makes.  You see what I mean.  There is a tiny bit of history.   But the part I liked was a set of bridge variants.  Here is 5-3-3-2 bridge as an example:

Rules: Each player are handed 5 cards and so the bidding starts as normal. After the first bidding round all players recieve 3 more cards. After the second round of bidding you get 3 more and then the last 2. The bidding closes as normal with 3 passes (or four if it’s the first bidding round) If the bidding should finish before all cards have been dealt, the players are dealt the remaining cards and the play begins.

Whoever wrote all this stuff was under 25, trust me.  As they say in the guide books this site is not worth going to see.