Linda Lee — My personal bridge blog

Happy New Year

For everyone celebrating the Jewish High Holidays Ray and I wish all of you a happy New Year.  May you all be written in the Book of Life.

 

image Don’t you love that ram’s horn!

As we move into fall I am sad to see the end of summer.  Ray is talking about putting our beautiful convertible in the garage soon.  I have told him not till the end of October.  He has the garage ready for the car which took quite some doing.

I am working very hard on Clyde E. Love.  I am now on the chapter on Triple Squeezes which so far seems more challenging than I had expected.  I looked ahead to compound squeezes and I can see that is going to take at least two weeks and possibly a new bottle of aspirin.

I finished strip squeezes and found them quite interesting.  Ray loves the delayed duck squeeze which he has called at various times in the past names like the Donald Duck squeeze.  It actually is one of the simpler strip squeezes but the name does have a ring to it.  I have also coined a new term: CLUE.  Those of you who know and ‘love” Love will be familiar with BLUE.  That is mnemonic for the conditions necessary to perform a simple squeeze.  Love also has the concept of CLE as the necessary condition for the two loser delayed duck squeezes.  C=companion (a second card in the threat suit without a winner) L = Lead (after the squeeze has happened you have to be able to lead from the suit with the companion card) and E = entry (there must be an entry to the established threat).  I thought CLuE was easier to remember.  Ray pointed out that we had now created BLUE(’s) CLUE(s).  For those of you without small children Blue’s Clues is a children’s show on Nickelodeon.  Somehow I don’t think that will make it to the finished book.

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I am pretty well at the halfway mark of Love and it really has been interesting if challenging.  Today I did a class with a whole lot of beginners and intermediates.  There were prepared deals and prizes.  The highlight for me happened when one of the students who had been declarer on the hand and failed to make it finally realized what she had to do.  The light had gone on and she got to explain it to everyone else.  For her tenth trick in four hearts she needed to make a ruff in dummy without drawing all the trump.  I had opened two spades and she could have ruffed a third spade in dummy but that was sure to get over ruffed by my partner.  So she needed to discard her third diamond from dummy on the spade and ruff a diamond instead.  It was a classic loser on loser.  Those hands can be hard to see.

In the next few days I am definitely going to do a blog which features a Love hand.  Sorry about that.  But squeezes are fun!  I have found one or two errors in the hands which makes me quite proud of myself but mostly in those days without all the wonderful tools we have now Love did a great job with his deals.  The auctions however are quite bizarre.  We have made so much more progress on bidding than on play or defense at least it seems so to me.

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