Regina update

Well the round robin is over and I do have some interesting hands to discuss, but I have found the schedule fairly grueling, with a 4-lady team playing a lot of boards and being quite jet lagged. It only gets worse as we enter the knockout phase, with even more boards.

In the open, the biggest surprise was that the Gartagnis team just failed to qualify. I spent a fair bit of time talking David Willis who, with Paul Thurston, formed the other half of the team. They had a rough start but they’d felt it was coming together. They got nipped out of the eighth spot when they lost to Hughes in the last round and the other teams in contention had big wins.

I feel the field is so even this year with a lot of very good teams that it is impossible to guess the winner.

The Zambonini team is Canada’s answer to the Bathurst team, with strong young players including: Ron Zambonini, Darren Wolpert, and Nicholas L’Ecuyer.

Our team finished solidly with a blitz in the last round to make sure of first place in the round robin. It wasn’t an easy choice of opponents and we could have gone either way but ending up playing the McNab team. We will see how it goes.

For once in the last round we didn’t have any big mistakes. My biggest problem has been remembering the system. We had a huge negative swing on one deal where I thought we played negative doubles up to but not including 4♥ and the not including was wrong. In fact it might have been difficult to get the best result in this system since penalty double was an excellent choice but we might have recovered anyway if my memory had been better.

I have come to the conclusion that we have too much system. I have heard the same thing from some other pairs too.

I promise hands when my play is finished.