Smokey
Yesterday afternoon was another World Wide Bridge contest. In other news, I still suck at estimating matchpoints. With a couple of rounds left we were, once again, waiting for our opponents to arrive and I made a comment to the Mad Scientist that while I felt like we were having a stronger game than the day before I didn’t think it was going to matchpoint very well. For one thing, we ended up in what I felt were some very slim games that made only to find that was practically the par spot — bidding those pushy, aggressive games is sort of our thing and we tend to win a lot of matchpoints that way. Maybe it was the donuts, people were bidding on their sugar rush — it couldn’t have been the cards.
Also, I didn’t feel like we were getting many gifts. On defense we weren’t giving much of anything away, but we weren’t doing anything particularly brilliant either, so it seemed like people would be doing the same thing elsewhere. Anyway, it felt like an above average game, but only that and nothing more.
For the 5th (6th? 10th?) game in a row I screwed up on the very last board this time by overbidding my hand after TMS made a long-suit game try. I decided to accept with all the wrong cards because I felt like I was at the top of my simple raise. Down one was not a good result. The contract could not be made if the defense was at all competent, but it made several times anyway and elsewhere the opps. were going down for a number. Still I didn’t feel like I had really cost us too much (4th instead of 3rd?) but when the smoke cleared I saw that we had come in 2nd by a narrow margin. Then I felt like I might throw up.
Later, unable to sleep, I took a look at the hand again and saw just what the TMS had made his game try on, but even seeing his idea of a game try in print did little to assuage my guilt. I knew who I was playing with, and like the saying goes: Only you can prevent forest fires.
