Bridge

It can be hard to recover your morale when you have a bad start in a tournament. You came in all positive and then need to claw your way back to average. Not everyone feels that way, though. I recently went to Bath with Sebastian Atisen, a regular partner, to play in the Wiltshire Congress Swiss Teams with my old friends Lou and Robert Hobhouse (who run the wonderful Hobhouse Bridge Holidays). As we were about to start, they told us they had a strategy. It’s important, they said, to lose the first match: it takes the pressure off. Lou and Robert often have a wonderfully eccentric take on things, so I wasn’t quite as startled as Sebastian, who had only just met them.

But mad though it sounded, it did have a peculiarly calming effect. I really think they’re on to something. We lost the first match (not by design), gave each other high-fives, and cheerily carried on. We ended up first-equal. It was Lou who sealed our victory with this slam:

* three keycards. West led the ♥️4. It was a possible singleton, but playing the ♥️A would mean she couldn’t afford to lose a trump, so Lou tried playing low. When her ♥️Q won, she could afford a safety-play in trumps. The only danger was a 4-0 split. If East held four, she could play low to the ♦️K and run the ♦️9. But if West held four, she had to play low to dummy’s ♦️9. And that’s exactly what she did – slam dunk!