So as most of you know, I managed to obtain the great honor of representing the US at the World Junior Championships in Thailand in 2006. These championships have been changed around a little, but at any rate, the qualifying will take place at the summer nationals in Las Vegas this July (as if you needed another reason to attend.) Here's the info -- note that there are separate championships for 26-and-under (ish) and 21-and-under (ish). Come one, come all!

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Attention all Junior bridge players!

Earn a spot to represent the United States in the World Junior Championship in Beijing, China! All individuals born in 1982 or later are eligible to participate. The trials will be held in Las Vegas prior to the summer nationals. The winners of the trials will be crowned the national champions and will represent the United States in Beijing during the beginning of October. The trials will begin on Tuesday July 15th and will last 2 or 3 days depending on the number of entries. We will ensure that anyone participating in the collegiate championships (which begin on Thursday) will not have a conflict with this event. Teams of 4, 5, or 6 players are eligible to enter. The format will be a round robin, followed by a semi-final and a final. In addition to the junior team a committee will select a youth team, consisting of players born in 1987 or later, out of the participants in this event. Players born in 1987 or later can play on a team with older players and maintain eligibility for the youth team.
Pre-registration for the trials is required, and can be done on the USBF website, www.usbf.org. Teams must pre-register by July 8th.
If you need help finding partners or teammates, check out the junior trials forum at www.bridgewinners.com/forum or contact Jason Feldman at jfeld222@yahoo.com.

After a few weeks directing, it became clear to me that the hard part is keeping people on the clock. If you have just one slow pair, unless you act like the tough cop and shuttle them along, the delays percolate, and pretty soon the game is ending at 11. So as a public service announcement, please try to play at a reasonable speed!

With the few weeks of directorship internship over, I played at the Cardinal Club last night. There were certainly some interesting hands, including a potential Merrimac Coup: Dummy had A9x and a bunch of good clubs left. Behind dummy was KJ7x of hearts, and declarer was down to QTxx of hearts and a few trumps. In front of dummy was 86 of hearts and the master trump, and no clubs.

This is one of my favorite plays in bridge. Playing the king of hearts gives up your heart trick (sort of), but it puts declarer on the board before the master trump is gone, so they can't run the clubs; they can pitch a heart on the first one as the defender ruffs, but defender can then stick them back in hand with a diamond (I guess I hadn't mentioned those yet) and they must concede the jack of hearts. Alternatively, they could try to run the nine of hearts, but when this gets covered the defenders have the spots to achieve a heart trick.

Sadly, it did not come to pass.

On the final hand of the night, I picked up KQJT9x AKQxx A x. I'm really not sure why I didn't just open 4NT, but for whatever reason I opened 1S. At any rate, keycard was not far behind, and partner showed up with ... no aces. So my monster 11-trick hand just took a boring 11 tricks, and that was that. How sad...

Vegas nationals are in a month! Don't wait to make reservations!