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!

------

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!

In other news, I'm now a certified ACBL club director. Unfortunately (?) my first game last week went by without a single director call, but I may have a different kind of story for you in the next couple of weeks directing at the Cardinal Club.

Today was a unit BAM in San Jose -- a fun form of scoring, and a bunch of people I'd never played with (or rarely played with) before. For some reason (possibly a coincidence) this brought out a bunch of jokerism from me and Ari. Here are some of the ... curious ... hands from the evening.

On the first board of the evening, I upgraded my "good" 14, KTxx Kx Qxx AQ8x, and opened 1NT. Partner, holding Qx xx JT87xx Jxx, decided to check it out. I escaped for down one not vul. On the next hand, I held a rather normal hand, KJT8x AK Kxxx xx. I opened a routine 1S, and lefty overcalled 2C. Partner doubled and righty passed, and I bid the obvious 2D. Now lefty bid 4C (okay...) and partner passed. Righty raised to 5C and when this was passed back to partner he thought (?) before bidding 5D (!). This got doubled, and I was quite unhappy because I thought we might beat 5C. It still seemed that way when partner tabled xx QJTxx QTxxx x, but amazingly lefty was slow-rolling her 9 solid clubs! We went down one for +100 and an eventual win on the board.

The night had just begun.

The third and fourth boards brought more interest. On the third board, I held Ax x AKJ87x JTxx. Lefty bid 1H and partner overcalled 1S. When righty raised to 2H (all red) I had a weird decision. Nothing really seemed right. What would you do?

I eventually bid 3D, planning to bid 3S (!?) over 3H. However, over the 3H, partner surprised me by raising to 4D. I hemmed and hawed. 4S could be right. 6D could be right (or, rather, bidding 4H.) Ultimately I decided partner need not have that much, and contented myself with 5D. This was enough to win the board, but partner's hand was KJxxx AT xxxx KQ and we were cold for six. Resulting? Maybe, I don't know.

Board four of the evening I held x AJ97x xx AK7xx. Partner opened 1H and righty overcalled 1S. I made a 3C fit jump (agree?) and I was stunned when lefty bid 3H (how many points are in this deck?!) Partner bid 4H and I didn't know what to do over righty's 4S, no one vul. I'm not telling you how this one turned out...

There were basically no hands tonight where we just played cards uneventfully. How would you play this one: you hold T9x AKQ8xx A8x x. Partner passes, righty opens 2S red-white, you bid 3H. Partner raises you to 4 and on the SK lead tables 8x JT9 JTx AJxxx. Lefty continues with the SQ which righty overtakes and plays back the SJ. Lefty pitches a small diamond. Plan the play.

After all these interesting hands, we started to get frisky. Holding xxx xxxxx AQ AKx I opened 1C in second seat. This backfired horribly when partner opened 1D, I rebid 1N, and partner raised to 3N: lefty led a heart from AQ97. Partner tabled KJ of hearts, but the defense had the ace of spades and three heart tricks to book it. Who knew I was supposed to open my five-card major as a lead avoider... though maybe that's not such a bad idea.

Ari calmly responded 1S to my 1D on the next hand, holding Axx xx Txx AT8xx, perhaps expecting me to have five when I raised. 2S was a good spot for us. It's funny how much this works out (among other things, it's impossible to defend accurately here.)

Some interesting defensive hands went by, including a 3Sx where we gave declarer the contract and he promptly gave it back, and then we held the following hands:

me: void Qxx AKQ87 Q976x; partner: xxxx JTx xx AKJx. My righty opened 2S in second seat. I bid double, and partner bid 3C showing values since we play lebensohl. I raised to 4C and partner passed. You be the judge... personally I think we are both to blame.

How would you bid this hand from partner: AT8x KJxx J Q98x. Partner opens 1C, suppose you bid 1H (what else.) Partner now rebids 1NT. Your options are:

-- show a 44xx invite
-- invite showing a balanced hand with club support
-- sign off in 3C
-- game force (eventually being able to show your hand)
-- anything else?

And so we reached the last set of the evening. I picked up a nice collection, KJ7 9xx x KT98xx, but unfortunately I was in 4th seat, so my dreams of opening a weak 2C were out the window. Partner opened 1D in second seat, and after righty passed I had to bid quickly. So 1S it was. Partner bid 3S, and here I was, once again.

The diamond queen was led (this looks good) and partner tabled AQ9x AQ8x ATx Qx. Plan the play, once again.

Then on the final board, we had a hilarious auction. I held KQ8 Kx AJ9 AKQxx and I bet my auction was shorter than yours:

3NT -- 4H (transfer)
4S -- 4NT
6S

Partner tabled Axxxx AJx xxxx x. On a club lead, I quickly scampered home with 12 tricks despite a 4-1 trump break, and ran to compare with our teammates. After all of this smoke had cleared, we compared with our teammates and had managed 17 out of 24 to take the event.

Good times.

Yesterday was quite an interesting day. In the afternoon, Li-Chung and I participated in the "Bidding Box" feature in the ACBL Bridge Bulletin (look for us next month.) We did okay, I thought; we had two nice auctions to top spots, two of the problems were basically insurmountable with our system, only one did we outright flub (my fault, I think.) It was definitely a fun time, and it'll be cool to see my name in print (for a second consecutive month; our Red Ribbon win was in the May bulletin.)

Then I went to a sadlily-small Cardinal Club in the evening, and the cards sort of went nuts. We had some insane tops and some hilarious bottoms, as always, ending up just north of 50 percent, but certainly a fun way to get there. I learned something from this deal:

AKQJx KJTxx xx x all red. Partner opened 1D and righty overcalled 1H. I went for the penalty pass and partner bid 2D. As always, I had to catch up now. I bid 2H, partner responded with 3C which righty (overcaller) doubled. This put me in a very sticky situation. I wanted to play 3NT from partner's side at this point, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. I tried 3S, but partner wasn't on the same page (perhaps I should have passed 3Cx?), and he bid 4D. I now tried a natural 4NT as a last-gasp, but partner pulled to 5D (maybe thinking it was pick a minor?). This seemed untenable at matchpoints so I pulled to 6. Partner's hand was xx x AKQxxx Kxxx and went down one...

The moral is not what happened, not really, but basically that making a penalty pass of 1H with 5 spades (or vice versa) is silly. With this hand, partner is only going to reopen with a double if he has 3 spades, and if he has 3 spades we have good slam chances (and often he'd have 4 to reopen with a double.) Meanwhile, we have to beat this 800, and if we are beating it 800 with him having 3 spades we probably _are_ making a slam.

Anyway, that was definitely an instructive hand. This hand was less instructive: I held AKJ x JTx QT98xx. Partner opened an innocent 1H in first-seat favorable and the auction quickly escalated:

1H (2H) x (2S) (x suggests penalty)
4D (4S) x (p)
5C! (p) 5D (p)
5H (p) p (x)
xx all pass

When he bid 4D, I knew he had at least 11 cards in the reds and a huge hand. My holdings in the reds sucked, so I was thrilled when they bid 4S and I could double it. But now partner pulled again! Now he has at least 12 cards in the reds (and by general probability theory exactly 12 almost always.) Amazing as it is, I thought he was patterning out by bidding 5C, meaning that he was 0751 or 0661 (we play substitution, so I thought he might have pulled to 4NT with 1750 or 1660, or maybe 5D with 1660 or something.) I had the spade ace, not the club ace (plus he was more likely to pull with a spade void), so I bid only 5D. In fact, partner was 1660 missing the diamond king. They could have held 5Hxx to 11 tricks, but failed to tap him twice, and he took twelve. The redouble was key, since 5Hx white is only 650 (750 with an overtrick), and the other scores in our direction were 800 and 920! So the redouble was worth all the matchpoints; how often do you see that?!

Psyching is an interesting beast. There's this idea that the people you should be psyching against are bad/novice players, that they get flustered and so on, but depending on the type of psych, this isn't really true -- first of all, in theory you are headed for good results against these people anyway, and second of all, they may not count the hand out to make your weird bid pay off during the play.

There are psychs and then there are psychs. Probably the most common psychs are:

1) Opening super light in third seat -- for instance, 1S on KQTx x xxxxx xxx. I don't really consider this a psych so much as a lead-directing bid. Would overcalling 1S on this hand (which I've done; in fact, I overcalled 1H over 1C on xx KQ9x Qxxxxx x just the other day; the auction proceeded something like (1C) 1H (x) 4H (p) p (x) (5C) and when declarer attempted to cross to dummy with a diamond my partner ruffed much to his surprise) be a psych? Would doubling opponents' artificial 1S bid be a psych?

This is technically a psych (if you routinely open less-than-8 (?) counts you have to prealert the opponents), but it doesn't really gummy up the works, and I would say it's more of a tactical bid than anything else.

2) Opening 1NT on generic nonsense. I held Qxx x JTxx xxxxx and confidently opened 1NT all white first seat. Partner bid 2D transfer to hearts which I passed.

The funny thing is that I would have done much better completing the transfer. I won't go too deep into psych theory, but I always get cold feet when I open 1NT and tend to pass partner's next bid in these situations. Partner had a great hand for 2D actually, x AKTxx AQx KQTx, but if I had accepted the transfer partner would (presumably) have bid 3C which would have been a great spot (and partner could easily have had her spade and diamond holdings reversed.) I of course was worried that the next bid would be 3NT or somesuch, but with only four diamonds it was probably odds-on to complete the transfer (and if the points are split evenly-ish I might not have gotten doubled in 3NT anyway, with opponents perhaps cold for game.)

This psych is hard to combat if you aren't playing penalty doubles of 1NT. Sometimes you can just wing a strong-sounding bid later, but this is always troublesome (suppose you have your 18 points, there is no psych, and partner really has a yarborough), and most of your strong sounding bids (e.g. (1NT) p (2H*) p (2S) 2NT) have probably been appropriated by competitive bidding later. You won't really be able to get into a position where partner can express their hand intelligently; most of the time either you will have to overbid and hope both that it's a psych and that partner has some values, or you will have to content yourself with an action that could be made on far worse a hand.

This, of course, is part of why you're not allowed to psych all the time. I once (I admit) conducted a study on BBO where I simply opened or overcalled 1NT on every hand when possible. The psych showed a substantial net profit. Of course, this is playing against randoms who are probably not regular partners and who don't know how to handle the inevitable convoluted sequences, but still I think it's a very powerful one.

So, with this pro-psyching platform so far, I feel like I need to insert some things about how to defend against psychs. Against the 1N psych there's little you can do but hope that the 1N bidder's partner has values and maybe spec double their final contract, assuming 1N opener does not reveal the psych as I often stupidly do. A far more common psych is the following:

(2D) x (2H)

The opponents open a weak two, partner makes a takeout double, and RHO bids a new suit. This is an easy, costless psych; partner is unlikely to raise you and if he does you can always take him back to his suit (perhaps after being doubled.) What's amazing to me is that many people play a double here as takeout! No, no, no. Not negotiating with terrorists is one thing, but trust me, you want to play penalty doubles here. If you haven't seen this one yet, you will, it's among the most common of psychs.

I hadn't had many interesting hands in the last several sessions, but yesterday was really fun. Some highlights:

Despite the fact that the boards weren't that interesting, I had one of the most fun rounds of my life. On the first one, I held some nondescript 4234 14-count. I opened 1C, partner responded 1S, and I bid 2S which ended the auction. Lefty now led the five of hearts out of turn. Partner had five options, and he chose an unusual one: he left the five of hearts on the table as a penalty card. This somehow got his left hand opponent to lead her stiff jack of trumps, and with QT74 facing A953 this was quite helpful, though the defense still had a trump trick. He played out some of the hand and eventually his RHO, who had the H5 as a penalty card on the table, won a trick with the ace of clubs and played back another club! I guess she forgot about the penalty card, but this worked out great for us because a heart return would have resulted in an additional trick for the defense. So despite forcing herself to get it right by the laws, she got it wrong anyway.

On the next board I inadvertently (well, I had nothing else to play for really) pulled off a winkle. I stretched to open 1C on KT 98 K8xx AJ7xx, and soon found myself playing 1NT after partner had bid a spade. LHO led a small diamond and dummy tabled Jxxx Jxx A7x Kxx. In an effort to conceal my points, I won the diamond on the board and played CK and a club to my jack. This held as both opponents followed, and I promptly ran off five clubs. Lefty pitched a heart, a fatal mistake, as after I cashed my DK, with six tricks to go she held AQ of spades, AQ of hearts, and two good diamonds. I threw her in with a diamond; she cashed two diamonds and then SA HA, but on the HQ continuation her partner was winkled! If she overtook the HQ with the HK my jack would be good (she didn't have any spades left), and if she didn't lefty would be forced to lead to my SK for an eighth trick. (It also would have worked if she hadn't cashed the SA and partner had retained a spade.)

So that was kind of neat. Fun hands, and I haven't even told you about the hand where we bid and made six notrump off the ace-king of spades. The moral, as always: don't overcall a jack-high suit lest your partner lead it against the opposition's six notrump.

Last weekend was our district's GNT flight B qualifier. As you may recall, we won this last year and then went on to win the national GNT B; you may recall the dramatic story, where in our first match (in the round of 16!) we went to a playoff and then lost 13 on the first board, but managed to win that somehow. Given that we won nationals, it's the equivalent of a team winning its first round NCAA match with a miracle three from halfcourt and then going onto win the title.

Anyway, this time around, off our win, we were seeded first, although there were similar dangerous teams in the field as last year. Our district has very strong flight B players; counting us last year, we've won three of the last four years at nationals with very different teams. I knew it wouldn't be easy to make it through qualifiers.

Indeed, in the first round, we were up only two (against the last seed!) at halftime, although mostly this was the flat boards. In the second half, things were more like what we might have expected: we picked up 50-ish to win handily. I wasn't sure whether this was an auspicious or an unauspicious start.

In our second match, cutting the field from 12 to 8, we were in a round-robin. Again, the boards seemed really flat; I don't have any remotely dramatic stories to tell you. At halftime, we were something like +15 to one team and -20 to the other; just a few blips, guesses, whatever, not huge swings anywhere. We played fine, I thought; in the second half I really got tired towards the end (I haven't been getting much sleep for various reasons), and felt like the last few weren't so great, but we ended up +1 IMP on differential and advanced.

On to the quarterfinals. I felt like we had gotten a decent draw: a solid team to be sure, but not one of the many dangerous floaters in the draw. So what happened? We were down 41 after the first half. What can I say? They played basically perfectly and none of the positions we took worked, and the same thing happened at the other table. Perhaps the first two boards (though they only cost six IMPs) contributed to their being in a positive mental state. On the first board I held Jxxxx x Jxxx Jxx nobody vul. Two passes to me and I opened 1NT. I didn't really do this because it was the first board; it just seemed like a good hand to psych on. This almost went well. Lefty passed, and partner bid 3H showing four spades and a game force. I thought we would buy this for 4S down a few with the opponents cold for 4H, but unfortunately (system loss!) righty doubled this. I bid a quick 4S and now lefty went into the tank and finally bid 5H. Partner doubled but we had only two tricks (well, he had only two tricks, I had none), -650 the hard way.

On the second board, red/white, I had another awkward hand, x AQx AQJ Q9xxxx. Righty opened 4S in first chair and I made an aggressive double. Partner, holding a 2524 hand with the club king and out, passed, and they again made eleven tricks for -690 the hard way. In retrospect, I think these aggressive doubles of 4S are not a good thing, but not because of what happened. The thing is, you're getting stolen from, but partner may well wing a slam, which will probably go down since he probably expects more from you (and he has to guess because there is almost no room to investigate.) It's hard to recover equity, but of course the same sort of thing is happening at the other table, so you don't need to. And partner, especially at these colors, may stretch to bid instead of passing anyway, playing you for more. I think I'll stop doing this.

Anyway, this was only lose 6, but I think it emboldened our opponents. Like I said, they played flawlessly, there wasn't much we could do. We pulled out the swings in the second half, and some worked, but not enough; we lost another 9 on the set, and, amazingly, we had gone from national champions to losing in the quarterfinals of qualifying. Oh well, can't win 'em all.