2014 Monaco Cavendish: A VERY EXPENSIVE Grand Slam!!!

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4 de Setiembre 2014

BURAS Krzysztof-NARKIEWICZ Gregorz won the Open Pairs Tournament qualifying stage and WORTEL Meike- MICHIELSEN Marion won the Ladies Pairs Tournament qualifying stage.

The event is scored by Cross-IMPs: Your score on any particular board is compared with those of every other pair sitting in the opposite direction to you, across the field and the result converted to IMPs just as if each were a team match. These numbers are added up.

What is one of the disadvantages? In a single session at IMP scoring a ‘big board = a good pair bids a slam/Grand Slam that the rest of the room has not been able to find’ has a bigger effect than at matchpoints.

102 boards were played in the 5 sessions of the Open qualifying stage and in only one of all of them existed the possibility of winning a Grand Slam, which by the way was cold.

 The thing is that the Grand Slam was only declared by  Brink -Drijver from Holland, generating them a 324 IMPs gain … the other side of the coin was the pair sitting in N/S, they scored -324 IMPs.

Let’s see the auctions in two of the tables that were broadcasted on BBO:

In both tables East opened 1NT and in both tables West transfered to spades.

In one of the tables East answered with a normal 2, but when his partner asked for his keycards East jumped to six spades occupying the space needed to investigate for the Grand Slam. East simply discarded the GS possibilities.

At the other table East answered with a 3 bid, showing support with extras although West continued with a re-transfer they also landed in the smal slam.

Csbnews.org asked to Brink-Drijver about their sequence to arrive to the grand Slam and this is how they made it:

West	North	East	South
	Pass	1	Pass
1	Pass	2	Pass
2NT	Pass	4	Pass
4NT	Pass	5	Pass
5	Pass	6	Pass
6	Pass	7	The End

A 324 IMPs sequence!!!…Thank you very much to Brink-Drijver who were kind enough to tell us the auction …