04 March 2015 17:00
Hi all 😆
The first board I am going to tell you in 2015 was played last week during a very important and special tournament: the Night of the Stars.
The Night of the Stars is an yearly event, which is able to bring champions and enthusiastic Bridge players together, and to transforms their communal love for Bridge into tangible help to persons in need of care and to the associations that support them.
Behind this tournament there is an impeccable organization, which besides giving the participants the possibility to spend a wonderful evening together, this year was able to raise no less than 50,500 £. This huge amount of money will be donated to the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, to Maggie’s, Mencapand React. So I wish to address my most heart-felt compliments to the whole organization, and, one for all, to Terry Hewett. She is the one who always contacts me for this tournament and I had the opportunity to appreciate the terrific will, the tenacity and the enthusiasm that she puts in the management of this event.
My partner for this tournament was Jonathan Harris. Jonathan and I are very good friends and I am always very happy to play with him. We have good affinity at the table; besides, he is very nice, I strongly appreciate his sense of humor and I always have a great time with him.
Despite that, we initially had some very unlucky boards that relegated us in… “the seediest part of London”. But then Jonathan pulled out his well-known character and his grit and was able to put our race back on the right track. Thanks to an amazing recovery we finished the tournament with a good 57.75%!
Here is a board with some technical implications from the tournament:
In the silence of the opponents, East opens 1NT (weak) and West bids 2NT.
East bids 3
(forced) and West bids 3
, with the intention of describing his 5-4 shaped hand with minors and the Hearts singleton. The bid is misunderstood by his partner, who raises to 4.
West bids 4NT, in the hope to contain the misunderstanding, but East takes it for Blackwood and bids 5 to show the Aces. The pair thus reaches 6NT.
South leads the 7. Declarer ducks, North takes with the King and plays the K back, captured by East’s Ace.
Declarer crosses to dummy via the 
A and plays the Click Here to continue Reading