Worst bridge of 2006

Since we're all celabrating, I thought it was time for a laugh and post the worst bridge hand I've encountered in 2006. It happened quite recently and it's unbelievable what errors happened. If you know the site poorbridge.com (the name speaks for itself), this is one which is even worse than what you get there!

Here's the hand, I'm sitting South as usual:

Dealer: South Vul: EW Scoring: MP	♠ x ♥ QJ8x ♦ 976 ♣ T9864
♠ Tx ♥ K9xx ♦ Kxx ♣ AJxx		♠ QJ97xx ♥ Tx ♦ QTx ♣ Kx
	♠ AK8x ♥ Axx ♦ AJ8x ♣ Qx

It looks pretty innocent, but wait until you hear what happened with it.

It all begins with the auction:
1♣! - pass - 1♦! - 1♠
1NT - 2♠ - 3♣ - pass
3NT - all pass

I have an easy opening, since we're playing a strong ♣ system. My partner shows 0-6HCP and RHO intervenes with ♠. I have no problem with a rebid, and here we get our first two blunders: LHO supports with ♠Tx while Vulnerable!!! Quite amazing since you know all ♠ finesses will be wrongsided and you don't even have an 8 card fit, but some people will do anything. Next mistake is the 3♣ bid from my partner. Since we play Lebensohl here, 3♣ shows a good hand while he intended just to fight the partscore battle. Dbl or 2NT would've done the job a bit better. Now obviously I like my ♣Qx and raise to 3NT since I'm quite confident that I'll make it when ♣s come in.

Now you better imagine (or put up) some music from horror movies.

LHO leads the ♠T and I duck. It's a hopeless contract, but why not try to make the best out of it. A ♠ is continued and I take my Ace. Next step was imo to try and cash some ♥s so I play ♥A followed by a small ♥. LHO hesitates, telling me where the K is, and decides to play low. This is the only thing that's done right, but includes the error of giving the position of the K. I'm in dummy and let ♦6 run for LHO's King.

Lets make it a bit of a quiz: can you figure out what card West played now?
For some reason she decides to return a diamond right into my finesse! Thanks, but I'm still nowhere. What else is there than to play another ♥? LHO takes her ♥K.

Here comes blunder number 5, can you guess it?
She returns a heart to my J in dummy! Dummy was completely dead, so that's another trick for the good guys. I discard a ♣ and RHO has discarded 2 ♠s by now. Still not home, I play my 2 remaining ♦s and RHO gets it in her mind to discard another ♠! Probably she trusted her partner's raise too much, but this meant my ♠8 got promoted to my 9th trick.

Unbelievable: it took 1 mistake from partner to get me to a hopeless contract, and it took 4 and a half blunders from the opponents to actually make it! Only 1 thing was done right, but if LHO made the mistake of taking ♥K immediately she wouldn't have had the opportunity to give dummy an unreachable trick. I prefer the latter for this article. Also my play was proven to be poor by GIB's double dummy analyzer.

Lets see how it went trickwise:
- If I duck ♠T I have a possibility to go -2. Otherwise I can go -5 according to GIB!
- 2nd trick has to be taken, what I did. That's 2 things right, but now it starts...
- My only chance for -2 is to go for the ♣s which I didn't do. This costed me 1 trick.
- ♥ to my Q was another trick I threw away.
- Now I got back a trick with almost every card I played.
So basically I should've gone -4 thanks to my poor play as well. However, taking the right line of play to go -2 would never bring my contract home...

All other tables made 1NT-1, I made 3NT= in the same direction.

That's it for 2006, I hope you've enjoyed my articles (why doensn't anyone sign my guestbook?), I'll probably keep encountering lots of interesting material to post on my blog next year, and you all have my best wishes for 2007!