Contract Bridge Themes with a Midwest Accent! 

An Impossible Auction?

Playing a Regional IMP KO match against a strong team you hold this hand, white on red:

Spade Graphic 9 6 3 Heart Graphic Q T 5 Diamond Graphic K Q 6 5 Club Graphic K Q 6.

As dealer, you choose to pass. LHO opens 1Heart Graphic, partner passes, and RHO bids 3Heart Graphic , a limit raise. LHO bids 4 Heart Graphic and partner surprises you by introducing a double.

What do you make of this, and what action do you take?

Convention Needed?

Playing rubber bridge you pick up the following hand:

Spade Graphic Q T 9 3 Heart Graphic A Diamond Graphic 7 3 Club Graphic A Q J 8 5 3.

You open 1Club Graphic and partner responds 1 Heart Graphic. The opponents are silent and you rebid 1 Spade Graphic. Partner bids 2 Diamond Graphic, an artificial game force, so you make your natural rebid of 3 Club Graphic. Partner now reveals spade support and extras with 3 Spade Graphic.

What should you call?

The solution is here.

Buffett Cup Publicity

Hats off to Stacy Jacobs for her work on the Buffett Cup media coverage. Her most recent post on the subject cited the Sports Illustrated online coverage. This is nice, but still not like the old SI days when they had a regular column on bridge.

I had a chance to catch up with her when we were both cheering on our White Sox, an event she notes with pictures here.

I had checked out her first article by doing a Google News search for “Buffett Cup”. Google news covers every paper with anything online, getting all sorts of obscure stories. I asked her how many papers had an article on the event. This is a tough question. You might want to formulate your own guess before reading on.

I also gave the quiz question to Spike (AKA Maribeth) who made a very good guess of ten papers.

And your guess?

Stacy hit it on the number: 3! She also named two of the papers–the NYT and the local Louisville paper. There was another article from Austin, featuring the star player and former Chicagoan Tobi Sokolow.

The Buffett Cup should be of widespread interest. We all need to think about how to increase the visibility.