Van Gils Blogs

Yesterday I played a bridge tournament in Zwolle (imps) with a very strong field including a lot of French players and some division players. I played with Jeroen, an excellent player from my club. We played a relatively simple system. The tournament started with 21 deals in the morning session (scoring -18 for us), 28 deals in the afternoon session (scoring +1) and 21 deals in the evening session (scoring +21) for a grand total of +4. All in all I’m pretty happy with the result.

Some details:

• the morning session went pretty well with the exception of a 3NT that I should have made. That cost us 11 imps. As far as I can tell 3NT is virtually unmakable. Perhaps there’s a better contract, not sure. We didn’t get any big swings our way in the morning session.
• In the afternoon session we started off with a big (+13) swing our way with a 4♠ doubled -3 for +800 We lost 11 imps with a slam that was bid by our opponents though We had some other plus-scores but lost another 12 with a bad sacrifice. Timing is hard. All in all +1 in this session was pretty good
• The evening session was great! We had 1 bad score with another bad / foolish sacrifice (-9). We had somg big swings, beating their 5♦ (+11), making an impossible 3NT (+8) and the last one a 6NT doubled +1 for +10. The deal is included further down

All in all I guess I need to work more on timing my sacrifices and continue to work on making tight contracts.

Our bidding was rather poor but I got in 6NT anyway which was doubled by RHO. I got a club plead and if you just run the diamonds then you can’t go wrong. You end by playing the ace of hearts, a spade to the K and the K of hearts. if the heart queen hasn’t dropped then you play a small spade to the ace after which the Q drops and you make another spade Nice squeeze!

Today I got a letter from a bookstore in Eindhoven who wanted to buy a copy of my dissertation! I never expected that to happen. Any thoughts on what I should charge ?

A little while ago (last week or so) we bought Koen some wooden shoes. He really loved them and is wearing them at every opportunity. We also started redecorating the little patch of “garden” in front of our house. The plan is to put in some stones so we can place a little bench there (if you happen to know where we can get a good cast iron bench, please let us know!).

Either way, today I started putting in the stones. Of course Koen wanted to help. We put on his wooden shoes and his “work gear” that Opa Cees gave him a while ago. Results can be viewed here.

Good thing he was wearing them too, because while helping, he dropped one of the (quite heavy) stones right on his foot! Those wooden shoes saved us a trip to the emergency room, no doubt! Much to be said for old dutch traditions

P.S. I bought some new wooden shoes also: yellow. I’m all in favor of restoring old Dutch traditions… so who’s with me!?!?