Back home

I wrote less often at the NABC than I intended, mostly because I had very little to write about. The week was extremely disappointing for me, bridge wise. I feel that I played well, but our results were so horrific, it's very little comfort.

There was some vicarious good news for me at the end of the week. First off, David Granger and Jon & Mike Rice won the 0-5000 KO playing with Joyce Hampton (and Lukas). That was cool to see. This was the first time Joyce tried to enter an event like that.

Also, Phil Gordon (of poker fame) won the 2 day Swiss on Sunday, basically leading throughout. He played with a top Norwegian pair, Jason Feldman and Josh Donn. Jason was a teammate of mine (playing with Mike Cappelletti Jr.) in Detroit earlier this year when we were in contention for the national Swiss. I've known Josh a long time as well, but I don't believe I've played on a team with him. Phil I know indirectly, as he and Michael White are old friends and partners from Georgia Tech days.

Congrats to all the winners. I'll be looking forward to Boston for a chance to redeem myself.

One and done

For the first time in a very long time, my Spingold run ended on day one. We lost our match by 2 IMPs, the closest match I've had in a 64 board KO match. (I have lost by 3 before.)

Congratulations to Bob Heitzman, Jonathan Weinstein, Michael Prahin and Alex Perlin on a match well played. They fully deserved to win. I played Bob and Jonathan in the 3 quarters I played, and overall they played very well. They had a 6 IMP lead going into the final quarter, and managed to hold on for the victory.

There was one board in the 4th quarter that I thought might have won us a game swing (and the match), but it was a push at +620. I don't know how the play went at the other table, but here is what happened at mine.

After opening the South hand 1NT, my partner Dan Gerstman bid 4H Texas transfer. This was doubled by Bob (East), 4S by me to end the auction.

How do you play the hand on the ♥4 lead, to the 2 and 7?

While I would love to be able to duck this trick safely, there seemed to be too much danger that the lead was a singleton. However, I was also concerned that if Jonathan (West) did have a doubleton heart, they may be able to take many heart tricks later unless I removed that card from their hand.

Based on this, I led my heart back at trick 2 to the 3, 5 and 9 by East. After some thought, East returned the ♥Q (suit preference for clubs). I ruffed and was over ruffed by West, as expected.

After some thought, Jonathan returned a spade. At this point, I was able to take over. I cashed the 2 top spades, hoping that my 'tapping' of the West hand would be from 3 cards, and I would have no more spade losers. This in fact happened, with Bob starting with Qx of spades.

In this ending, I've already lost 2 tricks. It seems that I have one more sure loser in the ♥J and one possible loser in the diamond finesse. If the diamond finesse works and clubs are 3-3, I might be able to make an overtrick, but at this form of scoring I'm primarily worried about making my contract. Also, both my table feel and the signals (suit preference for clubs) made me believe that the ♦K is offside. So what options do I have?

There is one last possibility: an endplay. I need to lose a trick to West in such a way that he provides me an extra trick. Accordingly, I led the club from the board, and covered East's ♣7 with the 8. When West won the ♣Q, he had only minor suit cards left. A diamond return would immediately give me 10 tricks, so he played a club. This in effect gave me an extra entry to ruff out the clubs. I won in hand (shaking a diamond from the board) and ruffed the 3rd round of clubs. When clubs were 3-3, I no longer needed the diamond finesse for 10 tricks.


The full deal. Notice that other attempts to endplay West such as the ♦10 from the dummy will fail, as East can cover. Here, East clubs were such that I can always force West to win the club trick. If that were not the case, I could win the ♣A, ruff a club and then try floating the ♦10. If West has the J as well as the K, the endplay still works. All of these seem vastly superior to the immediate diamond finesse, since there is always an option to try that later if nothing else works.

Alas, +620 was a push rather than the game swing I hoped for that would have been much more than the margin of victory.

Once again, congrats to Bob, Jonathan, Alex and Michael. I wish them the best in the rest of the event.

At the NABC

I'm writing this from the comfort of my room at the NABC in Las Vegas. Today is the second day of the tournament, and unfortunately my wife and I have already washed out of the first event. We had a good afternoon session (between 55 and 56%), but the evening was absolutely awful - one of the worst sessions we've ever had.

There were a few hilights during the day. Probably my personal favorite was getting to game with 16 opposite 5, off the AKQ of trumps (all cashing), cold.

The hands:

We had many good opportunities in the evening. It was disappointing not to qualify, but we have a fun team for the KOs today and tomorrow, so all is not lost.

YNABC and script updates

I haven't written since before the Youth NABC. It was a lot of effort to get everything running smoothly, but it was well worth it. All the kids seemed to have a great time, and the amount of energy in the room was absolutely a marvel to behold.

My contribution, the vugraph, was a success. We had some logistical problems getting going, but once we finally got everything working, life was good. I had a lot of positive feedback both from commentators and spectators.

I've also made some updates to my hand generation script. It has gone from draft mode, into primitive-but-usable mode. I've added a few different diagrams for various designs and uses. Samples below.

My goal with the script is to eventually have an HTML interface to it, so people can create images on the fly for web pages. Mostly for my own use of course, but if others find it useful, great!

Sample images:

One hand:



EW Only:



NS Only:



And the full diagram:

Bridge blog tools

One of the problems with having a bridge blog is creating a good way to display hands. In the past, any time I've tried to use HTML to represent bridge information, I've taken one of 2 approaches:

1. Use small images for each of the 4 suits inside of the text.
2. Use HTML entities to display suits symbols.

Each of these approaches has flaws. The first is difficult to maintain, as there is a lot of text that needs to be added for each suit symbol. Macros help, but it's still not easy to format. The second approach works if the client machine has a font capable of displaying the suit symbols, but managing the formatting can still be challenging. I've used nested tables before to get things to look decent, but it's still a lot of work.

Note: Most computers can display these symbols: ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣. Managing the colors for these symbols or using alternate unicode symbols x2661 (♡) and x2662 (♢) is more challenging. Many computers do not know how to display these symbols by default.

Dan Korbel has a different approach, one which should have seemed obvious in retrospect. He is using images to display his hands. He is currently generating them by using Bridge Base Online, taking screenshots, cutting and pasting into Paint or other graphic tools, etc. Sounds like too much work to me. And a challenge. :-)

Thinking about his idea of using just graphics, I've started working on a script to generate images of hands. It's still in the very early stages, but here is a mock up of what I have so far.



It's not perfect, but I think it will work.

Links:

Dan Korbel: korbelbridge.blogspot.com
BBO: www.bridgebaseonline.com