by
Csaba Raduly, 15 Jan 2000
After
a gap of more than five years, a bridge tournament was held in Timisoara
between 17-19 December 1999.It's
been the 10th aniversary of the uprising that led to the ousting of Ceausescu,
so the tournament was called ‘The Cup of the Revolution’. Due to clashes
with bigger tournaments, there were only nine tables playing in the pairs
and eight teams.The presence of
a player from Yugoslavia enabled us to call the contest ‘international’!
The
pairs were won by Mr.Gheorge Eckstein - Mr.Eugen Chelu, former members
of the Romanian squad at the 1995 European Championships in Villamoura,
Portugal.The following deal was
played by us (Raduly x2!) against them:
|
|
Csaba.Raduly
AJ8xx
Ax
AKxx
xx
|
|
|
Eckstein
x
KJxx
xxx
98xxx
|
|
Chelu
K109x
Q10xxx
xx
Jx
|
|
|
Stefan.Raduly
sr
Q7x
xx
QJxx
AKQ10
|
|
After
a strong club sequence, we arrived at six spades, doubled by Mr. Chelu
(afraid that he'll lose points if he didn't).After
a pause, I decided to trust him and converted to notrumps, to be played
by my father.Mr. Eckstein led a
club (a heart lead would have resulted in two down). After two rounds of
clubs saw the fall of the jack, a diamond was led to dummy and a small
spade towards the closed hand. Mr. Eckstein inserted the nine (if he plays
the king it would have been all over) and the queen took the trick.Three
more diamonds and two more clubs followed, Mr. Chelu throwing hearts (a
spade discard enables declarer to give up a spade and claim).A
heart to the ace left the following position:
|
Dummy
AJ8
|
|
|
|
Chelu
K10x
|
My
father now played the JACK from dummy and after winning the trick Mr Chelu
returned his cards into the board.6NT
making 1440 scored a near-top as somebody played in 4 spades redoubled
with an overtrick for 1480 !The
best contract is of course 6 diamonds, found by only one pair.
After
this deal, Mr Chelu insisted that a prize for ‘The best played hand of
the tournament’ (a bottle of wine) be created ad-hoc and awarded to my
father and partner, Prof. Stefan Raduly.
A
teams-of-four event was held the following day. Due to the small number
of teams (eight) a complete round-robin was played, the top four teams
to play another round-robin with a carryover formula.It
was very tense, before the last qualifying round seven of the eight teams
had chances to make the final. This was our team mates’ moment, a grand
slam bid and made helped us defeat one of the best teams and secure the
biggest carryover in the final.The
two most fancied teams ended up in the consolation game!
There
wasn't much to the final, we played steadily and won by
a
comfortable margin.
In
the picture from left to right:
Prof.
Stefan Raduly, Mr.Peter Fey, Myself, Mr Alexandru Toma.
An
‘Instant matchpoint’ pairs was held on the last day, won by
the
pickup partnership of Jolanda Saruga-Mugurel Tecusan.
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