The 43rd International Budapest Bridge Festival was held successfully with a much higher participation than expected. The bridge tournaments in the past years in Hungary had less and less participants. This tendency seems to have turned around at the IBBF, with the record number of players. The entry list for the open pairs was full already one week before the tournament. We couldn’t accept any more entries because of the size of the playing area. The interest of the foreign players was also higher than the past years, 13 foreign teams were playing in the teams’ tournament, and more than half of the field was from different countries in the open pairs’ competition as well.
The opening event of the festival was a mixed pairs tournament. Based on 30 boards Bernadette Argayné Magyar and Gyula Argay achieved the best result. Gyula is a regular player on the Hungarian championships and his wife, Bernadette occasionally plays on these events. The second place was acquired by a junior player, Janka Jalsovszky, and her partner Géza Szappanos, a senior Olympic champion. The third place went for Brigitta Fischer (last year she was the most successful women bridge player in Hungary for the 6th year consecutively), playing with a regular player of the Hungarian open team, Gábor Winkler.
The second competition was a two-day-long team tournament, where we invited numerous foreign junior teams. The participants played 11×8 boards with Swiss-Danish movement.
The medalist teams are:
- Galim: Péter Gál – Csaba Czímer – György Kemény – Tamás Szalka
- Seniors Sweden: Björn Wenneberg – Lars Goldberg – UllaBritt Goldberg – Henrik Wegnelius
- Dumbovich: Gábor Winkler – Alon Birman – Miklós Dumbovich – Péter Lakatos
The best junior team price went to a team with mixed nationality with Czech and Croatian players. They finished 6th on the leaderboard surpassing the other 9 junior teams, congratulations to Matea Grgurić – Veronika Dolanská – Barbora Kupková – Kristijan Štefanec.
The players played 52 boards of qualification on the first day of the Open Pairs’ tournament. The 16 best pairs played in the A final the next day, the rest of the field continued competing in the B final. After 30 more boards, the final results in the A final are:
- Brigitta Fischer – Péter Hodosi (HUN)
- Csaba Szabó – Gergely Szentandrási (HUN)
- Błażej Krawczyk – Marcin Szymański (POL)
The best pairs in the B final:
- Richard Gabriel – Martin Vodicka (SLO)
- László Budai – Attila Vikor (HUN)
- Miklós Andrási – János Kardos (HUN)
The best junior pair (Ivan Bilusic – Emanuel Evacic) and the best U16 pair (Kacper Kuflowski – Franciszek Kurlit) also qualified tot he A final, congratulations to all of the prize winners for the good results.
Here is an exciting board from the A final:
The play started with a heart lead, and Ödön Dienes took the trick in his hand with the queen. He led the jack of spades and overtook it with the ace on the dummy. After taking the ace of heart he ruffed the ten of hearts in his hand, while West payed the jack, and East discarded his known king. At this moment the contract was in high danger, because of the king of hearts discard, soon it will be obvious why. Declarer led another high spade and overtook it with the king. Played the high diamonds, ruffed a diamond, and gave the trick to East with the queen of spades. On this very spade West discarded his nine of hearts, which was the only potential entry to his hand to lead the clubs from the right side (that’s why discarding the king and keeping the low heart could have been a very effective play). Declarer let the five of hearts taking the trick, and now Lakatos had to lead a club, letting Dienes taking the last three tricks.
